Best Translated Book Nominees: Khaled Khalifa's DEATH IS HARD WORK (tr by Leri Price) with a sidebar on a movie I saw once

Once upon a time, as longtime readers of this blog or my twitter feed or other bits and bobs around the internet know, I got to go to the Toronto International Film Festival, not as press or anything like that, but just to drink, play D&D in a pub with my friends, and go to screenings of a whole lot of very cool international/arthouse films. It was a glorious period in my life, and I got to see some exceptional stuff, some of which still hasn't gotten a lot of eyeballs on it because not all distribution deals are created equal, and not everybody gets one.

One I vividly remember from my first year, 2010, was a Taiwanese gem called Pinoy Sunday, in which two young overseas contract worker types from the Philippines seized on an Allston Christmas-type opportunity and got their hands on a really nice red sofa. So far, so excellent; they lived in a dorm sparse of furnishing and lacking in comfort. All they had to do now, was get the thing from the location where a squabbling couple left it, to their dorm -- clear across the giant world-class city of Taipei. Being overseas contract worker types, they did not own a vehicle capable of transporting furniture, did not even own bicycles. The bus is quickly ruled out; a friend "offers" to help for entirely too much money, TL;DR, they wind up hand-carrying it home. And have many adventures, encountering many obstacles, saving a life here, getting arrested there. A typical Sunday. It's a charming and funny, though also moving and sad, piece of cinema that invites us to contemplate the true cost of "free", the plight of immigrants in any nation, growing up, all the good stuff. It often gets billed as a comedy but it's bittersweet.

I thought about it a lot as I started listening to the exceptional audiobook edition of Khaled Khalifa's Death is Hard Work, and I'm still trying to decide just how much of a jerk this makes me, because in making this comparison, I'm basically equating a dead human being to a sofa that got dumped on a street corner, aren't I?

Let's see.

The novel, beautifully narrated in its audio book edition by Neil Shah and translated into clear, even stark prose that lets the pure sensory impact of the scenes described shine through without a lot of frippery by Leri Price, concerns a trio of siblings whose father has just died of old age -- in Damascus, Syria, during the current violence, destruction and turmoil of that country's now ten-year-old civil war.* We begin the novel with that death, in which the father tells the only one of his children who is present that his dying wish is that he be buried next to his long-dead sister in their home village of Anibaya -- a couple hours' drive away from Damascus. And then, just to be sure that those are his last words, spends the next two hours saying nothing at all and daydreaming about his dead second wife (his children's stepmother) while his son Bolbol just has to kind of sit there and live with the fact that he just made a really stupid promise to a man who wasn't really much of a father -- because of course Bolbol said he'd make sure his father got his dying wish.

Death isn't hard work for the person who does the dying, really, is it? By the way, I'm told that a better translation of this title would be "Death is Hard Labor" because that term "hard labor" evokes things like prison sentences. The kind you risk incurring if you cross anybody in authority over anything in present-day Syria -- assuming you surive the encounter.

There are a lot of authority figures, official and un-, between Damascus and Anibaya.

But so, Death is Hard Work is essentially a road trip story that should bear more comparison with, say Smoke Signals (in which a young Native American man is charged with transporting his father's remains and brings along a friend for the trip) than Pinoy Sunday, maybe, but it's Pinoy Sunday I thought of first because once the death scene is behind us, we're watching the swift transformation, through both literal biological decay and through bureaucracy and commerce, of a human being to a commodity, something Bolbol himself realizes very early in the narrative -- and, like that of a couch through busy city streets, the movement of that commodity is very much impeded by the circumstances, physical and psychic, of the territory traversed. 

And of course, Bolbol isn't his father's only child; his acquiescence to his father's ploy sentences  his two siblings as well. Neither his brother, Hussein, nor his sister, Fatima, would have been so foolish, we quickly understand -- which is why they weren't even there to be manipulated in the first place. It's only grudgingly that they agree to help him, which is fortunate because Bolbol doesn't even have a vehicle for the trip. Fortunately, Hussein drives a minibus for a living. Perfect. Quick little trip to Dad's hometown and their obligations are complete. I mean, how is this even a novel, right?

