Here are the show notes from the original airing:

On this week’s Two Month Review, Tom Roberge from Riffraff and the Three Percent Podcast joins Chad and Brian talk about��2001: A Space Odyssey, Pink Floyd, potential errors and non-errors, cultural touchstones that serve to define friendships, the overall structure of this chapter of��The Invented Part, and Tom’s experience coming on the podcast having read��only��these forty pages of the novel. And, as per usual, Chad sneaks in a few��Twin Peaks������ڱ����Գ����.

You can purchase each of the books in the trilogy separately (,��,��, OR, if you don’t have them and are ready for the reading event of 2023, then get����for $40—approximately 30% off.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our����aaand you can support us at����and get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. And please rate us—wherever you get your podcasts!

��DZ����Ƿ�����,�������Ի�����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

This week’s music is “Always Together With You” by Spiritualized.

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Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere.

by Marcus Malte, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge (Restless Books)

First sentences aren’t everything. Except they kind of are, aren’t they? This is the opener of The Boy:

Even the invisible and the immaterial have a name, but he does not.

“He” is the mute, feral boy who drives Marcus Malte’s sprawling novel, which spans thirty years, much of France, one world war, and the earliest harbingers of the second one. The Boy won’t say a single word.

Occasionally, I will read a novel without looking at the front inside flap or back cover, going in blind. I wish I’d done that with The Boy. The book starts like a grim, dystopian tale: the Boy lives with his mother in the wilderness that still remains in turn-of-the-century France. She dies, leaving him to fend for himself able to hunt, fish, climb, hide, etc. but with no conception of his fellow man. What follows is the Boy’s journey toward (into) society, slowly leaving behind woods and rivers for farms, running water, prejudice, and worse.

This part is long—so long that a reader might justifiably be concerned about a Castaway-esque monotony: boy hunts rabbit, boy skins rabbit, boy eats rabbit. But no fear, Malte is an expert craftsman, his plot quietly accelerating despite the painstaking detail accorded the Boy’s physical environment. The author also knows to give us breaks, offering piercing observations about the human condition:

He has not yet asked himself whether [mankind] is a good thing in the end. Whether it’s a desirable thing. He has not yet told himself that it’s meaningless.

And then cuts to this, which I can confidently describe as my favorite literary passage about frogs:

He eats the frogs dusted with rosemary flowers.
He eats the frogs sprinkled with savory.
He eats the frogs rubbed with sage leaves.
He saves the last bone of the last skeleton and places it in his matchbox as a kind of talisman.

Had I not read the synopsis, or glimpsed the cover of the book, I wouldn’t have known The Boy is a war story. I wouldn’t have known because after starting as a pseudo-post-apocalypse novel, unexpectedly, after pages of frog-hunting and tree-climbing and apple-picking, The Boy gets steamy, pages and pages of sex, until, finally, we get it: this is a book about war. The author tells us as much on page 307:

This is the story of those who will die.

The first two sections of the book—the journey from wilderness to society, and a sexual awakening—could be novels apart. But the war part is what gets you, is what got me. The Boy is punctuated with historical asides, frequently as stark lists of dates and names—just often enough for effect. In 1912, “Eva Braun comes into the world.” The same year,

Jean Baptise Blumet, twenty-six years old, dishwasher, perish[es] off the coast of Newfoundland, at 41° 46’ N latitude and 50° 14’ W longitude, in the shipwreck of the unsinkable transatlantic liner baptized Titanic.

Malte interweaves this historical framework with visceral portraits of the battlefield. Death, dismemberment, disease, all of it; but also, monotony, resignation, boredom, terror, the savagery that forms, or rather rises from within. All with a protagonist who never speaks.

There’s little doubt Malte gave his translators a difficult challenge. To their credit, you can’t tell there were two of them—Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge, who, incidentally, are married. Or not incidentally. Having co-translated with both friends and acquaintances, I can easily believe that the intimacy of marriage fosters an especially seamless translation, though perhaps the arguments over semantic choices are somewhat more intense. I like to picture chilly debates over morning coffee: innards or viscera, dear?

The Boy is rife with translation pitfalls. French has the perfect noncommittal pronoun—on, which can be understood as either “they” or “we.” If you opt for they, you risk removing the universality of a text; we, and you might eliminate necessary distance. In this novel, imagine a world-weary narrator, he’s told this story before, or some version of it; he uses on constantly. Ramadan and Roberge smartly chose to translate it as “we.” As a result, as with the French, the reader is involved, attentive.

Now the boy has his bearings, he recognizes his guideposts, he is back on his path. [. . .] Towards what destination? To what end? Deep down, we don’t really care to know, but we catch ourselves hoping that they’ll reach it.

Verb tenses in the book are tricky too, switching from present to past in a way that shouldn’t function, grammatically speaking, yet does. These passages can’t have been easy to translate, but again, Ramadan and Roberge look to have navigated them with ease. The same for transitions between second person and third.

