{"id":293456,"date":"2013-03-22T14:15:29","date_gmt":"2013-03-22T14:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/03\/22\/why-this-book-should-win-my-fathers-book-by-urs-widmer-btba-2013\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:30","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:30","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-my-fathers-book-by-urs-widmer-btba-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/03\/22\/why-this-book-should-win-my-fathers-book-by-urs-widmer-btba-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: "My Father's Book" by Urs Widmer [BTBA 2013]"},"content":{"rendered":"

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA<\/span> Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking here.<\/a> And if you’re interested in writing any of these, just get in touch._<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

My Father’s Book<\/em><\/a> by Urs Widmer, translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin and published by Seagull Books<\/b><\/p>\n

This piece is by translator, critic, and BTBA<\/span> judge, Tess Lewis.<\/em><\/p>\n

Urs Widmer, woefully underappreciated in the English-speaking world, is one of Switzerland\u2019s most prominent and prolific writers. And My Father\u2019s Book<\/em> is one of Widmer\u2019s very best. A fictionalized biography of his own father, Walter Widmer, this novel is by turns heart-wrenching and laugh-out loud funny. Heady, intellectual passages alternate with slap-stick comedy in this exploration of how much we can know even those closest to us.<\/p>\n

The narrator\u2019s father, Karl Widmer, is an unworldly, intellectually voracious man whose fiery temper is balanced by his essential good nature and extreme absent-mindedness. He lives primarily through the great works of French literature he translates\u2014Stendhal, Flaubert, Rabelais, Balzac, and Diderot, whom he treasures above all others\u2014and dies in his fifties of a heart ailment exacerbated by a life of chain-smoking. Karl is an inveterate idealist who venerates the Encyclop\u00e9distes and the rationalism of the dix-huiti\u00e8me. He becomes a Communist for a time, but is too impolitic for the Party. What he loves, he loves ardently. He only occasionally registers the fact that his beloved wife\u2019s tendency to withdraw is a sign of unhappiness, and always too late.<\/p>\n

According to tradition in Karl\u2019s remote ancestral mountain village, on his twelfth birthday he was given a book for him to record each day\u2019s events throughout his life. On the day after his father dies, the narrator learns to his horror that his mother had already disposed of Karl\u2019s book along with mountains of manuscripts and unpaid bills. The narrator, who had only glanced through it the night before, resolves to rewrite his father\u2019s book, now in the readers\u2019 hands. Widmer not only recalls the events and circumstances of Karl\u2019s life, he is able to render a sense of the man\u2019s internal life by quoting imagined passages from the imaginary book.<\/p>\n

As the Germans advance through Europe, Karl, until now unfit for service, is called up along “with a few other oldish men with weak hearts” to protect Basel from the Wehrmacht. In the barracks at night Karl dutifully makes his daily entries in which mundane events alternate with vivid meditations on things literary.<\/p>\n

\n

‘19.5.40 Letter from Clara,<\/em>’ my father wrote, once he\u2019d saved the quill from the hobnailed boots of a comrade racing to the toilet. ‘Kitchen duty for insubordination (the corporal asked me\u2014it was to do with the dismantled gunlock I wasn\u2019t able to put together again\u2014whether I thought he was stupid and I said yes). The Germans still aren\u2019t here yet. General mobilization nonetheless. \u2014In the<\/em> ancien r\u00e9gime, ladies<\/em> vaginae could speak too. Not just their mouths. Often the gentlemen would sit with their countesses and ducal lovers, having tea, and chatting to one another about an especially good bon mot of Madame de Pompadour or the Pope\u2019s last bull, while, simultaneously, from beneath their skirts\u2014many-layered mountains of material\u2014came a chattering and sniggering, the sense of which they didn\u2019t quite catch. At any rate, there was almost constant chat from down there. The many different materials muffled the voices, but people sometimes thought they would hear their names, without knowing what the braying laughter beneath all the other skirts was all about. \u2014The light! The light of the<\/em> dix-huiti\u00e8me, you don\u2019t get light like that nowadays.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My Father\u2019s Book<\/em> is a boisterous, expansive novel, an encapsulation of twentieth century Swiss life through an idiosyncratic and highly concentrating prism. This sense of breadth comes not only from the contrast of Karl\u2019s engagement in politics and his ludicrous stint as a soldier with his wife\u2019s extreme introversion, but also from his appetite for life and the arts, which Widmer evokes beautifully. The sheer artistry of the writing in this novel alone would be deserving of the Best Translated Book Award, but in addition Donal McLaughlin\u2019s translation is pitch-perfect, capturing the various registers and tonalities of Widmer\u2019s prose and, most difficult of all, the many shades of his humor.<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[48756,50266,50496,50506,34536,22526,50486],"class_list":["post-293456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2013","tag-btba-2013-why-this-book-should-win","tag-donal-mclaughlin","tag-my-fathers-book","tag-seagull-books","tag-tess-lewis","tag-urs-widmer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334026,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293456\/revisions\/334026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}