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Historie Miłosne (2010)

by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak

review 1: امتیازش در حد ۲,۵ بود. باعث و بانیش هم داستان "اُدت معمولی" ـه. داستانی که ایده‌اش خوب بود ولی پردازش و پایانش افتضاح بود! داستان "غریبه" هم خیلی خوب نبود، ولی بقیه داستان‌ها خوب و قابل قبول بودند… شاید بعدا بهش ۲ ستاره دادم.
review 2: The reviews here are on opposite extremes: from the 1-2 stars (extremely annoying, does absolutely nothing, etc.) to the 4-5 stars (excellently written, highly recommended!, etc.) with a vast international audience who made reviews in English, Polish, French, German, Italian and perhaps a few other languages I don't recognize.This is not a full-length novel... more but a collection of eight novellas (or maybe eight short stories but longer than the usual, or eight novels much shorter than the usual). So not tied up in a coherent whole, it may easily happen that the disgust one feels after the first of these novellas which I found very close to mediocrity ("Wanda Winnipeg") could dictate the reader's mood in his reading of the remaining. Overall, I could pass judgement on it: simply narrated, straightforward, fast-paced, markedly plot-driven, bereft of any attempt towards sophistication or composition gimmickry. That could very well be a criticism. But it is not. Except for "Wanda Winnipeg" I enjoyed each and every story like I was a small boy tasting one exotic candy after another. I expected stories and was given delightful ones, each with distinct flavor and often with unexpected twists and turns. The last two I found the best, both of them having to do with the book's cover: you see here "Odette Toulemonde" (the 7th novella) happily reading her favorite author's (Balthazar Balsan's) "Silence of the Plain" but of course that's not the title the book carries. The eight was deemed to be more eye-catching, "The Most Beautiful Book in the World."This was originally written in French and it may be that some faults for the book's "imperfections" may have been brought about by poor translation. For a lot can be gained OR lost in translation. To illustrate, take a look at this poem:"This great toil: to go through things undonePlodding as if tied by foot and hand, Recalls the uncouth walking of the swan;Death, the loss of grip upon the shelfWhereon every day we used to stand,Mimes the anxious launching of himselfOn the floods where he is gently caught,Which, as if now blessedly at naught,Float aside beneath him, ring by ring;While he, infinitely sure and calm,Ever more of age and free of qualm,Deigns to fare upon them like a king."Then take a look at this one:"This clumsy living that moves lumberingas if in ropes through what is not donereminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.And to die, which is letting goof the ground we stand on and cling to every day,is like the swan when he nervously lets himself downinto the water, which receives him gailyand which flows joyfully underand after him, wave after wave,while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,is pleased to be carried, each minute more fully grown,more like a king, composed, farther and farther on."You'd think, at a cursory glance, that they are two poems. But no. They are just two different English (from the original German) translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Der Schwan" ("The Swan"), the first one by Walter Arndt and the second one by Robert Bly.Aside from the given possibility of the translation contributing negatively to this book, there is also a hint in one of the stories here which show that it may be indeed the case. I found it in "Odette Toulemonde" itself, the paragraph which reads:"When the Filipino maid found him lying there lifeless, it was not too late. The emergency services managed to revive him and then, after a few days under observation, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital."Now unless Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt really intended to write the next literary resurrection of the dead after Jesus Christ in French, I think this may be attributed to a faulty translation.Yet it is good if the dead can really come back to life. So happy Easter everyone. less

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