The Interpreter

by Diego Marani, Judith Landry (Translator)

'The Interpreter isn't merely the sequel to New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the it is a singular and deeply felt thesis, a warped manifesto of sorts, derived from a career spent immersed in languages. For Marani is up to his old tricks. Like in its predecessors, the novel comes dripping in satire, but this time of a more avowedly self reflexive nature... A primordial, universal language is the trick, and it is this which, and it is this with which Marani's interpreter, the shape-shifter at the heart of this masked ball of a novel, purports to have 'infected' Felix. His 'incomprehensible blather' might in fact be 'the ancient language of Eden, the one in which the serpent spoke to Adam'. Marani's ideas are typically far-reaching and provocative.' Thea Lenarduzzi in The Times Literary Supplement 'This is more of a romp than the other two novels, more comedic, albeit a very dark kind of comedy; part investigation into the properties of language, part thriller. The only lead Bellamy has is a list of seemingly random Vancouver, San Diego, Papeete, Vladivostok, Odessa … At one point he is sent to a sinister therapeutic institution, where patients are taught languages unknown to them in order to address their problems (Bellamy is assigned Romanian. Each language has its own therapeutic effect, but “English is the language of cowards and queers,” says an inmate angrily at one point, which is certainly a new way of looking at it). When we find out what links the list of cities together we realise that we have, in a most enjoyable way, been subject to a kind of superior shaggy dog story. Marani understands the appeal of the idea of the primordial language, but knows well enough that it is a Snark, a chimera, which is why the novel ends the way it does, why it is deliberately not as haunting as Grammar and Vostyachs, and also why Marani says this is the last time he’ll address the subject in fiction. It is excellently translated by Judith Landry, who I hope is not suffering like Marani’s characters.' Nick Lezard's Choice in The Guardian

Genres: Fiction

217 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Diego Marani works as a senior linguist for the European Union in Brussels.
Every week he writes a column for a Swiss newspaper in Europanto, a language he has invented. He also published a collection of short stories in Europanto, in France.
In Italian he has published six novels, the most recent being l'Amico della Donna.

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a crazy postmodern mashup of styles. It is a picaresque comic nightmare story, but it is the kind of nightmare that could only be conceived by a professional linguist. Like Marani's earlier novels New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs it starts with a linguistic idea and develops a fantasy around it.

The narrator of this one is a bureaucrat in charge of a simultaneous translation service. One of his interpreters is reported to be going crazy, his translations breaking down into primitive animal noises. The narrator meets the interpreter, who believes that these noises are part of an innate pre-human universal language, and he is determined to study it.

This is just the starting point of a weird journey, full of dreamlike logical jumps, in which the narrator develops the same symptoms, goes to a bizarre language clinic in which the "therapy" consists of immersion in the strangest languages imaginable, and it then turns into a quest/conspiracy thriller.

A very readable and memorable book, but like The Last of the Vostyachs, I felt it got rather too silly in places.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Interpreter is the ninth novel by Italian newspaper columnist, translator and novelist, Diego Marani, and the fourth to be published in English. Despite the fact that he doesn’t actually like or trust interpreters, Felix Bellamy is getting settled into his new administrative job as Director of the Interpreters and Conferences Department in Geneva, even if his dedication in the form of overtime puts him at odds with his wife, Irene.

A demand from Gunther Stauber, Director of Translation and Interpreting, that he suspend one of the interpreters, a man subject to unpredictable fits of whistling, hissing and clicking, as unfit to carry out his duties, sees Felix reluctantly complying. But the man in question is determined not to let the matter lie, claiming to be on the verge of discovering the secret language of the earth itself, and needing to participate in simultaneous translation sessions to gain mastery of it.

Meanwhile, Irene has decided to leave him, but most alarming for Felix is that he suddenly finds himself plagued by the same uncontrollable fits as the man whose fate he has just sealed, causing him to seek out the neurologist who diagnosed the Interpreter. How does this mild-mannered functionary end up on the run from the law, committing armed robberies and wanted for murder?

