opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

21 - 30 April 2025

21 April: French-American Foundation Translation Prize finalists | Ellmann's Joyce review
22 April: Translations from ... Vietnamese
23 April: Peter von Matt (1937-2025) | non/fictioN весна
24 April: Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist
25 April: IPAF | Rheingau Literatur Preis | Literary takedowns | Andrey Kurkov Q & A
26 April: New members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences | Khosrow and Shirin review
27 April: LA Times Book Prizes
28 April: Hsu-Tang Library | The Ways of Paradise review
29 April: RSL Ondaatje Prize shortlist | Salome at the Met
30 April: Jane Gardam (1928-2025) | René Char conference | Deutscher Sachbuchpreis finalists | NSW Literary Awards shortlists | The Innocent Libertine review

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       Jane Gardam (1928-2025)

       English author Jane Gardam has passed away; see, for example, the obituaries in The Guardian (by Lucy Knight) and The New York Times (presumably paywalled) (by Helen T. Verongos).

       She was a wonderful author, and several of her books are under review at the complete review:

• God on the Rocks
• Last Friends
• A Long Way From Verona
• The Man in the Wooden Hat
• Old Filth

       She's one of those authors where I try to hold some unread titles in reserve, for times when I got bogged down in or frustrated by what I'm reading, knowing that I can rely on whatever I pick of hers to satisfy me. (Other authors in this category are the very different Iris Murdoch, as well as Georges Simenon (though of course he published so much that there seems no danger of ever running out of works to fall back on).)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       René Char conference

       At Princeton they're holding a two-day conference, Resistance and its Futures: Translating the (Untranslatable) Wartime Poetry of René Char starting tomorrow.
       An impressive-looking programme.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Deutscher Sachbuchpreis finalists

       They've announced the eight finalists for this year's German Non-Fiction Prize, selected from 234 titles.
       The winner will be announced 17 June.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       NSW Literary Awards shortlists

       They've announced the shortlists for this year's NSW Literary Awards, "the richest and longest running state-based literary awards in Australia" -- unfortunately not in one single, simple, convenient list; ridiculously, you have to click on each category to see the finalists.
       The winners will be announced 19 May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Innocent Libertine review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of a new translation of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's The Innocent Libertine -- a 1909 'melding' of two of her earlier novellas --, just out from Dedalus.

       This is the third translation of this work -- suggesting also its continuing appeal. I've generally had trouble with Colette -- and this is the first of her works under review here -- but found this one quite winning.

       See also the manuscript of the first part, Minne; more here.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       RSL Ondaatje Prize shortlist

       The Royal Society of Literature has announced the shortlist for this year's RSL Ondaatje Prize, awarded: "for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place".
       The winner will be announced 15 May.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Salome at the Met

       A new production of Richard Strauss' opera, Salome, premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in New York tonight, with additional performances throughout May -- noteworthy also because it will receive a much larger audience than most recent Salome-productions, as there will also be a: 'Met Live in HD'-broadcast on 17 May, at thousands of venues.
       As always, if you're preparing for anything Salome (Strauss, Willde, or any of the many others ...), I'd suggest my novel, Salome in Graz has a lot to offer .....
       My protagonists would certainly be interested in this production, and I'm sure they'll be catching it at their local Met Opera in HD venue ....
       The Met production is directed by Claus Guth. Apparently, they've: "updated the action to the Victorian era" -- and this preview profile (presumably paywalled) by Javier C. Hernández in The New York Times suggests:

Inspired partly by Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, Guth has infused the opera, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s decadent retelling of the biblical story, with elements of a psychological thriller.

       And:

For his Salome, Guth said, he wanted to give the title character a sense of agency — to show that she’s “not just the puppet and product of her education.”

“It’s the biography of Salome — the development of a young person,” he said. “I was looking for something that everybody could connect to.”

