And yes, eventually I did find the nerve. He didn’t know, but he did know Saer, who lived in Paris, and he gave me his number. So I asked the prof if there was an English translation. Having read it, having had my frozen sea axed, I wanted all my friends back home to read it. For a class at Censier, I happened to read the French translation of El Limonero real, a masterpiece by the great Argentine novelist, Juan José Saer. In another review, written just after the first of the year, I recalled one instance when this did happen to me, back in the eighties, back when I was a student in Paris. Or you would.Īctually, you may have already heard me talk about all this, not long ago. You’d never seen anything like it, even though, in some sense, you’d lived it. Yet it is astonishing, nothing could have possibly prepared you for it, not before you found it on the page. But don’t try telling your friends-they’ll listen, but they’re not likely to understand, and it probably wouldn’t happen for them anyway, not like it has for you. The connection between life and literature, when it happens, is electric, and it sings the body. I like this quote on several levels, but mainly because in my experience it’s true. Every reader deserves to be astonished by the sudden interplay between his days and the pages of a book." You can’t book such appointments in advance, nor can you recommend them to others. "For those who stumble into a serendipitous reciprocity between life and reading, literature works at the level of nerve fibers. But then, I would think that, since I translate him. Who’s to say just what it is that inspires a reader? To my mind, the writer who answers this question with the most force and clarity is Erri De Luca.
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