But these are siblings, and did I mention that their dad wasn't a great one? He wasn't a great dad, which means Bolbol, Hussein and Fatima did not have easy childhoods even back when Syria wasn't a war zone-cum-exremist playground.

On top of a whole lot of tasty family drama (in which each sibling seems to embody a universal vice - Bolbol is a coward, Hussein is proud, Fatima is vain) is that of the various sides in this endless conflict; living in Damascus, the siblings have tried very hard to blend in with loyalists to the Assad regime, still in control there, but their dad was a left wing agitator of some small fame and comes from a region that is very much in the control of (I think) the Free Syrian Army, which matters more than an ignorant American (yo!) might think because his children were all three born there and it's on their identity cards as a permanent stigma, which no amount of hanging Assad's portrait in their living rooms** or other protestations of loyalty can really overcome.

So, as the siblings set off with their father and many blocks of ice to stave off decay, they're already in for it, as at every checkpoint they'll have to present their identity cards to armed strangers who will judge them by their birthplace, whether they're passing through loyalist or rebel territory -- or territory controlled by what seems a lot like ISIL.

Which is how a ten-hour journey back when there was relative peace and the roads weren't bombed-out pothole farms infested with snipers and lined with mass graves and, occasionally, fresh human corpses just left out to begin rotting in the sun, stretches out to three days while Dear Old Dad begins to bloat and stink and becomes a host to teeming maggots. And the story stretches even longer as we take turns exploring the back stories of the entire family, including the father's long-dead sister, whose dramatic death as a teenager kind of set off this whole big thing.

I make it sound ponderous and punishing, but it really isn't. A lot of this is due to the prose, which is vivid and reads like good journalism: no wasted words, precise, detailed and vivid as hell, and very, very efficient. Characters' states of minds are communicated as swiftly and completely as a description of the state of DoD's corpse as intensely as the fierce and unforgiving stare of a soldier pointing a machine gun at the minibus. In audio book form it's not even six hours long! But it turns out to be the perfect length as we discover at the end when we collapse exhausted alongside a survivor into a bleak and empty bed back in Damascus.

So to answer the question I posed myself at the beginning -- how big of a jerk am I to be mentally comparing a family's dead father to a fortuitously discovered red sofa? -- I don't feel like much of a jerk, no; as I said, the father (whose name I keep forgetting and also don't know how to spell -- one of the bummers of audiobooks is not knowing how proper nouns are spelled, and it's also a pain to go back and check something I've forgotten) is transformed into a thing pretty early on, even as he also grows into a character through all the flashbacks, but the vast divide between corpse and character is sort of the point, standing in, perhaps, for the divide between the character and his children, who it seems would gladly have traded him for a sofa not long after retrieving it from the Damascus morgue.

Anything to keep from facing themselves and each other. 

You know, the Hard Work.

*Which, wow, I always forget this conflict basically started as part of the Arab Spring. Remember that? And how excited we were for a whole lot of people in a whole lot of countries who were looking like they were going to fight and win for democracy and civil liberties and whatnot? Yeah.

**A flashback to when their father first arrived from the home village, frail and failing, to live with Bolbol turns on the point of this portrait, with the father ultimately winning out as Bolbol finally fails to put the picture back up until it sort of disappears in the kipple of his house, where it becomes an emotional irritant to Bolbol nonetheless as he lives in a passionately loyalist neighborhood and is already a figure of suspicion and hostility there.

