Friday Catalogs: Archipelago Books

Just when Francois Monti’s piece on Eric Chevillard has got me wondering about contemporary French literature, I see that Archipelago Press is publishing Small Lives by Pierre Michon (April, trans. Jody Gladding and Elizabeth DeShays). The catalog describes it as:

In Small Lives, Michon explores the act of writing through the intimate portraits of eight interconnected characters. In this evocative poetic narrative, the quest to breathe life into the stories of these individuals becomes an exploration of the author’s own voice.

I’m curious about what seems like a metafictional twist to these stories, and also, so far as "poetic narratives" go, the French seem to do them well.

One cannot help but be intrigued by Hyperion (April, Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Ross Benjamin), a 200-year-old epistolary novel by a German Romantic about a Greek hermit and a German friend that won the approval of Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin.

I wonder if the translator too liberties with the title of Plants Don’t Drink Coffee (August, Unai Elorriaga, trans. Amaia Gabantxo). Either way, it’s a great title, and it’s gotten me interested in the Basque tale of four crisscrossing lives. So does El Mundo’s gloss on Elorriaga—"Elorriaga seeks to explain reality outside conventional lines, he doesn’t avoid it"—which has me thinking of Witch Grass by Queneau.

I’m not entirely sure about Mafeking Road (May 2008, Herman Charles Bosman). On the one hand, it would be good to read a voice out of South Africa besides Coetzee and Gordimer, but on the other hand, it’s difficult to get a read of this book from the catalog copy.

Likewise with A Mind at Peace (July, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, trans. Erdag Goknar). This novel about the Westernizing Turkey of the 1920s and ’30s sounds interesting, but I don’t know enough about what kind of writer Tanpinar is to be sure.

One last note. Though it’s a bit early to mention it, Archipelago will be publishing Halldór Laxness’s first novel, The Great Weaver from Kashmir in October.