Although I’m dying to get into the Venuti part of this book—maybe in part because I’m simultaneously watching the NL Wild Card game as I write (Brewers up 2-0 with no outs in the top of the 1st!) and there’s some sort of weird parallel between two teams battling it out, and a theorist trying to pick apart centuries of ingrained thinking about translations?—I’m going to stick to my original concept . . . So, let’s talk a bit about Ěýby Ingeborg Bachmann, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, which New Directions reissued earlier this year.

If you’re expecting an incisive, smart analysis ofĚýMalina, then, well, you’ve probably never read any of these posts, but, also, here, in brief, is what I think of this novel: It’s fucking great. It’s a weird book, in which it’s hard to find your footing, as each of the three sections unveil different aspects of the mind of the narrator—a female writer in Vienna involved with two men. (Read into that what you will.)

That might sound straightforward enough—as jacket copy, it gives you somethingĚýto hang on to—and the first part is pretty emotionally charged.

Because Ivan and I only tell each other good things and sometimes things intended to make each other laugh (but without ever laughing at anyone), because we’re even able to smile when preoccupied and so find the right way to get back on track, to get back together, I hope we might effect a general contamination. Slowly we will infect our neighbors, one after the other, with the virus whose most likely name I know already, and if an epidemic should ensue, it would benefit all humanity. But I also realize how difficult it is to catch, how long one has to wait to be ripe for contamination, and how difficult, how completely hopeless things were for me before it happened!

*

I’m thinking about Ivan.

I’m thinking about love.

Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ injections of reality.

Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ their lasting only a few hours.

Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ the next, more potent injection.

I’m thinking in silence.

I’m thinking it’s late.

It’s incurable. And it’s too late.

But I survive and think.

And I’m thinking it will not be Ivan.

Whatever’s ahead, it will be something different.

I live in Ivan.

I will not outlive Ivan.

*

I would like to write an incunabulum standing up, for today twenty years have passed since I’ve loved Ivan, and it’s been one year and three months and thirty-one days on the 31st of the month since I’ve known him [. . .]

*

Ivan and I: the world converging.

Malina and I, since we are one: the world diverging.

 

Part 2, “The Third Man,” is much darker, more dangerous, more unnerving, a bit more imagistic, definitely filled with abuse. I mean, shit, Bachmann is a writer’s writer.Ěý

My father came home once more just by accident. My mother is holding three flowers, the flowers for my life, they aren’t red, or blue, or white, but they must be for me, and she throws the first one in front of my father, before he can approach us. I know she’s right, she has to throw him the flowers, but now I also know that she knows everything, incest, it was incest, but I’d still like to ask her for the other flowers, and I watch my father in deadly fear as he tears the other flowers from my mother’s hand, to take his revenge against her as well, he tramples them, he stomps on all three flowers, as he has often stomped about when enraged, he treads on them and tramples, as if he were trying to kill three bugs, that’s how much my life still means to him. I can’t look at my father anymore, I cling to my mother and start to scream, yes, that’s what it was, it was him, it was incest. But then I notice that . not only is . my mother silent and unmoved, but . from the beginning my own voice has been without sound, I’m screaming but no one hears me, there’s nothing to hear, my mouth is only gaping, he’s taken away my voice as well, I can’t pronounce the word I want to scream at him, and as I am straining with my dry, open mouth it comes once more, I know I’m going crazy, and in order to stay sane I spit into my father’s face, but there’s no saliva left, hardly a breath from my mouth reaches him. My father is untouchable. He is unmovable.

Really: Just go read this book. Whatever words I use to talk about it will be inadequate, will approximate its power and craft in ways that will seem embarrassingly lame tomorrow morning. Especially since I know that Rachel Kushner’s introduction (fortuitously reprinted at theĚý) is so much better, and is the piece youĚýshouldĚýread aboutĚýMalina.Ěý

Also, it’s the pivot that I’ve been building toward . . .

MalinaĚýwas initially written in 1971, and this Philip Boehm translation (great guy! great translator! I met him at the PEN West gala last year when I was on the jury that awarded him the Translation Prize forĚýChasing the King of HeartsĚýby Hanna Krall) came out originally in 1990. The only truly “new” aspects of this book are the introduction (stellar!) and the cover (quite good!).