Best Translated Book Nominees : Sinan Antoon's THE BOOK OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE (translated by Jonathan Wright)

Bearing the title that it does, The Book of Collateral Damage cannot be expected to be a lighthearted and cheery read, but let's take a moment to contemplate a list of the things author Sinan Antoon and translator Jonathan Wright will make you feel like crying about over its relatively short length: a fledgling bird, a carpet, a tree, a stamp album, a racehorse, a bedroom wall, an oud (an Arabian stringed instrument kind of like a lute), a cassette tape (oh my god did I blubber at The Colloquy of the Tape), a roll of film... plus, you know, various people, including a woman whose poetry survived thousands of years on a Mesopotamian tablet only to disappear in 2003 (probably ending up in Hobby Lobby's stolen hoard)...  I mean, there's evoking empathy and then there's whatever these guys do, and I'm a complete mess and unfit for company right now and I just want them to do it to me again.

The novel, written in such a profusion of incredible poetic imagery and language that I wish my Arabic was better so I could enjoy the original*, concerns two men: an academic, Nameer, who emigrated from Iraq to the United States, and Wadood, a bookseller he met on a trip back to Baghdad. Nameer's story of academic life in an adopted country is interesting enough, if kind of just a slight variant on the male narcissist writer narrative we're sick of from the likes of Updike and Irving, but is quickly and rightly subsumed by his obsession with Wadood's life's work: a catalog of person, animal and "inanimate" (I'll explain the scare quotes in a moment) object destroyed, minute by minute, in the Iraq War.** Wadood presented Nameer with a draft of this work on their first meeting, and Nameer, blown away by its beauty, tragedy and importance, wants more than anything that it be published in Arabic for the home crowd and then that he be allowed to translate it into English for a wider audience. 

Destruction also has a tablet preserved, somewhere in the netherworld. On it are written the names of everything that will be obliterated and everyone who will die. Every night I see myself flying and I read what's written and I come back to write it in my catalog.

It's not 100% clear whether this passage, like many in the book, is meant to be understood as Nameer's or Wadood's writing, but ultimately it doesn't matter; Gene Wolfe fans like me are quite accustomed to blurred narrator identities, but unlike in a Gene Wolfe book, I don't feel like the question of who is writing what is meant to be a puzzle for me to solve; the blurring is the point; the two men's experiences dovetail. One could almost see them as one man split in two by, say, a quantum event, whether or not a family home was destroyed by a bomb in war-torn Baghdad in their youth. The man who came upon the rubble as a boy became Wadood; the one who didn't escaped Iraq and became Nameer. Who didn't really escape at all, as his fixation on Wadood and his work and his encounters with a therapist make readily apparent.

Of course it's Wadood's "Colloquies" which really set this work apart. Antoon-as-Wadood does a heartbreakingly perfect job of imbuing things like walls and rolls of film with personality, memory and emotional resonance. Hints throughout point to everything named in these Colloquies having been within or at least associated with the aforementioned destroyed home, but they could just as easily have been things all over Baghdad that were destroyed in the same attack.

Anyway, like I said, I'm a wreck now, and I've got to take a break from this project (especially since the next few of the books from the Best Translated Book Award long list that I've got, I've got as audio books, and I don't consume those as rapidly as I did back when I was stuck half-blind in the attic last year). But I've still got several to go before I read the one that actually won, so keep watching this space, friends.

And give this one a look. Just have some tissues handy. And be prepared to apologize to the ones you use and throw away.

*I loved Urdu poetry the most when I was studying that language! Which I've forgotten most of in the 20-some years since I blew off my grad school research to do that! So I know I could improve my Arabic enough to open up this pleasure to me as well, but... which flavor of Arabic? 

