Books & Culture Corner: Telling Lies, Telling Stories
Lars Saabye Christensen's The Half Brother reveals imagination as escape.
Reviewed by Elissa Elliott | posted 6/01/2004 12:00AM
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Most novelists cannot rival Saabye Christensen's sensitive treatment of his flawed characters. Never do we detect an overbearing, omniscient authorial presence. The characters' voices and actions speak for themselves. But Saabye Christensen isn't the only one who deserves credit. This behemoth of a book must have been lovingly translated. For that, we have Kenneth Steven to thank. He writes in a translator's note: "All translation is a compromise; there are inevitable losses in bringing a richly woven literary text from its native tongue. It is not the thousands of words that pose the difficulty, it is the single words—the tiny words that have been chosen by the author for their resonance, for their resemblance to other words in the language, their interplay with different elements of the text."
Rightly said. In the end, there are not enough words, not enough precise ones, to translate all the secrets of our lives.
Elissa Elliott is writer in Rochester, Minnesota.
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Related Elsewhere:
The Half Brother is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.
Most reviews of the English translation of The Half Brother have so far appeared in the U.K. The book has been reviewed in The Telegraph, The Guardian, and twice in The Independent. It has also been reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Arcade Publishing's site has a bit of information, but not much, on the book.
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