To anyone in the industry, this whole section is going to be remedial and boring. (Unlike the other things I write? right? right?) For everyone else: It’s impossible to underestimate the value of a press’s backlist. If managed correctly, the books you’ve published over your past decades—titles your newer employees probably haven’t even heardĚýof—can be the goldmine that keeps your press afloat for decades.Ěý

I can’t tell you how many members of Literary Twitter encounteredĚýMalinaĚýfor the first time this summer. A lot! Despite the fact that this was issued in 1990, again in 1999 (when I first read it), and now, 20 years later.

On the first episode of the new season of the Two Month Review (you can download this podcast tomorrow morning), Dan Wells of Biblioasis mentions how you can publish a great book that goes unnoticed because you published it six months too early or too late.

Now, look back over the New Directions catalog. There are dozens of books that might have been published at the “right” time originally, but time has moved on, and they need to be refreshed. No. They need to be reintroduced.ĚýEvery six years there are enough new additions to the literary community that the most lasting books can find aĚýsignificantĚýnew audience.

For YEARS, this was the bread and butter of Dalkey Archive Press and the New York Review Books classics series.ĚýRemember this? Well, if you don’t, you need to check it out. We got a cool, of-the-moment writer to tell you why it’s so good, why this is a sort of bridge to literary history. This is one way to join our group.Ěý

I’ve decided right this second (as Scherzer strikes out Hiura to save the Nationals’ season) that this is a provable fact: There are always 10 times more interesting books notĚýin bookstoresĚýthan interesting new titles that came out within the last year.

That seems bold. Provocative. A good pivot to the next section of this post? Not yet, not yet.

Over the past year, how many titles have been published that will beĚýreprinted with new introductionsĚýthirty years from now? Like, maybe 4? Is 4 too high? Let’s say there are 20. Over the course of human writing from 1900-2000, are there 200 amazing books that none of us have heard about because capitalism and social trends and the fact that publishing employees are underpaid and no one thinks anymore and everyone just tries to be the “cool new thing” and . . .

Holy shit, I am old. I turned 44 last week, which means that I’ve been alive for approximately five different Henry Green rediscoveries. (I even participated in one!)

Everything can be new again. Which is encouraging. There’re always new readers who will read these amazing books. These life-changing books. Like our reissue of The Invented PartĚýin 2039 with a new cover and an introduction by an author who is currently twelve years old. Literally.

*

One thing that I’ve always harped on in my translation classes is how there is no stable “original,” no “infallible genius writer.” It sometimes comes out as anti-German (because there’s no one quite as enamored with the idea of received genius as the German literary establishment), but it’s not intentional—I just always found this naive and annoying.

Which is why Lawrence Venuti’s new book,Ěýis so exciting. This review by Matt Reeck in is so good, so smart—go check it out.

But to summarize—to the best of my 8th inning ability—Venuti’s statement, it is this: Leave behind the core idea that a source text has fixed, unchanging elements that needĚýto be conveyed in a translation. What would those even be? Not only is the source, original text in flux, but the concept of some sort of “instrumental” (to adopt Venuti’s incredibly helpful terminology) viewpoint in which the source is perfection and a translation is an approximation of an X factor (word meaning, impact, intent, reaction among readers of the original) is so philosophically dense that it needsĚýto be overthrown.

In the place of “lost in translation,” and “poetry is what’s lost in translation,” and every other silly, trite, misleading statement we’ve all heard, Venuti proposes a “hermeneutic approach” in which we start from the core concept that every translation is an interpretation of the original text and the translation is also a version of that interpretation. By starting from that viewpoint, the discussion around and evaluation of translations—and the field as a whole—can advance beyond the conversations that have been weighing it down for centuries.

To be honest, I don’t see the tenets of Venuti’s book to be a provocation. At all. It seems natural to me, and has provided me with the terminology and perspective to really clarify the muddier statements about translation I’ve been trying to work through with students (and here) for years. Even if there are times when the language reaches the post-structural academic stratosphere, it’s a book that’s definitely worth reading and, in Venuti’s words, change the way you think about translation.

I see this book functioning as a device of “desiring-production” in [Deleuze & Guattari’s] sense, producing in you, my reader, the will to critique a model that has been so deeply entrenched in thinking about translation for so long as to be unconscious, knee-jerk, rote. The difficulty or apparent inability to criticize instrumentalism means that coolly detached reasoning is not enough to be persuasive, this model is heavily cathected with desire, and the provocation of polemic has become necessary to release and direct it.