Once again, Marani gives the reader a clever plot with plenty of twists and turns to keep everyone guessing, a hefty dose of absurdity, and quite a few laugh-out-loud moments. He somehow manages to include antique furniture, narwhals, an organ harvest racket, a mysterious list of cities, a very unusual clinic, dolphins, long-distance truckers, a very different sort of philanthropist, a cruise ship and quite a lot of dead bodies.

He also gives the reader some delightful descriptive prose: “…they formed small groups of wildly gesticulating, wild-eyed individuals, endlessly prattling, leaping from one language to another like acrobats, sometimes prone to fitful movements, reminiscent of those made for no apparent reason by a fish or a bird….they had a horror of silence; they seemed to stiffen in alarm whenever they sensed that it was about to descend upon them. They fended it off with an animal instinct, clustering in noisy packs”

Flawlessly translated by Judith Landry, this is a marvellous novel that is bound to be enjoyed by readers who appreciate the importance of language, identity and existence. Interesting, funny and highly original.

[Joan Kerr · Rating 2 out of 5]

It doesn't reflect well on Marani’s publishers and editors (Text in my copy, but the same blurb is repeated on the Penguin Books Australia site) that there’s a double error in the book’s blurb that describes the interpreter of the title as “Gunther Stauber, head of Translating and Interpreting”. The interpreter is not Gunther Stauber, nor is he head of Translating and Interpreting. It is the narrator who directs the department, and Gunther Stauber is head of the German section. We are never told the interpreter’s name: he is only referred to as “the interpreter” and in fact it's part of Marani’s whole theme that he has no name, and not even a consistent physical description.

"I paused to look at the photographs….In each one he looked like a different man". (20)

A woman obsessed with the interpreter after hearing him simultaneously translate foreign films, writes: "You cannot be anyone but Pyotr, the Russian in the film the other evening…Or perhaps you are Snorri, the Viking pirate from last Sunday’s show?...On second thoughts you might be Yamada, the Japanese nihilist…." (63)

This isn't just a pedantic quibble: quite apart from the important fact that the interpreter is intended to be nameless and faceless (and yes, he could be any of those three and myriad others), there’s a lengthy interview early in the book between the narrator and Stauber discussing the interpreter’s bizarre behaviour, and a very dramatic encounter between Stauber and the interpreter midway through the book. I wonder if the inattentiveness of the blurb-writer reflects my feeling that Marani is making it up as he goes along.

"The Interpreter" is the third of three books published in Italian very close together: "New Finnish Grammar in 2000", "The Last of the Vostyachs" in 2002 and this one in 2004. All of them deal with Marani’s fascination with the relationship between languages and individual or cultural identity, with what communication, at its heart, really is, and with the idea that there might be, like the source of the Nile, a universal mother tongue buried deep in all of us under layers and layers of other languages. In this sense all languages can be seen as “translations” of this ur-language. Add the multi-reflecting mirrors of interpretation and translation into other languages and we’re wandering in a Kafkaesque construction. Looking at the three books together, you can see that there is a trajectory: in the first book we have a hero who has no words and no memory, in the second we have a hero who is the last speaker of an ur-language and who ends up finding a sort of audience for this lost language by working on a cruise ship as a curiosity, and in the third we have a person who speaks many languages and is trying to strip himself back to the one universal mother language. I won't tell you where he ends up, but it’s definitely more of a whimper than a bang.

