Listen up
To the editors:
As a devoted audiobook listener of literary fiction, I am so disappointed that your audiobook reviews are still about non-fiction titles. Is there a reason for this? If you’ve had a fiction column that I missed, my apologies, but it would be a rarity. The most recent audiobook reviews (March 13) are more non-fiction.
A great artist can bring a great book to life more beautifully than reading on the page. To wit: Listening to Juliet Stevenson reading “Middlemarch” is one of the aesthetic highlights of my life. Recent great audio of new novels include “The Lincoln Highway” and “Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
I am always looking for good fiction audio and would appreciate your suggestions.
Anna Belle Kaufman
Sevastopol, California.
Translations are stuck
To the editors:
Regarding Pankaj Mishra’s By the Book interview (March 6): As an exception to Mishra’s comment that almost no reader of English knows the novel “In Diamond Square” by Mercè Rodoreda, I was preparing for my first trip to Barcelona in 2019 by searching for a book translated from Catalan, and happened to come across her book “The Time of the Doves”, in which the main character is called “little pigeon”. When I found another part of Rodoreda’s title “In Diamond Square” on the library shelf, I also started that novel, and was surprised to find that it was the same story in a different translation, with the name of the birds she wants. raising them as ‘pigeon’, and the woman’s nickname changed to ‘Pidgey’. I once lived in a neighborhood that was teeming with pigeons and that conjured up a very different, less lovely image in my head. What a difference make a translator! But in either case, this is a wonderful novel, especially relevant in today’s international context. Diamond Square in Barcelona houses a life-size statue of the protagonist and her birds, as well as a wall plaque honoring the author. Both the book as the city site are well worth a visit.
Marilyn J. Boxer
Kensington, California.
Nightmares and black hearts
To the editors:
In her By the Book interview (March 13), Karen Joy Fowler endorses a strategy of inviting “authors who were not recognized in their lifetime” to dinner, to cheer them up by letting them know “how good they are now.” to stand. One of the writers she dreams of is Franz Kafka. But Kafka’s famous request to burn all his work; the widespread distribution and celebration of Kafka’s writings is the result of his friend expressly ignoring his wishes. It seems rather cruel to bring Kafka back to life to let him know that his nightmare has come true. I say let him sleep.
Sarah Aintelope
Irvine, California.
To the editors:
I’m excited to see Fowler read “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” to her grandson. I urge her to continue on to ‘Black Hearts in Battersea’ as she has not yet met the formidable Dido Twite.
Mary Harriman
Milwaukee
Double standards
To the editors:
Walter Kirn, author of “Blood Will Out,” certainly seemed to be looking for blood in his review of Heather Havrilesky’s “Foreverland” (March 6). The chauvinistic tone with which he supports the author’s husband is unpleasant from the start (“a marriage between a neurotic perfectionist and a formidably patient man”). Kirn admits, “I only know my own marriage,” but he prefers to keep it “secret.” (This is interesting, since his memoir is about a failed marriage and befriending a sociopathic killer.) I say Havrilesky is brave to share struggles that mirror many marriages, but that most of us are afraid to expose because we want the world to see our relationships as blissful. If a reviewer wants to discuss the writing, fine, but don’t stab the author to watch her bleed happily.
Donna Marie Merritt
Watertown, Kon.
Correction
A May 10, 2020 review of Cho Nam-Joo’s novel “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982” erroneously referenced the book’s protagonist, Jiyoung. She has a daughter, not a son. This correction has been delayed because the error was only recently brought to the attention of the editors.