Even the chapter of the book on subtitling—the one I thought I would be least interested in—was absolutely fascinating. There’s a lot to mull over, but the ways in which he dismantles instrumentalism and demonstrates how it’s baked into so many seemingly innocent comments and metaphors can definitely open things up for a translator, scholar, or reader. I know it has for me . . .

It will be really interesting to see how the translation community reacts to this book, though. Although I think his ideas are sound, Venuti does nothing here to alter his reputation for being incredibly direct and willing to go after other theorists or translators.

I have to admit that, in the most self-involved way, I was terrified at the start of this that he would rip apart some crap article that I wrote in the past. It wouldn’t be hard! But I’m also nowhere noteworthy enough to merit any such attention. There are some pretty pointed attacks in here though . . . Here’s a smattering, starting with a response to a quote from Emily Wilson that she “wants to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”

Whatever Wilson believes the truth of theĚýOdysseyĚýto be, she has assumed the existence of an invariant, contained in the Greek text, and that becomes the goal that she works “toward” achieving through successive revision of her translation. Wilson obviously remains unaware of any logical inconsistency in her comments. So does Wyatt Mason, a literary translator himself, who authored the profile and unwittingly chose to emphasize Wilson’s instrumentalism by concluding with it.

Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ Polizzotti’sĚýSympathy for the Traitor, which I read, enjoyed, and plugged in the aforementioned “Controversy & Value” post:

Polizzotti’s text does not offer a coherently argued account of translation substantiated by exhaustive research, but rather a string of largely unexplained assertions couched in overstatement, metaphor, and clichĂŠ. [. . .] His manifesto, not surprisingly, is riddled with contradictions that display how the instrumental model cuts off thinking about translation among translators and publishers.

Even Emily Apter’sĚýAgainst World LiteratureĚýcomes under scrutiny:

Apter has simply asserted her reading of [Eleanor] Marx’s translation [ofĚýMadame Bovary], not argued it with textual analyses and historical research. It is purely speculative, lacking any grounding in empirical data, making only the rare textual reference. It is the epitome of theoreticism, a fetishizing of theoretical concepts at the expense of linguistic, cultural, and social specificity. For the fact is that Apter is interested only in theory, not in translation. [. . .] Apter’s reliance on the current critical orthodoxy leads to half-baked formulations that require more careful exposition to make sense, but that would still seem of dubious value in understanding translation.

Is Venuti the translation studies equivalent of Tim Parks? Not in terms of their ideas (Parks is most definitely an instrumentalist), but in the way that neither are afraid to criticize specific authors, translators, or works.

But for Parks, this has earned him a bit of a dodgy reputation. I personally find his takes to be stimulating and interesting, but there are a lot of people I know who think of him as simply a curmudgeon whose translation “criticism” is just “mean.” Mostly they don’t care for his takedowns of specific translations (like his repeated criticisms of Deborah Smith for her Han Kang books), but once you get a reputation like that, it’s hard to win people back over.

I can’t say for sure how well Parks’s keynote at the American Literary Translators Association conference in 2017 was received, but I’m going to guess that it was “mixed”—much like the reaction to Venuti’s keynote back in 2011.

Translators—and academics—can be pretty sensitive about things like this. But I do think what Venuti is doing here is a bit different than simply hacking apart someone’s work. He’s examining a very ingrained way of thinking that has been rather damaging to the reception, promotion, and study of translation. Although some of the above might seem a bit personal (which is often the complaint about Parks), I read the intent as being more aimed at how instrumentalism has even infected some of the smartest translation thinkers.

(Also: That Nationals-Brewers game was WILD. I’m finishing this a day late because I got sucked up in Soto’s 8th inning heroics. And Grisham’s flub.)

Ěýby Hanna Krall, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm (Poland, Feminist Press)

There is a certain amount of fatigue, I think, with Holocaust narratives. People may feel that they already know what to expect, they know the story, they do not need to revisit that world. This despite, or perhaps, because of, the recent which found a significant lack of knowledge about the Holocaust in the United States. Whatever disinterest or trepidation you might feel when faced with the prospect of returning to this horrifying terrain, Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall, translated by Philip Boehm, is worthy of your attention.