Am I being fanciful to see echoes of Frankenstein in this? "it was then, with my own eyes and my own ears – I swear to God – that I witnessed the ghastly scene of that man’s metamorphosis, one in which all the awful power of creation was at work" (38)

The hero, the interpreter, has become a monster and leaves a trail of wreckage behind him just as Frankenstein’s monster does. And he draws the narrator into this mad rampage. Very briefly, the story deals with an interpreter who begins to behave weirdly, babbling meaningless words or snatches of the wrong languages when translating, and progressing from that to producing long series of clicks, whistles, groans and rumblings instead of words. Challenged, he claims to be working his way towards "the ancient language of Eden, the one in which the serpent spoke to Adam!" (37) He is dismissed, and disappears; then the narrator finds the same grotesqueries appearing in his own speech, as if he has been infected. He sets off on a quest to cure himself, and then to track down the interpreter and get to the heart of the mystery. The quest spins more and more out of control and this sedate bureaucrat finds himself committing all sorts of crimes and getting mixed up in a caricatured criminal underworld.

Marani, it seems, in this third book is casting a satirical eye on the dream of the ur-language, just as he does on the profession of interpreters (a swarm of ranters) and psychotherapy – the narrator’s therapist offers this therapy for "linguistic dissociation” :

"we would have to subject you to a deeply alienating and, how can I put it, exotic linguistic soaking, with some sessions of Tungusic and Inuit to lure your ego out and oblige it to face up to the trauma it is suffering. Occasionally we might even have to have resource to dead languages…" (53)

There’s some lively writing, some fun and some intriguing episodes, but the whole thing is rather unconvincingly hung on a linguistic theme that’s already been worked out in the earlier two books, and Marani really doesn't bring any more to it. And the book just doesn’t cohere as those two did. The links between the various escapades are plucked out of the air and it’s hard to see why certain characters even exist (the wealthy Klaus Burke, for example, towards the end of the book). What is the significance, if any, of the fact that the narrator has the same name, Felix Bellamy, as the man who wrote a gigantic book about Arthurian legend and the mythical forest Broceliande?

I’ve read that Marani has said he won't be writing any more books on this theme, and that’s a good thing. He’s written it out. "God's Dog", set in a future in which Italy is a theocracy controlled by a ruthless Vatican, came out in English in 2012. There are at least two more novels as yet untranslated.

[Text Publishing · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Interpreter is a book for linguaphiles everywhere. We love what reviewers are saying about it:

‘A marvellous novel that is bound to be enjoyed by readers who appreciate the importance of language, identity and existence. Interesting, funny and highly original.'
BookMooch

‘The energy and momentum of the book, translated into English by Judith Landry, makes The Interpreter an enjoyable read rich with insight into how languages shape our lives and in the first half of the book, a provocative and curious cast of side characters.’
Daily Review

'A mesmeric novel about communication.'
Saturday Paper

‘A great read…Playful and deliberately irreverent…[The Interpreter] is further evidence that Marani deserves to be better known than he is.’
Age/Sydney Morning Herald

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daft. Ultimately, I can think of no other adjective to describe this novel. I really enjoyed 'New Finnish Grammar'. I was excited to find out this was just the first of a trilogy about language and identity that Marani would write. 'The Last of the Vostyachs' began superbly but descended into farce. 'The Interpreter' was based on an intriguing premise: characters find themselves beginning to speak in a hitherto unknown language. Unfortunately, this novel disappointed too.

It rattled along more consistently than 'The Last of the Vostyachs', at least for the first 130 or so pages. Then began an interlude in which the narrator becomes an armed robber in Romania and a down-and-out in Munich, none of which seemed to have much to do with what had gone before or any bearing on the outcome. Nor were these events related with any conviction. If this section had been edited out - admittedly, only leaving a novella behind - the melodrama would have had more credence. Up until that point, I was put in mind of sinister picaresque novels by the likes of Charles Williams and Rex Warner. The ending (spoiler alert) in which the former anti-hero ends up talking to dolphins was pretty weak too. I get the feeling, for whatever reason, there was no one saying to the author, 'Look, Diego, you need to cut this bit and improve that.' It's a shame because this had the makings of a good literary thriller.

[Milica · Rating 2 out of 5]

a mishmash of styles that did not bring any positive development to the story. However, the translation merits applause.

