PW on a Couple Translations

This week’s fiction reviews at Publishers Weekly includes a couple reviews of translations worth noting.

They gave a starred review to Victor Serge’s The Unforgiving Years, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books, and is a title we’d very much like to review here. The PW reviewer summed it up by stating, “Serge remains sophisticated even during the book’s more noirish moments, and action sequences form an inseparable part of his hypnotic, prophetic vision.”

Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen is coming out from Dalkey Archive Press in November, and is a book I helped acquire, so I’m personally interested in seeing how this is received. It’s a big, ambitious book about physics, neo-Nazis, Holocaust stories, and fakes, and although the review is primarily positive, the reviewer has a few reservations.

The novel strains to tie together loose ends, but the big convoluted twists and outlandish ending may be part of the point. This is an ambitious, epic literary debut, and it’s not surprising that Verhaeghen, in trying to orchestrate a familiar epoch, falls short of Gravity’s Rainbow and Underworld.