Ferrante inspires that rare thing, rarer still among contemporary writers: the compulsion to read everything she’s ever published. (Such are the privileges of judging for BTBA you have to read the 25 titles selected to this list, and thereby profit directly from the enthusiasms of others.) I devoured it whole, then did the same to The Story of a New Name. I discovered volume 2 of the Neapolitan Novels last spring when it made our longlist. There’s no denying the force of Ferrante’s writing. It’s preceded by a concise introduction by Humphrey Davies, whose translation of Shidyaq remains among the most gymnastic and resourceful amongst this year’s competition.Įlena Ferrante: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, trans.

This chapter from volume three appeared in the 2014 translation issue of London’s The White Review. It should come as no surprise that the other two are now contenders as well. I wrote about the charms of this novel last winter, when the first two volumes were eligible for the prize. John Darnielle had Vertical Motion in mind when he pointed to the “grammar of dreams” that underpins that volume of stories: “situations in which a general meowing sound throughout a hospital provokes not the question ‘what’s going on?’ but instead ‘where are the catmen hiding?’” A similar grammar is present in The Last Lover, her most ambitious-and perhaps most radical-novel to date.įaris al-Shidyaq: Leg over Leg volume 3, trans. As in much of Can Xue’s fiction, the prose is comic and disturbing at one and the same time. And they do so unpredictably, in ways that surprise and delight. How refreshing it is to encounter fiction that so resolutely disregards conventions of character and plot! The protagonists of this book do not develop-they transform, as do their relationships to one another, from one scene to the next.

The strangest and by far most original work I read this summer was Can Xue’s The Last Lover. from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Yale/Margellos Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series.Ĭan Xue: The Last Lover, trans.

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