Book Tamers| book reviews

A book’s normal course in a publishing house should be the following: translator- editor- translator- imprimatur (the last one being also a person, who checks the book for mistakes one last time before printing). Even though there might be people to say that the lack of spelling mistakes is not the most important thing in a book (and they would be right), this time I had the feeling that the book jumped from the translator directly into the printing house.

Even from the very beginning I came up against phrases that had little meaning because of their awkward construction. Other problems were the sequence of tenses and words that required another translation than the one given, as it was a matter of context. A literal translation of some sentences from Romanian would sound like this: “After that, when the rain had stopped, people are dancing noisily in a horrible place.” I haven’t read the English version of the book, but it is clear to me that part of its value, if any, was lost in translation.

The subject appears promising in the beginning: a female protagonist wakes up in the middle of a bar without knowing where she is or why she is there, as a consequence of memory losses which she claims she frequently experiences. However, the construction of the first person narrative is discouraging but out of a few foreign opinions I understand that this construction is the author’s innovation, the reason she is so appreciated. I find it hard to believe, though, that out oh her original words can be understood as little as from the translation.

Unfortunately, as I turned the pages, I realized that the plot is not as attractive as i thought. Why? Because almost the whole 300 pages are an interior monologue in which Hannah describes her alcoholism, frustrations, her failures, drunkenness and at times the dates with the one who appears to be her soul mate. Nothing extraordinary happens to her.

Two hundred pages of constant drunkenness, the purpose of which I failed to understand. What is the author’s actual pursue? What did she want to prove? Behind the minute introspection there doesn’t seem to lie anything. I don’t think that the intention was to help readers understand alcoholics. The protagonist does nothing to grow in the eyes of the readers, her degradation even increases with every page.

”I have no children, no hobby and I don’t have any plan, I can’t even sing anymore, but I can still rely on my soul, the recording of my sins. My work of a life-time. I am no stranger to lies, secrets and blasphemies, I keep my Sundays busy and filthy, I fight with God and sometimes I resolve to violence and mean forms of theft.”

Written by Raluca