This slim volume (originally published in Polish in 2006) is Krall’s account of the life story of Izolda R., a survivor who spent the war restlessly, relentlessly trying to reunite with her husband. Her single-minded quest sends her throughout occupied Poland, Austria, and Germany, in and out of camps and prisons, and back and forth between passing as a non-Jewish Pole and being hunted as a Jew. The author and the subject clashed over how the story should be told. As Krall has stated, Izolda R. was “sentimental, wordy, emotional, always wanting it bigger. I have always known that the only way to tell such a story is with austerity and great emotional calm, even detachment.” The marriage of Izolda’s almost preposterous true story of survival and Krall’s laconic style gives this book its power, and, of course, draws our attention to the thorny relationship between history, memory, and truth, and between fact and fiction.

With her almost aphoristic approach Krall constructs vignettes that capture Izolda’s scattershot movements throughout the Reich and illustrate how factors like gender, language, and class shaped her experiences. I found Krall’s foregrounding of gender particularly fascinating (it is fitting that the Feminist Press brought this U.S. edition out.) Language is also a compelling through line—particularly Izolda’s inability to fully share her experiences with the younger, Hebrew-speaking generations of her family. And class also—Izolda cannot do the menial tasks she is often required to perform as a prisoner because she never had to do them before the war. When she encounters Austrian Jews being deported, they are convinced they are better than Polish Jews and will therefore be treated better by the Germans.

The vignettes Krall constructs capture the dark truth of the Jewish experience of trying to pass—Izolda recites the Hail Mary perfectly, only to be told an actual Catholic wouldn’t bother to enunciate each word so clearly. They also reveal identity as something both terrifyingly fixed and strangely fluid in the landscape(s) Izolda traverses while trying to find her king of hearts. Jewish women die their hair (Izolda at one point ties a bit of torn-out coat lining around her head to hide her roots), men have surgery to elongate their foreskins, teeth (real and false) are knocked out, false teeth are then removed preemptively ahead of beatings . . . There is ultimately no escape from being Jewish—even after the war she and her husband try to pass and fail, eventually having to leave Poland—but there is also a strange sense that everything is malleable. Old photographs can be doctored; concentration camp numbers can be removed or amended. If there is a “Jewish way” of holding a bag, then there must be a way to learn how to fully inhabit the other, the non-Jew. A way to escape.

The short chapters—from a paragraph or two, to two or three pages long—mostly follow Izolda as she tries to survive the war. However, a series of chapters interspersed throughout the text capture Izolda’s reflections as an elderly woman in Haifa (“Armchair. Everything is Life,” “Armchair. More Urgent Matters”). These chapters reckon with the terrible mathematics of contingency, as in this passage from “Armchair. Credit”:

If they hadn’t taken her for a prostitute, she wouldn’t have stopped in on Mateusz the caretaker,

she wouldn’t have learnt about Mauthausen [her husband’s location],

she wouldn’t have travelled to Vienna.

If she hadn’t gone to Vienna, she would have stayed in Warsaw. She would have died in the uprising, in the basement, together with her mother.

If she hadn’t escaped from Guben, they would have sent her on with the other women.

She would have landed in Bergen-Belsen,

in the middle of a typhus epidemic.

She would have died of typhus together with Janka Tempelhof.

Evidently God had decided she was meant to survive the war.

Or not. He had decided that she was meant to die and she opposed His verdict with all her strength. That’s the only reason she survived. And no God can claim credit. It was hers and hers alone.

Izolda’s journey, mapped by Krall and Boehm, circles back to contingency again and again. How did Izolda survive? Why? Is there any meaning to this survival? Izolda is convinced her love for her husband propelled her forward, but he seems to not fully reciprocate that love, and the love story does not provide much by way of explanation or closure.

Near the beginning of Chasing the King of Hearts, Izolda wants to witness one of the typhus patients she is tending die because she is curious about “what she might see when someone else’s life comes to an end.” She wonders if she will see a sign, “because if there is a sign, it ought to be read.” Izolda continues to look for signs throughout the book: using a pack of cards to help locate her husband, wondering if it is a good omen when she sees someone wearing a sweater like one that belonged to a friend who escaped to Honduras. Chasing the King of Hearts is a book full of signs—signs that it may be impossible to fully interpret, but that we ought to read nonetheless.

by Herta MĂźller, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, and published by Metropolitan Books

This piece is by BTBA judge Bill Marx, who also runs a great source for criticism and commentary on a range of art forms.

