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There are stories here that are so exceptional, so inspiring, so creative, they made me rethink everything I thought I knew about fiction. Stories like Clouds, The Woman From Porto Pim, Night, Sea, or Distance, and The Trains that go to Madras. These are among the best of Tabucchi's short work in my opinion, and well worth the price of the volume. Other stories maybe not so much but then, I might be commenting on their translations, I don't know. This is a collaborative publication. The stories are translations done by 7 different writers.

I am still a dedicated Tabbuchi follower. This book took me a long time to get through only because it had taken me some time to settle into a routine after moving from the US to Spain. What a great companion this book has been for my circumstance, however. Tabucchi is nothing of not a European artist.

My first Musil, though I think many ease into him this way. How else could I commit to his life's work, the multi-volume opus, A Man Without Qualities? Here we have many short works: essays in miniature, scraps of ideas, flourishes of descriptive writing, sometimes only a few pages long. But they are written with such clarity and precision that when the most abstractly investigative piece glimmers like a finely cut diamond. Musil is such an intentional writer. I know that sounds silly and maybe a obvious but it is this aspect of his voice that comes across the most clearly. From the content of a piece right down to the level of sentence construction not a word or grammatical phrasing is taken for granted. I found, while reading, every paragraph was worth showing down for. In fact, as short as the pieces collected here they each demanded such a careful pace of reading that the collection didn't feel as short as it looked.

I highly recommend this volume for anyone contemplating Musil. It felt like an excellent introduction to his work and I came away from the book excited to take on his grand tome.

"We've been through so many phases in the time you've been ill, but after we got married in the Summer, you'd been ill for a year then, and for a long time it was as if everything was all about getting that done, getting married, as if that was our focal point, the thing we were moving towards instead of death, and we were going there together, but after we got married there was nothing ahead of us anymore, nothing we had to look forward to together. All there is now is that you're going to die. And you say you're not. So we're not together in that, or at least it's not something we talk about, but still its the point towards which we're heading now." - pg 72

This book hit me like a bag of hammers. I'll be honest, I had no idea what it was about. I've read and enjoyed Orstavik's novel, Love, and that should have tipped me off that a novel from her titled Ti Amo might not be a romantic, feel-good affair. So here I am, in Honolulu, on a beach, pulling out my sun time reading and a few hours later I'm fighting back tears and trying not to ruminate too much on my own mortality.

Yes, this is a crushing novel about a writer's husband's decline due to stomach cancer, but no this is not cheap or gimmicky in the slightest. Orstavik has a masterful handle on the craft of writing and her ability to sustain a first person voice for the duration of these pages and still layer a depth of themes and philosophical considerations without ever once dropping her emotional connection to the excruciating transformation at hand is a testament to her abilities.

Highly recommended.

Exceptional prose written in a style that inhabits a liminal space between dreams and waking. Each story begins with a clap ("Suddenly, he started to dance beautifully and walk toward me." - Fat Tuesday. "'Hermes!' The whip cracked against the worn wood of the table." - Sergeant Garcia. "It was like her head was plunged under water, and an organ grinder was playing by the river." - Music Box) and after the initial shock of action and lyrical setting Abreu immerses the reader into the phenomenology of character. I found the technique overwhelming at times. Yes, the prose is fluid and lends to quick reading but that same pace of reading was just too fast for me and I had to force myself to slow down or even re-read certain paragraphs. I was always rewarded for doing this. That magic trick of easy diction and dense content was something I admired throughout. I really got a sense that I was encountering different characters. Encountering in the Buberian sense.

As usual, Archipelago has produced this text in an artful way. I love the square shape of the book, the font size and the feel of the cover. They are a premiere publisher in the United States and they have published a tactically approachable volume which is also an intellectually approachable introduction to Abreu's writing for English speakers. I've never seen Abreu's work in Portuguese but Bruna Dantas Lobato's translation felt natural, rhythmic, and rich with a mix of formal and colloquial word choices depending on the story. I was never pulled out of the story and came away feeling like I had a grip on Abreu's voice.

Highly recommended!

5 stars for Loynaz's work, 3 stars for the translation.

