Guadalajara by Quim Monzó

Susan Fortes Waiting for Robert Capa Harper Perennial Set during the Spanish Civil War, this highly acclaimed novel tells the true love story between photojournalists Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. The two figures meet in Paris, fall in love, and decide to completely alter their true identities in order to be successful with their work. Jay Parini has hailed the book as an “intensely poetical novel,” and Michael Mann is currently turning the story into a film. Alex Epstein Lunar Savings Time Clockroot Books Thanks to the rise of Internet social media, microfiction is becoming more and more popular. In his newest translated short-story collection, Epstein has compiled nearly one hundred of his “flash fiction” pieces. Though the stories are quite short—most are constructed in less than a page—they lack neither depth nor substance. Epstein’s stories move through such themes as humor, love, death, memory, and beauty, each within the smallest space possible. Nota Bene between people who shape world history in an often anonymous capacity. Readers benefit from Ghosh’s capacity to assess the costs and gains of such globalization. As a character remarks toward the novel’s end, “Flowers and opium, opium and flowers! It is odd to think that [Canton], which has absorbed so much of the world’s evil, has given . . . so much beauty [in] the flowers it has sent out into the world: chrysanthemums, peonies, tiger lilies, wisteria, rhododendrons . . .” Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Bertrand de la Peine. Bande-son. Paris. Minuit. 2011. isbn 9782707321411 Bande-son is a second novel (preceded by Les Hémisphères de Magdebourg, which appeared in 2009), and second novels are often difficult hurdles to clear. Bertrand de la Peine’s leap is seemingly effortless, however; he writes with precision, grace, and considerable wit. His style is characterized by that lightness of touch Italo Calvino praised in his Six Memos for the New Millennium. The characters that he creates are pleasingly off-kilter , and the situations that he imagines are gently absurdist ones. Sven Langhens has a finely tuned ear, and he is bent on hearing sounds that other people miss: a snail munching on a lettuce leaf, lizards running over rocks, crocuses blooming in the springtime sun, a spider devouring a fly. Originally a painter, it occurs to Sven that sounds in the natural world constitute a rich palette for an artist . His recordings have been broadly acknowledged, and have established him as the premier “bioacoustician” of his generation. Electing residence in the south of France, as Van Gogh had done before him, Sven finds a soundscape there much to his liking. His wife, Gerda, appreciates it less, however, and returns to their native Copenhagen alone, though sometimes they still meet in Paris for a dirty weekend. When circumstances take him to rural Ireland, on the trail of Rudolf Erich Raspe, the author of The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (and quite possibly an ancestor of his), Sven is launched headlong into another quest. Its object is that Holy Grail of bioacousticians, the “singstein ,” or singing stone—and thereby hangs a tale. Both in his strategy of character and in his strategy of event, one might be tempted to compare Bertrand de la Peine to Christian Oster, his stablemate at the Éditions de Minuit . Bande-son should position him as a writer who deserves our attention, one who (it is reasonable to expect) will produce in years to come novels that intrigue and delight. And even, perhaps, ones that sing. Warren Motte University of Colorado Quim Monzó. Guadalajara. Peter Bush, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2011. isbn 9781934824191 In “Family Life,” the opening story to Quim Monzó’s newly translated collection of stories, a little boy—fearing a ritual dismemberment—pleads to his father that he doesn’t want his finger chopped off. “I want to be normal,” the scared boy says, “like the other kids at school,” to which his father replies, “Being normal has nothing to do with having one finger more or less.” This line sets the tone for January–February 2012 | 63 Monzó’s Guadalajara, brilliantly translated by Peter Bush: a normal world has nothing to do with the normal

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