In A Thousand Darknesses, her critical study about how literature manages to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, critic Ruth Franklin asserts that “every canonical work of Holocaust literature involves some graying of the line between fiction and reality.” One could apply that claim to the literature about the pitiless existence in the death camps of the period as well, the Russian gulags. Romanian writer Herta MĂźller’s masterpiece, The Hunger Angel, describes life in a Soviet forced-labor camp right after the war through a powerful, almost uncanny, melding of imagination and first-hand testimony. Beautifully translated by Philip Boehm, this is the finest volume I have read so far by the Nobel prize-winning author, and I have no doubt that it is a canonical work because it meets Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted demand for literature. What’s more, it does so despite the odds—transforming stale pieties and images about the era’s inhumanity into news that stays news.

Back in the early ’60s, critics such as Ted Solotaroff already felt that all that could be said about the horror had been said: “By now there have been a glut of books and articles, reminiscences and diaries, documentary history and objective analyses tell us everything we need to know about the ghettos and prisons and death camps; no survivor need feel compelled to assume the burdens of testimony to the degradation, torture and murder that reiterate through these accounts and finally dull and deaden consciousness of their import.” So much more has been revealed since then.

So how does The Hunger Angel expand our consciousness of this well-worn material? Partly because it deals with what had been a repressed part of Romanian history, an episode that the authoritarian Ceaușescu regime did its best to keep a secret. After the war, Romanians with a German background were sent off to Soviet work camps, where thousands died. MĂźller explains in her afterword that “the deportations were a taboo subject because they recalled Romania’s fascist past.” She wanted to write about this hushed-up injustice, and spoke to a number of elderly survivors about life in the camps, developing a special relationship with the poet Oskar Pastior. There was talk of a collaboration, but when Pastior died MĂźller fashioned the material into a novel that evokes, amplified through her distinctive creative vision, the man’s playfully stark poetic sensibility.

The book creates the consciousness of seventeen-year-old prisoner Leo Auberg through his meditations on objects (in his past as well as in the camps), minimalist contemplations of horror that are pungent, sardonic, poetic, humorous, acidic, and heart-breaking. Along the way MĂźller invents words to describe the dehumanizing experiences that beset the narrator, a compelling language that, according to translator Boehm, evokes “the displacement of the soul among victims of authoritarianism.” The value of such an inspired articulation of historical witnessing is summed up near the end of the book: “Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am. Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember. But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.”

Lily Ye: What did you think of the way in which Rezzori is able to voice different characters (as there is a lot of direct quoting in this novel) and how did you approach the translation of these different registers and argots into English?

Philip Boehm: First I have to “hear” the voices in the original. Then I try to find a suitable musical key in English. I also work professionally as a theater director and am often struck by how that activity overlaps my work as a translator—interpreting the text, envisioning the script, clearly defining characters, etc.

In rendering the accents and argots, it’s important to bear in mind that a Russian inflection, say, sounds different to a German ear than to an English one. There are also occasions when it’s best to know the proper mispronunciation.

Read the full text

This is the conundrum that von Rezzori overcomes beautifully in Philip Boehm’s unabridged translation of The Ermine of Czernopol. In this memoir, we are treated to the un-opening of the world, its people and its countries, as understood by a group of children growing up in Czernopol, where there is a little bit of everything thrown together. The narrator speaks for his younger self, a young boy in this group of nigh inseparable siblings, as they eavesdrop upon the conversations of various adults, their primary source of information of the outside world. They listen to their frequent house guest, the prefect Herr Tarangolian, who gossips with authority; their tutor Herr Alexainu, who expounds on the nature of love; and countless others—all the while forming their own collective judgments and implications without fully comprehending what is being said. They dwell on the sounds of words and take delight in particular turns of phrase:

The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association [. . .]. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of a great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexainu had also described as a king of capacity, but to a name—in this case that of a certain FraĂźlein Kapralik. Of course we had never laid eyes on her, but people said she gave Italian lessons. In any event, beyond our associations with capers and capricious—expressions our father liked to use in reference to us—her name called to mind a fun-loving woman from Capri. A similar wealth of associations opened up when a chance to overlap in pronunciation created by the miracle of fused meanings; for instance, when we heard the newly experienced word ektase—ecstasy—in the name of Năstase, which right away seemed to capture this young man’s tango-like essence.”

