You could read this book in an hour. You could think about it for the rest of your life.
An evocative conversation between the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and his translator.
Coetzee has long been admired for his sinewy prose, his uncompromising humanism, and his immense sensitivity to the nuances of language in everyday life. This short book records a dialogue between Coetzee and his Spanish translator, Dimópulos, in which they range widely over such questions as these: Does language represent the world, or does it create that world? If we grow up multilingual, do we see the world in different ways? How do languages with grammatical gender organize the world? Should we try to neutralize gender in our own writing and speaking? The stimulus for the dialogue is the publication of Coetzee’s novel, The Pole. That book told the story of an elderly Polish pianist who has a relationship with a Spanish woman whom he meets as his host at a concert in Spain. Coetzee wanted the book to convey a linguistic as well as a musical world. His idea was to have the book, originally written in English, published first in Spanish and then, to use the Spanish version as the base text for all future translations (including the published English version). This move prompts the conversation about how English-language publishing largely controls world literature. More books, they note, are translated from English into other languages than the reverse—a fact they attribute to the Anglo-American resistance to what’s going on in the world outside their purview. They also make the point that world literature splits not just into English and non-English, but into north and south. The Southern Hemisphere, they intuit, lives among languages differently from the Northern. These issues will compel many American readers to reassess the politics of translation and their own literary and linguistic imperialism. Fans of Coetzee will also find a refreshing colloquialism to this book and a respite from his recent judgmentalism about animal rights, Western power, and public institutions.
You could read this book in an hour. You could think about it for the rest of your life.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781324096450
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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