–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow But more importantly, it is a love story-between the two central friends, yes, but also between each woman and herself. My Brilliant Friend is wise, it is nostalgic, it is wistful. They each are beautiful and compelling, but they take different paths. My Brilliant Friend introduces Lila and Elena, childhood friends, as the two bright starts in a depressed Italian neighborhood-precocious readers and writers. They are about women’s voices-what it means to be a woman and to have a voice as a woman-but also the ways women speak and not speak and who they sound like when they do or don’t. Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein in 2013, the Neapolitan novels (and My Brilliant Friend, particularly, since it broke the ground) are so perfectly, beautifully intuitive. Really you can’t go wrong by immersing yourself in the work of these two masterful artists. this novel edged out Erpenbeck’s more recent novel, Go, Went, Gone, also translated by Susan Bernofsky, for this list, but we also very much recommend that one. Elegiac, often astoundingly gorgeous, sometimes strikingly brutal, this is one of the most wonderful novels of any sort that you could hope to read. And also like To the Lighthouse, there are little human dramas within this grander and colder scheme, ones that secretly hook us in, however minor they seem, so that we are devastated when time passes, so that we mourn the ones we barely knew, for their fixations, their tragedies, their trying. As in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the house itself becomes the central, if mute, figure of the novel, and time itself its essential subject: what it does to us and to the world, how we remember, and how we don’t. The realities and their attendant characters-the gardener, the architect, the cloth manufacturer, the red army officer, the girl-are layered elegantly on top of one another, creating a sense of pattern, of fugue, more than of traditional narrative. People move in, through, and around the house, and time moves in these ways too-the novel is set during the second World War, and before, and after. The house and the lake and the woods are in Brandenburg, outside of Berlin. Susan Bernofsky, Visitation (2010)Īt the center of this extraordinary novel is a house on a lake, surrounded by woods. (We stuck to novels because that was the biggest group.) But in the end, considering that books in translation still make up only a tiny percentage of the books published in English every year, we figured it was worth highlighting some of our favorites. We have now reached the seventh list in our series: the best novels translated into and published in English between 20.Įach of these lists has presented its own set of problems with this one we worried about whether it was somehow condescending to books in translation to give them their own list (especially considering they do appear on many of the linked lists above). We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs, the best essay collections, and the best (other) nonfiction of the decade.
We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists.
#Monster hunter international employee handbook torrent full
So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website-though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task-in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We’ll take our silver linings where we can. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches.
0 kommentar(er)
