{"id":299586,"date":"2014-09-26T11:21:52","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T11:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/09\/26\/my-books-and-how-they-got-there\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:12:31","slug":"my-books-and-how-they-got-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/09\/26\/my-books-and-how-they-got-there\/","title":{"rendered":"My Books and How They Got There"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n

I live in Berlin, in a neighborhood with a chronically understaffed post office, so books on their way to me from the United States are usually in for an adventure. <\/p>\n

A package from Archipelago Books,<\/a> example, arrived dripping wet, even though it hadn\u2019t rained in Berlin for a week. Luckily, the texts themselves were all intact, and a little water damage has only lent a pleasant air of world-weariness to the appearances. <\/p>\n

Another package I received, this time from Vintage<\/a>, had been opened, its contents shoved into my mailbox, and the envelope stuffed crookedly in after them. Is that even legal?, I wondered, are they even allowed to open my stuff? Turns out, yes, but only is the stuff is books. Since most of them were about hard-boiled detectives, I figured they were used to some rough handling and didn\u2019t feel too sorry for them.<\/p>\n

But the best (by which I mean most unusual) delivery arrived this week: an absolutely enormous blue bag bearing the seal of the Belgian post, one gaping end knotted shut with plastic cords. It was the sort of bag I imagine Santa Claus would use if he were a Belgian mailman. For a moment I hoped that there would just be one giant book inside, but instead there was another<\/em>, slightly smaller blue bag, tidily wrapped and stamped by Sweden Post. <\/p>\n

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Of course, no matter how bizarre the story of a book\u2019s arrival at my front door might have been, its importance fades as soon as the experience of the text itself takes over. One of those half-drowned Archipelago titles, Scholastique Mukasonga\u2019s Our Lady of the Nile<\/i><\/a>, has proved a moving and memorable read. One of the few novels from sub-Saharan Africa to be eligible for this year\u2019s BTBA<\/span>, Our Lady of the Nile<\/em> centers on an elite girls\u2019 boarding school in 1970s Rwanda, shortly before a wave of ethnic violence breaks out. I recently reviewed the novel for Music & Literature<\/a>, where I wrote of it as both a collective coming-of-age story and a prelude to genocide.<\/p>\n

The book I\u2019m reading currently, Jenny Erpenbeck\u2019s The End of Days<\/i><\/a>, was unusual in that it arrived at my apartment completely unscathed. It\u2019s the first novel by Erpenbeck that I\u2019ve had a chance to read. It begins with the death of an eight-month old baby and traces the ramifications this death later has on the child\u2019s family. But then, in the first of the book\u2019s many \u201cIntermezzo\u201ds, the baby is resurrected: time rewinds itself, the baby is saved in the nick of time. She\u2019s given a second chance at life, allowed to grow up for a few more years. When she finds another death, she is resurrected again, and so on; the main character, whose name we learn only at the end of the novel, keeps dying and keeps not being permitted to die, until she has lived through nearly the entire twentieth century.<\/p>\n

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A serious (in my opinion, unfortunately humorless) meditation on death, The End of Days<\/em> was striking to me not only for its compelling premise, but also for the quality of its translation. Susan Bernofsky has produced an exceptionally powerful English version of this very German text; the book\u2019s prose, just like its cover when it arrived in my Berlin mailbox, showed no sign of having made a transatlantic journey. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. I live in Berlin, in a neighborhood with a chronically understaffed post office, so books on their way to me from the United States are usually in for an adventure. A package from Archipelago Books, example, arrived dripping wet, even though it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[2176,58046,56,28166,1646],"class_list":["post-299586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-archipelago-books","tag-madeleine-larue","tag-new-directions","tag-open-letter-books","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299586","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\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317176,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299586\/revisions\/317176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

The treasure inside this strange blue matryoshka was more than worth the trouble it took to wrestle it out. Inside the blue Swedish bag, surrounded by what I assume used to be an envelope but which now resembled something closer to the insides of a sofa after they\u2019ve been torn up by a very eager puppy, were eight books from Open Letter<\/a>, dusty but otherwise unharmed. Among them were several titles I\u2019d been looking forward to for some time: Ingrid Winterbach\u2019s The Elusive Moth<\/i><\/a>, Amanda Michalopoulou\u2019s Why I Killed My Best Friend<\/i><\/a>, and of course the splendid anthology that\u2019s been getting so much attention on this blog recently, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n