Von Rezzori does not condescend a child’s point of view with a child-like vocabulary, but rather uses his rather extensive supply of words with a precision and an ingenuity of combination that, stunningly, do not give a sense of some overly precious precocity but instead imbues in the reader with that sense of wonder and of first understanding that children experience but do not have power to express.

Perhaps the central figure in the text, as the object of the children’s greatest affection and curiosity is the Austrian officer Major Tildy, who they fall in love with immediately, without knowing almost anything about him. They spend the majority of the novel trying to hear more and more about him, as he defends the honor of his sister-in-law, a promiscuous woman from a wealthy family possessing a recognizable nose, and finds himself put away in a mental institution. Such is their infatuation that when they hear he is part German they spend an incredible amount of time speculating on the nature of Germans, and on the beauty of war. For them there is no such thing as a just war—there is just war. They understand the question only in terms of existence. When they are forced to grapple with their observations of Jewish discrimination within Czernopol, which culminates with a great riot in the streets, they understand not “that Jews are also people, but rather the reverse, that people are sometimes also Jews.” And so on, go the discoveries of this group of siblings, the unnoticed eavesdroppers in a city full of both turmoil and laughter.

For children find themselves in the unique position of alterity which still allows them access into realms of privileged knowledge, as it were, because they are not expected to understand the information that passes before their very eyes and ears. Von Rezzori seizes upon this privilege of youth and puts together an exquisitely recounted tale of childhood that contains not only the excitement and wonder of discovery, but also the cutting commentary and revelation that accompany such discovery when precisely expressed.

This is the first book in the Von Rezzori trilogy, which also includes The Snows of Yesteryear and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. All three titles are available from NYRB . . .

Here’s the opening of Lily’s review:

The Ermine of Czernopol is the first of Gregor von Rezzori’s semi-autobiographical novels about growing up in what was Austria-Hungary. In it, childhood is the conduit through which we must understand everything. The thing about a being a child is an unorthodox and oftentimes uncanny mode of perception, due to the foreign nature of those not yet fully socialized, coupled with a certain inability of expression. And this is an inevitable coupling as the very language that could do justice to children’s intuitions is only attainable through the very socialization that would dull these intuitions.

This is the conundrum that von Rezzori overcomes beautifully in Philip Boehm’s unabridged translation of The Ermine of Czernopol. In this memoir, we are treated to the un-opening of the world, its people and its countries, as understood by a group of children growing up in Czernopol, where there is a little bit of everything thrown together. The narrator speaks for his younger self, a young boy in this group of nigh inseparable siblings, as they eavesdrop upon the conversations of various adults, their primary source of information of the outside world. They listen to their frequent house guest, the prefect Herr Tarangolian, who gossips with authority; their tutor Herr Alexainu, who expounds on the nature of love; and countless others—all the while forming their own collective judgments and implications without fully comprehending what is being said. They dwell on the sounds of words and take delight in particular turns of phrase:

“The sayings we overheard, the whimsical sentences, the amazing word formations all burst into glowing colors when touched by the magical light of association [. . .]. It was like a star dropping from the sky if one of my siblings actually used in speech one of the words that had so excited us—for instance, when Tanya spoke of a leap of a great capacity—and if we were able to trace it back, not to the gymnastic exercises which Herr Alexainu had also described as a king of capacity, but to a name—in this case that of a certain FraĂźlein Kapralik. . . .”

To read the entire review, click here.

We chose this book because of its unique and revealing perspective: von Rezzori works through the recollections of the eyes and ears of a group of children, using “we” almost exclusively, and it is through these children’s growing understanding and point-of-view that von Rezzori uses his power of description and imitation bring to life the discovery of a city and the entanglements of its citizens. Von Rezzori’s extensive vocabulary does not spare his young subjects, and so the reader has the pleasure and the advantage of innocent fascination without the language of innocence.

Much of the narrative centers on the children’s obsession with Major Tildy, an Austrian officer whose extreme attention to propriety and honor and extreme guard against losing face prove very costly. And the city discovered, the city of Czernopol, is diverse to say the least, with the characters featured in this story proving themselves extremely peculiar, whether or not through the hyperbole of childhood. A stint in a mental institution, an acclaimed locksmith poet, a tutor who shuns socks, and a production of The Nutcracker ballet all feature in this insightfully and incisively written book, where children are not spared anything.

This week we will have a full review and an interview with the translator Philip Boehm. Read the to begin your introduction to the city of Czernopol and its peculiar sense of humor.