“Noémi Lefebvre starts by setting out her menu, and it’s a hearty one. Although it is less than obvious where we should start, which element is meant as the main course, and what will round it off as our coffee and dessert.”
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Robin Moger
"Much of Iman Mersal’s book is mediated through different registers and genres: different writings. They might come by way of direct quotation, or be more subtly invoked: ghosts haunting the prose. As it happens, a great deal of this writing is in some way bad. What matters here is the way in which it is bad; making bad writing work can be harder than translating beautiful prose."
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Maureen Freely
“I must navigate Tezer’s stream-of-electroshock-consciousness. This is not in any way a language challenge. It is an existential crisis. It carries with it the full force of all that came before. It runs its current through all that follows.”
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Lucy Jones
“But Elisabeth’s tone wavers between grief and criticism; grief at losing Konrad and criticism because he’s sold out to capitalism.”
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Daniel Levin Becker
“No surprises? Well, perhaps a renewed sense of the power and complex majesty of this novel, its psychological acuity and attention to detail, its tautness in spite of its sprawl.”
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Daniel Levin Becker
“Everything in The Birthday Party is deliberate and precise, even its imprecision, even its curious word choices, even the long and tortuous sentences unbothered by conventional methods of delivering or sequencing information.”
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Daniel Levin Becker
“Haste suits The Birthday Party, which so often carries itself along with the propulsive momentum of thought, reading breathlessly even as it keeps dilating time to burrow into a moment, a memory, a perplexity, a silent wound.”
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Ros Schwartz
“All along, I’d had a niggling sense that something was amiss, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on what it was.”
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Kristen Gehrman
“In Dutch, leuk is a simple, everyday word that could be translated a variety of ways depending on the tone and context.”
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Chris Clarke
“Girod’s long sentence takes on the form of the desert itself, rising and falling, shifting with breath and wind, ever-changing but never changing.”
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Alice Whitmore
“When I wrote to Dimópulos to ask her what on earth was going in these passages, she very kindly, very patiently, explained the Quiniela code to me. And yet, understanding was only half the battle—I now had to find a way to translate these passages into English.”
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Julia Sanches
“In English, the whooping crane does not trumpet, just as, in other languages, roosters do not all cock-a-doodle-doo.”
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Lisa Dillman
“There are words misheard, misspelled, and misunderstood. All things typographical reinforce this thematically, but at the sentence level, so does word choice.”
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