One of the pleasures of AWP - more on this in a later post - was meeting readers and reviewers and booksellers in the flesh whom we've corresponded with, in some cases, for many years. This included Anca Szilagyi, who offered up this brief review of one of our most recent translation series titles, Mihail Sebastian's The Accident, in the current issue of Shenandoah. Here's a taste:
The Accident glimpses a lost world of inter-war, pre-Communist Romania, and it also delicately foreshadows the war. Celebratory imagery is often eerily militaristic, such as when popping champagne corks are described as “detonation” and droves of holiday skiers, dressed in similar ski suits and piled into special skiers’ train cars, are compared to troops.
Even setting historical background aside, The Accident remains a powerful work of art. Descriptions of landscape are lush (“Clouds flowed down towards Poiana like buoyant lava”), encounters with local fauna glint with incandescent magic, and the reader is intimately engaged with Nora and Paul – the undulations of their fears and their doubts, their desires and, however ephemeral, their exaltations.
For the full review please go
here.
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