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“... published, in Paris, in ‘the early Thirties’, according to its English translator, Michael Henry Heim. It appeared in the émigré journal Numbers and shortly thereafter as a book; fifty years of oblivion later, a copy turned up in a second-hand bookshop and was translated into French, bringing overdue fame to its ...”

“... What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind.’ Instantly, a person opens before us like a quick wound: probably a man (that slight vibration of a swagger), grandiose in aspiration but glued to a petty destiny, eccentric and possibly mad, a talker, rowdy with anecdote ...”

“... Kapo – in the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative ...”

“... like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book and give the memoir, fiction and essay a different feel. Ugrešić studied in Moscow ...”

“... There is always comedy in the ways in which we are impressed by a novel. It can either impress us (if, that is, it is one of the very good ones) with the sort of truths that Nietzsche, Kafka and Dostoevsky tell us, or with the truths that Tolstoy and Trollope tell us. To the first kind we respond with amazement and delight, awe even. ‘Of course that’s it! Of course that’s it!’ The second kind of truths are more sober, more laboriously constructed, more ultimately reassuring ...”

“... Many celebrated translators, like Gansel, carry on adding to their linguistic crane bag: Michael Henry Heim, who worked on slippery ironists (Milan Kundera, then writing in Czech, and Dubravka Ugrešić, then writing in Serbo-Croat, now known as Croatian), liked to acquire a new one every year or so and to get to grip with that language’s neglected ...”

“... Towards the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, convicted of war crimes: she had been a concentration camp guard, something he hadn’t known when she seduced him as a 15-year-old boy. None of the roles he saw played out in court appeals to him: ‘Prosecution seemed to me as grotesque a simplification as defence, and judging was the most grotesque oversimplification of all ...”

“... the copper mines in Mexico’. The richer they became, the less people liked it. Florette recalls Henry Hilton trying to ban ‘the Seligman Jews’ from his fine hotels in 1877. Their descendants know that New York society still associates the rough, uncouth origins of their wealth – ‘the dank dirt of mines, underground, filth’ – with their ...”