**Peter Greenaway fans take note: if you love Greenaway's mania for lists and catalogs, this is your novel. 

Best Translated Book Nominees: Burhan Sönmez' LABYRINTH: A NOVEL (Translated by Ummit Hussein)

I've never been less certain that the people who wrote the jacket copy for a novel read the same book that I did than in the case of Labyrinth: A Novel, my latest read from the long list for the Best Translated Book Award.*

The marketing for Labyrinth describes it variously as a crime novel and a heady political tale, but I see neither in this rather nice and moving story of a young semi-famous blues singer/songwriter/guitarist in Istanbul, Turkey who wakes up from an apparent suicide attempt with a wicked case of amnesia. Intriguing premise for a crime or political novel, right? I mean, was it a for- real suicide attempt or attempted murder? If it was really a suicide attempt, what brought this young, well off, good looking young musician to such a pass? Something terrible on his conscience to do with crime or politics because this is, you know, a crime novel? If it was a murder attempt made to look like suicide, who wanted him dead and why? Did he witness something he shouldn't? Was he a bad guy himself? Or a political dissenter the current regime in Turkey wanted quashed?

But, uh, nope. None of this really gets asked or, really, even answered in the text of the novel (and I'm a Gene Wolfe fan, so I'm used to really really having to pay attention when mysterious things get mysterious in fiction). Well, maybe a little bit about why our man, Boratin, would suddenly decide one night to exit his taxi while it was stuck in a traffic jam on the Bosphorus Bridge and jump right off said bridge to his suddenly intended death, but only a little bit. Like, nobody he asks has any idea, his therapist isn't much help, and then Boratin is more interested in figuring out what to do with his life moving forward than in solving this mystery of his past. 

The only clue we're given is that two of Boratin's favorite musicians, pre-swan dive,were Kurt Cobain (who committed suicide at age 27) and a Turkish guitar god named Yavus Çetin (who committed suicide at age 30). And yes, I looked up Yavuz Çetin and wow is he a revelation. See below where I'll link to a playlist I made for this novel.

Anyway, so unless I really, really read this one wrong (not impossible!) this is neither a heady political nor a crime story, but that's fine, you guys. Because it's a good book, a fine story, and worth reading on its own merits and not only because it will lead you to the discovery of some kickass Turkish pop music. 

Boratin as we get to know him (and he gets to know himself) via his friends and family, emerges as a very kind and generous young man who inspires considerable loyalty in his friends and bandmates and whose widowed sister really misses him and loves him devotedly even though he's not been to visit her and her son in years. There might well be something to this last bit -- why has he avoided his family for so long? -- and maybe his friends are lying to him about what he was like before the Bridge, but what about the neighborhood people who fall all over themselves to extend affection and gratitude to him when he happens by? Was he like, actually some kind of gangster or police informer or something and they're actually all scared of them?

That question, that idea, only occurs to me because of the jacket copy, I must emphasize. There is no textual evidence to support or even suggest it, no furtive glances, no signs of fear on the part of other characters, no unexplained suggestive imagery bubbling up from Boratin's subconscious... Without this crime/political designation I would have read Labyrinth as an elegant and moving account of an amnesiac coming to terms with his condition, deciding whom to trust with the truth of it, choosing how much effort he wants to put into recovering his memory, and determining his best course forward. That's more than enough for a good novel right there, and this is a good novel, especially since it also vividly depicts a place not a lot of us are ever going to experience any other way. Even if we get to 21st century Istanbul or have already been many times, we're not going to experience it the way a hot young Turkish musician is going to.

And that, my friends, is what I read for. And listen for: here's the promised playlist. Yavuz, man. Dayum.

*The winners have been announced for this, so now I know what to save for last!

Best Translated Book Nominees: Donatella Di Pietrantonio's A GIRL RETURNED, Translated by Ann Goldsmith

I understand it's a fairly common fantasy among children, to imagine (usually when they're angry with their families) that their parents aren't their Real Parents and that their Real Parents are far richer, kinder, grander people who will buy their long lost children all the toys they want and let them eat candy bars for dinner just as soon as the Real Parents sweep in and claim their suffering darlings and take them away from those wicked people who limit the kids' screen time, make them share with siblings and eat green beans.*

This isn't that story, all though we could call it that-story-adjacent. Let's say it's that fantasy meets the harsh realities of, not just the modern world, but the world as it's really always been but that privilege has allowed a lot of us to pretend isn't anymore. And also, kind of an inversion of that fantasy.

A Girl Returned (L'Armintua in the original Italian) allows an unnamed young girl to share with us what it's like to be unceremoniously ejected from a loving and comfortable home in the city and sent to a miserable hovel near the mountains to live with a Real Family she didn't even know she had, who barely even speak the same language she does,** and don't share many of her assumed to be natural expectations for what a bright young girl in Italy can have for her future.

The mystery of why this has happened is a constant pull on the narrative, and we do get an eventual explanation for it, but this isn't the focus of the novel, either. But so, what is?

For me, it's two things: what it's like for the narrator to discover she has siblings and to suddenly be thrust into close quarters (as in sharing a bedroom) with them, and how the author and translator can convey, just via the very careful deployment of articles and possessive pronouns, how our narrator's perception of her Former Family and her Real Family are shifting from scene to scene. That may sound boring, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure this book would still be a highly engaging read if the reader wasn't paying attention to those little parts of speech, as they are grace notes rather than The Point, but since I noticed this fairly early on and found myself really interested to see if it was just my imagination based on a few flukes or something deliberately done for effect, I found this aspect of the novel fascinating.

Where this is really interesting is how our narrator interacts with her two mothers, the one who raised her into her early teens, and the one who gave birth to her. For a long time, she refers to the first as "my" mother and the second simply as "the mother" of the Real Family, with all of the emotional distancing that implies and more (the relationship is difficult and often borders on hostile, even after the narrator comes better to understand the circumstances of the Real Family's mother's life and stops trying to fight her new circumstances). As the various and colorful members of the Real Family come into focus for her, then and only then are their names revealed, first her sister Adriana, just a little younger than she, then baby brother Giuseppe***, fun and disturbingly attractive eldest brother Vincenzo and another older brother, Sergio.****  All the kids share a bedroom full of rickety furniture, dirty bedclothes and many other signifiers of poverty; to the narrator's credit, she doesn't dwell on her disgust, as first she is just too shocked to register anything properly and by the time the shock has faded not only has her little sister latched on to her tightly (as the cover art depicts, the two share a narrow mattress and sleep head to toe, continuing the practice even after the narrator's guilt tripping Former Family buy them bunk beds, even though Adriana is a persistent bed wetter), but sister and the RF mother have thrust responsibility for a lot of baby Giuseppe's care on our narrator, who has been brought up with enough decently not to take out her dismay and disgust on a helpless infant.

Meanwhile, her relationship with Vincenzo, who is secretly the real man of the family, providing better for them with his odd jobs and shady dealings (about which more in a moment, and TW for some othering/racism when we get there) than the mostly absent father does, is constantly on the verge of becoming inappropriate, especially since he still sleeps in the kids' bedroom and does what young men do in the night, until Circumstances Intervene, just saving this book from developing a major ick factor, but it still had a minor one that some readers might find not so minor and that lies in the descriptions of the shady company Vincenzo keeps, called in this text not Roma but Gypsies, and pretty much every stereotype about them gets an airing here. I suspect this is deliberate, whether on the author's or the translator's part isn't clear, to convey our narrator's perception of the described people (her Former Father was a kind of policeman, and had a policeman's stereotypical tendency to stereotype others, and there is a minor educational story arc of our narrator taking baby steps toward unlearning the unconscious attitudes she picked up from him, but in the process, well, there's some casual othering some readers might not be willing to forgive in the service of a very minor arc in the novel).

I love books like this, that not only demand I empathize with the unfamiliar experiences and point of view of the character but also change my attitudes about the characters around her as her own do. A Girl Returned achieves this with what appears like effortlessness, but I suspect it was actually a lot of work. And it pays off.

*I never had it, but I happen to have done a pretty decent job of picking parents. Who are still married to each other after more than 50 years and were just cuddling on my sofa while we watched TV tonight. I know I'm astonishingly lucky and I don't take it for granted.
**(I'm not sure if this is a matter of accent or dialect but I suspect it is accent; I'm okay with not being sure because this means that author Donatella Di Pietrantonio and/or her translator into English, Ann Goldsmith, did not burden me with any attempt whatsoever to show me in dialogue how differently the Real Family and their neighbors speak from our narrator's Former Family. The narrator mentions a few times that they talk very differently, and that is fine. This is not poverty porn or armchair anthropology or anything like so tedious. There's much more interesting stuff going on.
***Interestingly, the kids born after her become people to her considerably faster than her older siblings or her biological mother and her husband (who, unless I misread, might not actually be the narrator's father but is at least Giuseppe's father?).
****Sergio never really emerges as a person and, to be honest, might not actually be a sibling; it wasn't clear to me but ultimately didn't matter.

Best Translated Book Nominees: Christos Iknonomou's GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA (translated by Karen Emmerich)

Blogger's note: this is my first read off the long list of books nominated for this year's Best Translated Book Award. I'm going to see how many of them I can read before the short list and eventual winner are announced. They all just sounded too interesting not to try out!

"Back then they sent people to the islands by force, now we come here on our own."

The four linked stories that comprise Christos Ikonomou's  Good Will Come From the Sea are set on a fictional Greek island that, like the rest of Greece (and the rest of the world), is still feeling the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, and of earthquakes that have been wrecking Athens. But that description, as bland as this book cover, doesn't begin to convey those impacts, which are not abstractly economical (though they are that, too) as much as they are very, very human, in the form of a new kind of migration pattern that proves the source of enough different kinds of agonizing tension to power many more than just these four excellent stories, and not just, as the pulled quote above conveys, because earlier in Greece's history the Aegean islands were where repressive governments sent uncooperative citizens to contemplate the error of their ways with a little help from jailers and torturers.

People who have lived on the island for generations witnessed that and let it form their society and grew accustomed to it, but now are suddenly having to deal with a new, semi-voluntary influx of people who, again, are just as Greek as they are, but because they come from Athens and grew up in higher socioeconomic classes above the natives' own, are referred to behind their backs and, in hostilities (which are many) to their faces as "Foreigners." The "Foreigners", in turn, refer to the natives as "Rats", perhaps alluding to the island's weird cave-riddled geography that the natives know intimately and the Athenians can barely navigate? If I'm being charitable here? Which nobody in these stories is, neither the Foreigners (not even, much, to each other) nor the Rats, all of whom are now trapped together by circumstances but none of whom are adjusting especially well.

All four stories are from the perspective of the in-migrants from Athens, who have left behind broken lives of relative privilege and prosperity and are still in shock but striving to rebuild in a new place... and finding it very, very difficult. Their prior values and cherished illusions are getting shown up as laughable and flimsy, they're facing real privation for the first time in their lives, and their support networks are disintegrated or diminished. They're still perservering, for now, but as each story opens, they're facing crises that may break them. And, I'll warn you right now, readers: don't come to these stories looking for happy endings or neat resolutions. Mysteries don't get solved. Resolutions may be fulfilled beyond the confines of a narrative but you don't get to see it.

But you do get to explore the interiority, and hidden resilience, of some very interesting characters as they struggle with the disappearance of loved ones, with vandalizing assaults on barely-started enterprises, with the question of the responsibility to act on knowledge they wish they didn't have about harm happening to a helpless other. As the protagonist of my favorite of the four, "Kill the German", a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs trying to blow up a sex shop and now uses mobility aids on an island not at all designed for his kind, observes to himself as he frets over the fate of a young girl pimped out by her family to a rich old man:

The world is constructed in such a way as to deprive each of us of the possibility of doing any personal good. No, that's not right. Let's take it from the top. Ready? Okay. The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We are all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else's affair.

We're all dealing with this right now especially, wherever we are in the world, eh? Only a lot of us have discovered that the government/social safety net/network of private charities we've always counted on to mitigate the sob stories the daily news brings us was never so robust as we thought, even in the free and prosperous West, and it maybe really is up to us to help each other out directly, even though we risk a lot in doing so.*

As we wring our hands at what the COVID-19 virus has done to and, more importantly, revealed about our world (though yeah, lots of us already knew from first-hand experience that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were very unevenly distributed), I feel like the characters, both Foreigners and Rats, from Ikonomou's stories would laugh at us, bitterly. Which is to say that these stories feel uncomfortably prophetic, especially for readers like me who live in remote places to which everybody else (*cough* Neil Gaiman *cough*) dream of or already have active plans for retreating, and have already seen the effects of decades in-migration by people who visited here once and decided to retire here but who are used to or demand "better" than what we have to offer, which is to say I was disposed to identify perhaps more with the Rats (none of whom really get developed as characters in these stories) than with the Foreigners, but Ikonomou is so damned good that he made me care about the Foreigners -- which is one of the big things that literature, that art, is for, isn't it?**

"If you're in need, if you are on the outside, you're a foreigner everywhere." another character observes. And your turn to be one might be next, is the not-so-subtle message here. So why not start being decent to one another now? Because here's the alternative, and it ain't pretty. 

So while these tales of people facing hostility, subterfuge, corruption, distrust, envy, sabotage, from people who are supposed to share the same culture as themselves, more or less, awaken empathy, they also are every bit as disturbing as any of, say, William Gibson's recent fictions of his post-Jackpot world.*** Passages observing the effect of long-term unemployment may soon come to feel a bit too familiar to a lot of people who have taken gainful work for granted , for instance. So I really can't decide if this is bad pandemic reading or good, but it's possibly the best pandemic reading? Because it is full of some sweet and amusing moments, too, like my favorite, which takes place in a new family-run taberna:

One of the ladies points at the light fixture on the ceiling. And the kid turns bright red and says no, no, no lamp, lamb, lamb, you know baaa, baaa. The old ladies start laughing and say okay okay and Petrus picks at the menus and comes over all in a huff and asks me who wrote the English menu.

And some frankly lovely prose, as when a man in search of his missing son (delivered into the employ of a shady local syndicate on his orders, no ifs ands or buts) pauses and observes the sea as he climbs to the top of the island's ridge to get a better look around: "The waves tipped with white like frothy eyebrows over the water's countless blind eyes" and wouldn't we all just kill to have sentences like that published under our names? And of course, how much of that is Ikonomou and how much is translator Karen Emmerich?

One bit that I think is mostly Emmerich comes as my paraplegic friend contemplates some old wisdom that I get from Jorge Luis Borges but think he probably got from Bishop Berkley or somebody, but phrased as succinctly and elegantly as I've yet seen in English: "Fathers and mirrors should be hated to an equal degree because they alone have the ability to make people multiply." Maybe it's really economical in the original Greek, too, but I'm thinking this is the translator's hand showing, gracefully.

So, as I said on Twitter the other day, if the rest of the books on the long list for Best Translated Book are anywhere near this good, I'm going to have an emotionally challenging but very satisfying set of reads ahead of me. Gimme!

*And, of course, in the U.S. and, it appears, the U.K. especially, we're also dealing with sizeable populations of people hell-bent on preventing us from helping each other, sometimes with the threat of deadly force.
**Not that my foreigners are going to be in quite the shape of these Athenian migrant-refugees, of course. I live in the Billionaire Wilderness.
***He seems to be buried in tweets whining to him that he predicted our current plight too damned well and maybe wasn't writing fiction but is some kind of pre-cog wizard. At least no one is mocking him for not foreseeing cellphones anymore?