       As to the take on the most problematic bit (so the main disputant in my novel) in the opera:

The Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the opera’s defining scenes, is often portrayed as a striptease. But in Guth’s version, the dance is a moment of reckoning, as seven versions of Salome, including van den Heever, portray the horrors of her upbringing.

       There's also a short but rather unrevealing video preview:



        Jay Goodwin's preview-article at the Met site, Gone Girl, has a few more photographs, and offers additional background, including the explanation that:

“This girl was raised like a puppet, completely in terror of the moods of her stepfather,” Guth says. “There are many indications that she was sexually abused by him, and when Herod says, ‘Dance for me,’ we sense that it is something he has said to her many times before.”

       So also then, regarding the Dance of the Seven Veils:

Using a sequence of progressively older Salome doubles that enter in turn, each veil becomes Salome at a different stage of childhood, being taught—or groomed—by Herod as she dances for him. It is an accusation of terrible force, made in front of her mother (sung by mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung), which makes clear that Herodias has enabled this all along by willfully looking away.

       (My novel's Marguerite would strongly disagree with much of this, holding that, in the Wilde and Strauss versions (and quite a few others), mom has been the guiding, controlling manipulator all along. Still, while she probably means it very differently, she'd probably go along with Guth's conclusion:

“Ultimately, Salome is a story of finding your own values,” he says. “It’s a proposal to be radical in the way you discover who you are, and this is only possible if you communicate with your dreams, with your fears, with the things underneath the rational daytime world. So this is something we should all be interested in.”

       Yannick Nézet-Séguin will be conducting, and Elza van den Heever plays the title role; see also the official programme (warning ! dreaded pdf format !), with additional notes.
       And at Vulture Jason P. Frank has the behind-the-scenes story of how they made the prop-head, in The Metropolitan Opera Brings Salome a New Head.

       (Updated - 1 May): Helpfully, Playbill collects links to the reviews, at What Did Reviews Say About Salome at The Met ?

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Hsu-Tang Library

       I've mentioned the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature -- and four titles from it are under review at the complete review -- and it's good to see more coverage of it, as Maddalena Poli profiles it, in: Premodern Chinese Literature Can Be Trendy Too at the Los Angeles Review of Books -- noting that:

the biggest conundrum that the series faces, I would say, is not one of editing but one of marketing and participation. Having “smartly scholarly and eminently readable” editions is a good start, but it remains just that if the work is not forcefully advertised.

       I'm not sure about advertising -- in whatever sense -- but, as I've mentioned, I am surprised this series hasn't gotten more attention and coverage (yet). But Poli is on the right track suggesting:

To the same end, the Hsu-Tang Library should invest into turning these hardcover editions into affordable paperbacks with running translations for those not acquainted with classical Chinese language and flood public libraries (and maybe even bookstores) with them to increase the chances that readers come across these texts serendipitously.

       Though I note that the hardcover editions are not outrageously expensive -- US$34.95, which is in the same range as the Loeb editions ($30.00 apiece). Still, these volumes certainly should be more readily ... discoverable. (And, yes, more bookstores should be stocking some of these as well -- surely some readers would pick them up and take a chance on them.)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       The Ways of Paradise review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Notes from a Lost Manuscript, Peter Cornell's 1987 work, The Ways of Paradise, recently out in English from Fitzcarraldo Editions.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       LA Times Book Prizes

       They've announced the winners of this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes -- with winners in thirteen catgories.
       Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet won the Fiction category.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       New members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

       The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced its new members -- nearly 250 in a wide variety of fields ("grouped in the thirty-one sections, organized within five classes").

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Khosrow and Shirin review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Nezami Ganjavi's Khosrow and Shirin, now out in a Penguin Classics edition (though apparently only in August in the UK) -- apparently the first translation of the work into English.

