My latest translation — that is, the latest to be published as a book — got a review in the New York Times. And got a picture of the cover, too! Personally, I think the review could have been a little better. And maybe could have mentioned the translator? Well, of course that’s what the translator would like! Anyway, here it is:
Simone
By Eduardo Lalo; translated by David Frye
159 pages. The University of Chicago Press. $17.
A dispirited writer in Puerto Rico receives a series of mysterious notes from a stranger in “Simone,” which won the lucrative Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize for a Spanish-language work in 2013. The book is split almost exactly in half, before and after the letter-writer’s identity is revealed to us and to the narrator. What results is a split reading experience. The first half of “Simone” is grounded in a convincing existential weariness (“Geography and travel were infinitely less real than my feeling alone”) and genuine psychological suspense. Once the stranger is known — a Chinese woman emotionally damaged by her past who now works six days a week at a local restaurant — the pair’s erotically charged relationship proves less interesting than the previous mystery, and the prose describing their desires grows occasionally purple.
And here’s the link: Review: New Books.