[The.Faye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not like. The beauty of the beginning of the book simply fades away as Irene does, revealing absurdity and shenanigans. Characters dim as the plot gets more erratic and hard to stay with. Implausibility is a little too rife, I found myself disappointed in the hurriedly rushed "and then" feel as the book progressed. The blurb on the back of the book utterly ruined the reading too, as I was constantly awaiting the arrival of a key piece of divulged information. Perhaps without this giveaway I might have settled more with the rest of the story - but I doubt it. I like quirky, I like different, but this was too far-fetched for me. I much more enjoyed New Finnish Grammar it was a much much better read, comparable only through such beautiful sentences as these:
"Suddenly I had the irritating feeling of having wasted time; then I felt a cold sadness creeping over me like a snake, slithering over Irene's furniture, slinking under the door and engulfing our whole house in its deathly grip."
Which sadly seemed lost among the hectic, loose plot and vague characters soon after the first chapter.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very odd book indeed, though dealing, as it does, with language, it can be viewed as a kind of companion piece to Marani’s New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs. The narrator, Felix Bellamy, a Swiss national, is head of an interpretation department who becomes fascinated by one of his staff beginning to exhibit a peculiar kind of glossolalia, making sounds that are effectively unintelligible and which may be those of a primordial language which has long since been forgotten.

Curiously, Bellamy, parachuted into his supervisor’s job with vague promises of further promotion, is unsympathetic to translation, mistrusting his underlings as “circus performers, shifty, dishonest, quick-change artists, mental stuntmen.” Quite how Marani’s translator reacted to his outbursts against the profession is a question. These all may of course be a jest on Marani’s part but he has his narrator go on to tell us, “Languages are like toothbrushes: the only one you should put in your mouth is your own …it’s dangerous to let yourself be contaminated by the germs of another tongue … a foreign language injected into our mind brings with it the taint of unknown sounds, a vision of worlds that are incomprehensible to us – the lure of other truths and a devilish desire to know them.” It is that lure, though, that devilish desire, which makes reading translated fiction so interesting.

The interpreter disappears, leaving a list of names of cities, some of which have been ticked off. Bellamy’s wife leaves him (which may be connected with the interpreter’s disappearance) and he himself begins to suffer from the interpreter’s malaise and goes for treatment to a clinic run by a Dr Barnung. Barnung tells him French and German are similar in the way they view reality, but in essence are profoundly different. “Latin and Germanic languages have something in common … but they cannot mix. In Romanian, all that is rational about Rome, mingled with Mediterranean ebullience, becomes fused with Slav passion and melts into the yearning melancholy of the steppe. German is a bit like aspirin, it’s good for everything: it clarifies thought processes, stiffens resolve and makes feelings bare.” Felix soon perceives something is amiss at the clinic, leaves, and sets out to try to find the interpreter by visiting the cities as yet unticked on his list.

Then things get really weird. The text morphs into a species of thriller when Bellamy is targeted by operatives of Dr Barnung, but escapes. To survive he has to embark on a crime spree, robbing petrol stations, becoming known as ‘the Beast of Bukovina,’ taking up with Magda Kobori, a young woman whose car he stole, with her in it. They stravaig through the back roads of Romania like some sort of Balkan Bonnie and Clyde before Bellamy returns once more to tracking the interpreter.

I’m never sure if something like this is because of the opacities of translation or whether it’s a true indication of foreign sensibilities but in common with other protagonists of fiction translated into English Bellamy as a character here presents as incomplete, almost as a kind of absence, though his misanthropy shows in a passage where he reflects, “I was exposing myself to risk by mixing with insane deviants such as interpreters, people with slippery, unformed identities, in whose company sprinklings of the irrational are more likely to insinuate themselves and further crook humanity’s already crooked timber.” His actions are off-kilter, not quite reasonable, nor perhaps justifiable, though it is not impossible - highly likely even - that we are being given a portrait of a madman. Other languages apparently do that sort of thing to you.

