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by Breyten Breytenbach
April 6th & 7th in Boston; April 9th in NYC
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published March 2009
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When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return from university life to take over his brother’s role on the small family farm, resigning himself to spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow.’
The novel begins thirty years later with Helmer moving his invalid father upstairs to have him out of the way as he sparsely redecorates the downstairs, finally making it his own. Then one day Riet, the woman who had once been engaged to marry Helmer’s twin, appears and asks if she and her troubled eighteen-year-old son could come to live with them on the farm.
Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, The Twin is ultimately about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life that has resisted modernity, a world culturally apart yet laden with romantic longing.
A novel of restrained tenderness and laconic humor.
"—J.M. CoetzeeStealthy seductive story-telling that draws you into a world of silent rage and quite unexpected relationships. Compelling and convincing from beginning to end.
"—Tim Parks
Claus rages against the decay of the physical self while desire remains untamed. From the beginning, his poetry has been marked by an uncommon mix of intelligence and passion, given expression in a medium over which he has such light-fingered control that art becomes invisible.
"—J.M. CoetzeeWhile fully aware that such an honorable title can only be used in great exceptions in Flemish literature, I would call Wonder a masterpiece.
"—Paul de Wispelaere, Vlaamse Gids
Unai Elorriaga does away with the boundaries and coordinates of conventional literature and takes them elsewhere: to the surprising literary territory of a writer with no hang-ups.
"—Harkaitz CanoI read Unai Elorriaga’s latest novel almost without stopping to breathe. Breathlessly, yes, but not quickly, because Elorriaga's books are not the kind you read in two or three hours and put back on the shelf. It is a very good novel. Incredibly good.
"—Gorka Bereziartua, Eremulak.com
The greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.
"—Orhan PamukTanpinar's lyricism and resonant plot will leave U.S. readers wondering why they've had to wait so long to read this exquisite novel.
"—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Yet this is not a prisoner's book. It would be a crass injustice of underestimation and simplification if it is presented and received that way. It describes how the ordinary time-focus of a man's perceptions can been extraordinarily rearranged by a definitive experience… Prison irradiates this book with dreadful enlightenments; the dark and hidden places of the country from which the book arises are phophorescent with it.
"—Nadine Gordimer
Breytenbach's passionate desire to know and serve the truth, whatever it may be and whomever it might offend, is deeply admirable.
"—The Washington PostVoice Over is a short but affecting sequence, with a slightly experimental feel to it, its author trying to come to grips with the death of his friend and colleague through a variety of approaches. A beautiful little pocket-sized pamphlet-volume, it is well-worthwhile.
"—The Complete Review
Reading like the bastard child of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Tranquility is political and personal suffering distilled perfectly and transformed into dark, viscid beauty. It is among the most haunted, most honest, and most human novels I have ever read.
"—Brian EvensonBartis at times puts one in mind of Joyce, at others of Kafka, at others of Roth, yet ultimately eludes all comparison by the strength of his originality.
"—Arturo Mantecón, ForeWord
Laxness is a poet who writes at the edge of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot: He takes a Tolstoyan overview, he weaves in a Waugh-like humor: it is not possible to be unimpressed.
"—Daily TelegraphLaxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling.
"—Alice Munro
The strong, intimate voice of this gentle, canny narrator continues to stay with us long after we reach the end of The Waitress Was New—what an engrossing, captivating tale, in Jordan Stump’s sensitive translation.
"—Lydia DavisFor his U.S. debut, Fabre offers a poignantly funny, slender slice of a French waiter’s life...In Fabre’s patient, deliberative layering, the details of Pierre’s quotidian life assume an affecting solidity and significance.
"—Publishers Weekly
The Salt Smugglers
What an amiably digressive tale, à la Laurence Sterne! The Salt Smugglers leads off with an irresistible hunt for a rare book and continues full of high adventure, often involving collisions with an absurdly wrong-headed judicial system. Yet the narrator's tongue-in-cheek sincerity and his jibes at the government are startlingly modern. Richard Sieburth has rescued a lovely book from obscurity or perhaps even virtual oblivion.
"—Lydia DavisEvery intelligent English-speaking reader must be grateful to Richard Sieburth and Archipelago Books for rescuing from oblivion this gem of factual fiction, revealing a Nerval poised somewhere between the subversive Diderot and the vitriolic Voltaire. The Salt Smugglers now has pride of place in my library.
"—Alberto Manguel
Darwish is the premier poetic voice of the Palestinian people...lyrical, imagistic, plaintive, haunting, always passionate, and elegant—and never anything less than free—what he would dream for all his people.
"—Naomi Shihab Nye
Dreams and Stones is a startling, beautiful, powerful achievement. It calls the conventional genres of literature into question as its central image and metaphor, 'the tree of the world,' grows, spreads and deepens. It does away with the persistent superstition of humanity's distinction from 'nature.' The originality of the writing is not lessened by representing a family tree that includes Michaud, Kafka, Calvino, and Saramago. It is a work to welcome and return to, and the translation is vibrant and graceful.
"—W.S. MerwinDreams and Stones, by the Polish writer Magdalena Tulli, is a postmodernist masterpiece of lyrical prose that defies generic definition and is rife with paradox and metaphor.
"—Kirsten Lodge, Slavic and East European JournalHarlequin's Millions