I’m always wary when cautioned to patience before even starting a book, as Julie Orringer does in her preface to The Boy. But to be fair, patience is required. The novel isn’t perfect. To start, it’s thirty or forty pages too long. And at times Malte can be too clever by a tad. The Boy is teeming with obscure references—music, history, art, literature (and smutty literature! the smuttiest of nineteenth-century French poetry and prose, folks!) But the author is easily forgiven. A French reviewer, Christine Ferniot, wrote that Malte “has both nerve and well-placed ambition.” Well-placed being the important bit, I think. This is hardly the sole novel to tell of a boy returning from war, no longer the same, to a girl, no longer the same. And yet, it’s all in how the tale is told, right?

by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby (Sudan, Darf Publishers)

Sudanese writer (and doctor) Amir Tag Elsir’s short novel Ebola 76, translated from the Arabic by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby, is a beguiling piece of fiction. As its title suggests, the narrative traces the initial spread of the Ebola virus in central Africa, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire) to southern Sudan and beyond. But it’s nothing like the other outbreak narratives offered to the world, whether in books or movies. There are no heroes. There are antiheroes. Lots of them. There is a somewhat anthropomorphized virus, eager to sow wreck and ruin, having fun along the way. There’s plenty of misery and suffering, but it already existed, had existed for decades and maybe even centuries before the virus showed up. The virus simply piles on, bringing unhappy lives to quicker ends. There’s no camaraderie. No banding together in the face of overwhelming, inconceivable carnage. No putting aside of differences or petty squabbles in order to cooperate. Instead there’s blame, rumor-mongering, self-interest, and isolationism, with a dash of casual disregard for consequences.

All of which is to say that this is perhaps the most genuine portrait of a viral outbreak ever conceived. Empathy and selflessness are wonderful traits to aspire to, especially in times of crisis such as this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they kick in the second a tragedy strikes. And certainly that urge is made more difficult to catalyze when the crisis-stricken society has been taking a beating for so long that hope and optimism in everyday life are almost non-existent, never mind during a crisis.

Colonialism started it all off for these people, that much is obvious, even if this fact is never overtly expressed in the book. And post-colonial Africa was of course riddled with corruption, internal wars, and economic ruin. Education was a privilege for most and the vast majority of citizens had no chance of upward mobility through honest means. Life expectancies were horrifyingly short and infant mortality rates horrifyingly high. To get all of this across, to imbue it in the story without recounting it in history-textbook-style, Elsir employs a masterful ability to color his character’s thoughts with the subtle influences of history, distant and recent. It reads as black humor (which, for the record, is really, really well done and really funny in its own dark way) and widespread pessimism, a coping mechanism for these people in the face of their suffering, old and new, but upon closer examination it reveals these characters’ unshakeable distrust of the world they live in. It’s sad. Beyond sad, it’s also an honest account of an undeniably tragic time and place.

Has any of the preceding convinced you that this is the book that deserves to win this year’s Best Translated Book Award? I suspect no, so I’ll close with an assertion that this book doesn’t exist to be praised for its narrative flights of fancy or stylistic flair or its translation. It’s not that it doesn’t do these things astonishingly well, it’s that they are used in service of pointing to something important and intriguing beyond the pages of the book itself. This is not a book about the life of the mind, this is a book about the diseased blood coursing through our hearts.

This week’s music is a snippet from the 13+ minute long by Car Seat Headrest. Great song, great album.

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Caitlin Baker of University Bookstore in Seattle will guest star on the next episode, which covers Part II (59-72). This episode will be broadcast live on We’ll be discussion Part II (pgs 59-72), and you can watch us, ask questions, make general comments, talk about the lighting in Brian’s closet, etc. Or you can wait for the normal podcast release next Thursday, March 1st.

As always, The Physics of Sorrow (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

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The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Splendor and Misery, featuring Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel!

This week’s music is by Unlikely Friends. Yes, this is the second week in a row that we’re featuring this album. It’s great!

As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like us to read and analyze (or just make fun of), send those along as well.

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For those keeping track as you listen, and here’s a link to on Brigid Hughes and The Paris Review.

Sorry, while we’re goofing on Rochester’s delusional ambitions, I have to share Please try and make sense of those statements.

This week’s music is by Unlikely Friends. Now that football is over with Minnesota’s crushing defeat to the Eagles, it’s almost time to pay attention to America’s game!

As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like us to read and analyze (or just make fun of), send those along as well.

And if you like the podcast, tell a friend and rate us or leave a review on iTunes!

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This week’s music is “Young Lady, You’re Scaring Me” by Ron Gallo.

As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like us to read and analyze (or just make fun of), send those along as well.

And if you like the podcast, tell a friend and rate us or leave a review on iTunes!

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss

UPDATE: Here’s a link to And the one for

This week’s music is by Beaches.

One other note: The next season of the kicked off on Thursday, October 26th with an episode introducing Mercè Rodoreda and the two books of hers that will be featured this season: and Both are avaialble for 20% off by using the code 2MONTH at The full schedule of episodes is available here.

As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like us to read and analyze (or just make fun of), send those along as well.

And if you like the podcast, tell a friend and rate us or leave a review on iTunes!

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss