John Taylor just published a piece on Michon’s translation in English for The Arts Fuse. On Michon’s style:

Offering the long view, as would a novel, of life as a concatenation of a great number of events between birth and death would not suit [Michon’s] stylistic inclinations. Instead, he focuses on a handful of scenes and musters his exceptional style — arguably, closer to the prose poem than to narrative prose — in an attempt to make them at once palpable and emblematic. Nothing is diluted; these are heady, compassionate distillations — like cognac.

Read the whole review here.

Martin Riker has just reviewed Mircea Cărtărescu‘s Blinding, translated by Sean Cotter, for the London Review of Books, as well as his previous book, Nostalgia (New Directions). Riker compares the two:

Blinding can seem like a surprising next step after Nostalgia, whatever stylistic qualities the two books may share. Nostalgia describes a multiple, uncertain, open-ended world while Blinding expands inward, plumbing the infinite depths of an individual imagination. It’s as though Cărtărescu has chosen to withdraw from any topical literary or cultural conversation, and that rather than attempting to stitch together a fragmented contemporary reality, he is returning to a time that never actually existed, an imaginary time when all genres were one genre and all discourses one discourse, before everything broke into parts.

Read the full review here.

 

P.T Smith thoughtfully reviews Wiesław Myśliwski’s A Treatise on Shelling Beans in Issue 35 of Quarterly Conversation. 

A man enters a house and asks to buy some beans, but we aren’t given his question, only the response: humble surprise from the narrator and an invitation inside. This modesty, though it remains at the core of the narrator throughout, is quickly overwhelmed when his questions, his welcoming explanations, flow into an effort to tell his whole life story, from his childhood in Poland during World War II to his current life as an aging caretaker of cabins by a lake. During it all, the narrator responds to questions from the listener, but we never hear this strange man’s voice, only the responses. Each question becomes a starting point for another story.