It is a brave move for a publishing company to put out side by side language editions. Brave, and also maybe not so brave. In this case, it was a necessary move to offer the raw brilliance of Loynaz's language beside O'Connor's incredibly concise work bringing her poems to English. Of course, translating poetry is such a difficult undertaking, not unsimilar to interpreting jokes, but here I gotta say, there were times when the straight to the point English style really missed out on the rhythm in baffling ways. Take this instance:

CI

La criatura de isla pareceme, no se por que, una criatura distinta. Mas leve, mas sutil, mas sensitiva.

Translation:

The island creature seems to me, I don't know why, a different kind of creature. Lighter, subtler, more sensitive.

As you can see, this is not a bad translation at all. It gets the job done and it does contain an accuracy of meaning. I'm using this example, however, to bring up a pattern throughout the book. O'Connor often edits out word repetition and straightens out word order. It is my assertion that in doing so he saps too much feeling from the work, which, let's be honest, if Loynaz had anything to offer it was feeling. Why not write it closer to the original? "...a distinct creature. Lighter, more subtle, more sensitive." Sure, that isn't very concise, but it shadows way more of the rhythms that make Loynaz pop off the page as her work so often does.

I'm sure I'm completely offending all my translator friends on here, several of whose excellent Spanish translations I have read. I'll admit, me poking at O'Connor's work is a consequence of the side by side publication and I am very much an armchair translator (if that epithet even applies here -- look at me, I can't even write in English. How dare I critique a translation!).

I still think this is worth pursuing. Especially if you haven't been exposed to Loynaz's work, which is so moving.

CIII

Like this river that keeps running although it will never arrive anywhere, I chose life, my love, running toward you.
Running toward you along a path that was always longer than my water, even though my water never ended and it was my heart pushing it along.
I have lived my death and I have died my life in your direction, feeling my way through darkness, confusing faces.
Like this river. Yes, like this slow, blind river that can't stop or turn back or break away from the rock from which it was born.
The distance of a river has been our distance, the river that never ends, even if I walk, day and night, my entire life.


This one is my favorite translation in the book. I wouldn't be able to choose from the originals, however.

More like 3. 5 stars.

This took me forever to read. Mostly because I took on this novel just before a massive undertaking: selling our house in Washington, putting all of our stuff into temporary storage, and moving my little family including kids, cats and dogs across the world. We're moving to Spain! The kids are still pretty young and the housing market was pretty decent. The time was right to make a big life change, for no other reason than to live a slower, richer existence, and to improve my Instagram feed (kidding). I'm not quite there yet (still waiting on the visa - ugh) but activity has slowed down enough for me to read again and I started by finishing Couperus' shot at a Hague novel.

This one has a slow, easy going pace. The prose is beautiful and I was never oppressed by the story's rhythm but the effect of so much nothing going on is a bit like Kubrick's use of time in Barry Lyndon. One starts to feel the pace of living among these upper class hallways and ballrooms. Unfortunately, this means Couperus' project, the churning interiority of ruling class dramas, did require a little more generosity on my part as reader than I may have had at times. Oh, the whinging, and the back of the hands pressed against the foreheads, and the tearful sobs because a boy said he liked a girl but she doesn't believe him... come on already.

Mostly I enjoyed this. The prose, as I said, is fantastic, and the characters are very well drawn - their dilemmas usually poignant. It overstays its welcome a bit, in my very humble opinion, but my circumstances in reading weren't entirely fair.

Surely the best part of this novel was the author's notes section at the back of the book where all the scientific interests that inspired Watts to write this novel are listed and explored to some degree. In the novel itself, those are probably the only worthy bits. Watts excels at creatively expressing the realized points of speculative theories and Echopraxia is a successful Hard Scifi novel in that regard. Sadly, in all other regards this story cannot compare to Blindsight. He ditched emotional connection and chose interior lecture hall and the result was unsurprisingly easy for me to ditch altogether. If you are in the mood to contemplate the scientific underpinnings of this story and would rather set aside the mushy stuff of Blindsight (or, like, literature) then you will enjoy this book very much. His creative synthesis of theory into something like a plot is dazzling for its creativity. If you want a novel full of the kinds of characters that made Blindsight so unique you might want to look elsewhere.