The Interpreter was interesting enough but didn’t, for me, reach the same heights that New Finnish Grammar, The Last of the Vostyachs, or even Marani’s immediately preceding novel, God’s Dog, did.

[Wendy Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In your case what I'd suggest first is an intensive course of Romanian...Alongside the Romanian cure, however, I'd also suggest protracted German therapy, partly because for us German is a bit like aspirin, it's good for everything: it clarifies thought processes, stiffens resolve and lays feelings bare...I feel I must warn you that complications could arise. Disturbed by a sudden feeling of estrangement, at first your ego might take refuge in French and refuse to emerge from it and then shock therapy would be required." p53

I dived into this book, not having read the first two of the trilogy. It's hilarious. I thought it might be dry and humorless and spin into heavy philosophical ponderings about the nature of language but it's anything but.
It starts off as a standard novel grounded in reality but then spins into a crazy expanding world of Dr Barnung's bizarre institution, murder at the conference centre and robberies and infamy across Eastern Europe where our mild-mannered narrator turns into the "Beast of Bukovina" with the help of Magda, his German- English- Italian and Dutch-speaking accomplice! All as part of the narrator's desire to find out what happened to the mysterious gibberish-speaking simultaneous interpreter who was searching for the primordial language that would unlock the key to human language.
One issue I have is with the blurb. I keep finding deeply dissatisfying blurbs and am wondering if I should start writing blurb reviews instead of book reviews! The blurb gets the central character's name wrong -it's not Gunther Stauber - this is a very poor editing error to make. Come on Text Publishing, you can do better than that. I hope.
The English translation is terrific: playful, energetic and beautiful. The original must be even better! If you like quirky and intelligent, you'll like this. If you prefer sensible, look elsewhere!

[Brigitte Barrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit disappointing. It was more like a bad dream than a coherent story.

[Meri Gallego]

Prestado a MAS

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Interpreter is the third in Diego Marani’s novels about language and identity. Monolingualists may be baffled if they subscribe to the view that everyone should just learn to speak the same language as everyone else (usually English), or they may for the first time get a glimpse of how crucial language is to a sense of self. The possibility of such divergent responses is because the book is such an absurdist melange of events that the message may be lost. I may well have misunderstood it myself…

Felix Bellamy is the boss of a European translation service, theoretically married to Irene but in reality married to his job. He is (intentionally) the classic stereotype of a bureaucrat with no intrinsic understanding of what the organisation does, but merely interested in its smooth administration. However, he experiences a quasi-moral epiphany when the Director of Translation and Interpreting, Günther Stauber, demands that one of the interpreters be suspended. This polyglot interpreter, with five languages and an impressive commitment to improving them and learning more, has suddenly started whistling, hissing and clicking instead of producing intelligible translations for the consumers of the interpreting service. He’s not fit to do his job.

The interpreter tells Felix that the languages have ‘re-formed’ in his brain to create a new one (or a very old one from the dawn of time). He is excited by this, and doesn’t want to be ‘cured’. Like any good modern bureaucrat Felix goes through the motions of suggesting medical help, recommending the clinic of a neurologist called Dr Barnung. But by definition, Felix is a problem-solver; the interpreter is a recurring and unrepentant problem; and the pragmatic solution to the problem is to pension off the interpreter. Which Felix does without much of a qualm.

What little attention Felix has to this matter is diverted by the departure of his discontented wife Irene. He forgets all about the interpreter – until suddenly he too begins to suffer uncontrollable attacks of gobbledygook.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2016/02/13/th...

[Susan Steggall]

Not too sure what to make of this book - often the case with translations, even though this one is a prize-winning translation. There are many strange and wonderful ideas in the text as we follow the protagonist through, across and around a rocambolesque European adventure. I was initially interested in the book because of its core setting in the city of Geneva, to my mind pretty well the centre of the world, meeting place as it is of so many languages.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come....