       That's four of five in Nizami's Khamseh (quintet) under review -- only one more to go.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       IPAF

       They've announced the winner of this year's International Prize for Arabic Fiction and it is صلاة القلق, by Mohamed Samir Nada; see, for example, Lauren Brown's report in The Bookseller.
       There were 124 submissions for this, the leading Arabic-language novel prize.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Rheingau Literatur Preis

       They've announced the winner of this year's Rheingau Literatur Preis, and it is Verzauberte Vorbestimmung by Kraft-author Jonas Lüscher; see also the Hanser foreign rights page.
       This prize is noteworthy because beside award money -- €11,100 -- the winner gets 111 bottles of wine.

       (Previous winners include Thomas Lehr's Nabokovs Katze (1999) and Peter Stamm's Agnes (2000).)

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Literary takedowns

       At Pioneer Works 'Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor talk to hannah baer about the dark art of literary takedowns', in I'd Like to Report a Murder.
       Always a fun subject.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Andrey Kurkov Q & A

       At Georgia Today they have a Q & A with Grey Bees-author Andrey Kurkov: “Putin has reached the upper limit of geopolitical machismo, and he will remain there until he dies”.
       Among his responses:

If you were granted an audience with Trump, would you have any pusuasive arguments to convince him not to stop aid to Ukraine ?

Trump is not a man of arguments, and I don’t think that any meeting of mine with him could be even minimally productive. I think that only good psychologists and psychoanalysts can calculate who from the Ukrainian side he needs to meet with and how to prepare that person so that they implant their ideas into Trump’s head and mouth. Because that’s exactly how it happens. An economic advisor implanted tariff war ideas into Trump. If someone from Ukraine can skillfully put reasonable words into Trump’s head that aid to Ukraine should not be stopped, then everything will work out.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Griffin Poetry Prize -- "the world's most generous award for a first edition single collection of poetry written in or translated into English", with the winner getting C$130,000. There are five books left in the running, selected from 578 submissions, of which 47 were translations; three of the finalists are works in translation.
       Among the finalists is Karen Leeder's translation of Selected Poems, 2005-2022 by Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running; see also the Seagull publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.co.uk.
       The winner will be announced 4 June.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Peter von Matt (1937-2025)

       Swiss critic and author Peter von Matt has passed away; see, for example, the swissinfo report.
       None of his work appears to be available in English.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       non/fictioN весна

       They're still having literary fairs in Russia, icnlduing recently non/fictioN весна, and at Realnoe Vremya Ekaterina Petrova reports on 'What the International Fair of Intellectual Literature non/fictioNvesna was like', in Not just Nonfic.
       Among the things on offer was an AI-co-written project, as:

Over the course of four days, the performance Inspiration Machine was held, in which the writer and cultural scientist Lev Naumov, together with a neural network, created a story called Silence and Other Forms of Life. A total of about 800 requests were sent, the result was 56,648 letters of text written in three days. In one of them, 26,000 characters were generated — a record for productivity even by Naumov's own standards. The story was not edited: according to the conditions of the experiment, the public was presented with the “raw” text, as it is.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Translations from ... Vietnamese

       At Arts hub Thuy On reports how New publisher aims to make Vietnamese literature the next translation trend, profiling Major Books; see also Kim Thoa's Major Books: The journey of bringing Vietnamese literature to the world at Tuoi Tre News

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       French-American Foundation Translation Prize finalists

       They announced the finalists for this year's French-American Foundation Translation Prize earlier this month; I had hoped they'd post the information at their site, but they still haven't gotten around to it .....
       The only title under review at the complete review is one of the Non-Fiction finalists, Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz's translation of Pascal Quignard's The Answer to Lord Chandos.
       The winners will be announced next month.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Ellmann's Joyce review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of The Biography of a Masterpiece and its Maker by Zachary Leader Ellmann's Joyce, one of the year's most eagerly-anticipated literary biographies, coming from Harvard University Press.
       (And, yes, that would be Richard Ellmann and his James Joyce.)

       Not much review-coverage of this one yet (publication date is 6 May), but it will be getting a lot.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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