Unfortunately, we have yet to review this (my fault, seeing that our copy is buried in my “to read!” shelf), but I’m planning on including in a new feature that I’m going to start next week. (Seriously, I will. Summer’s basically over—it’s time to get everything going again.) In the meantime, you should check out

Northwestern University Press, in a fine translation by Suzanne Jill Levine, has just released The Lizard’s Tale, an unfinished novel by José Donoso first published in 1997, eleven years after the author’s death. [. . .]

The lizard’s tail (tale) refers to a key theme in the novel: what happens when you turn your back on something that once defined you? Disillusioned with the commercialization of the art world, Antonio Muñoz-Roa, a fifty-year-old painter from Barcelona, publicly breaks with Informalism, the artistic movement he helped to found. Muñoz-Roa, who also stops painting, likens this break to a lizard shedding its tail (although he isn’t sure “if I were the lizard and the informalists . . . were the severed tail, or if on the contrary, I was the tail that would die and they the lizard that would soon grow another tail”). On an ensuing trip to the coast with his ex-lover Luisa, Muñoz-Roa discovers Dors, an unspoiled town in the mountains. He falls in love with the Dors, restores an old house, and lives there for several years. The town is so important to his post-painterly identity that he becomes obsessed with persuading the locals to preserve it from the crass developments springing up along the coast. Critics have drawn a parallel between Muñoz-Roa’s disillusion with Informalism and Donoso’s feelings about the Boom, but I wouldn’t make too much of this. Donoso likes to isolate his protagonists as a way of having them reflect upon their lives, and for Muñoz-Roa, Dors serves this function.

The book itself sounds interesting, and the reviews all heap praise on Jill’s translation:

There’s plenty to applaud in The Lizard’s Tale. For long stretches of the novel, Donoso’s fluid and agoraphobic prose—which Levine does a marvelous job of following—lures us into the tangled web of Muñoz-Roa’s many contradictions. (Bookforum)

Levine is at once the writer and the interpreter of Donoso’s labyrinthine sentences, and her work is masterful.

Congrats to Suzanne Jill Levine, and be sure and check out The Lizard’s Tale (and Donoso’s other works).

It’s a strange list, one that, for an international award, is remarkably English . . .

1. Galore by Michael Crummey (Canadian). Doubleday Canada
2. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (American). Faber & Faber, HarperCollins, USA
3. The Vagrants by Yiyn Li (Chinese / American) Random House, USA
4. Ransom by David Malouf (Australian) Random House Australia
5. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Irish) Bloomsbury, UK, Random House, USA
6. Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates (American) Ecco Press, USA
7. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (Australian) Allen & Unwin
8. Brooklyn by Colm Toibín (Irish) Viking UK, Scribner, USA
9. Love and Summer by William Trevor (Irish) Viking, UK
10. After the Fire, a Still, Small Voice by Evie Wyld (Australian) Pantheon Books, USA

Yeah, no, I’m not sure why these are numbered either, since they’re actually in alphabetical order. But regardless, there you are. The winner (my cash is on Colum) will be announced on June 15th and will receive 100,000 euros.