World Books Review: Visitation — Difficulty for Difficulty’s Sake?

That Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Visitation, is ambitious is unmistakable, for it is undeniably difficult and precisely crafted. Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, who suggested that a difficult world as ours calls for a difficult literature, I think it a moot point as to whether the novel ultimately succeeds in its being difficult. Is it really difficult for difficulty’s sake? After finishing this novel I have to admit my own ambivalence, not based on, admittedly, its philosophical import, but because of the way it reads.

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World Books Review: Start Making Sense

The prolific Yoko Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

World Books #28: Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky

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Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky talks to World Books Editor Bill Marx about “The Tanners,” an early work of fiction by the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a marginalized genius admired by J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and W. G. Sebald. She also reads an excerpt from her translation, the first in English, of the 1907 novel.