In silken prose and with subtle suspense, Nina Schuyler brings us a mesmerizing novel of language and translation, memory loss and heartbreak, and the search for answers in a foreign country. When renowned translator Hanne Schubert falls down a flight of stairs, her injury is an unusual but real condition—the loss of her native language. She is left speaking only Japanese, a language learned later in life. With her personal life at a crossroad, Hanne leaves for Japan. There, the Japanese novelist whose work she translated stunningly confronts her publicly for sabotaging his work. Reeling, Hanne struggles for meaning and seeks out the inspiration for the author's novel—a tortured, chimerical actor, once a master in the art of Noh theater. Through their passionate and intriguing relationship, Hanne begins to understand the masks she has worn in her life, just as the actor dons the masks that have made him a legend of Noh. The demons from her past and present begin to unfold and Hanne sets out to make amends in this searing and engrossing novel.
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“Multilingual readers will be delighted by how Schuyler
weaves the intricacies and the process of translation into the novel without
interrupting the story or its tone. Monolinguals, too, will relate to
Schuyler’s carefully sculpted, complex characters and their relationships, the
most tender of which involves Hanne’s poignant transformation in regard to her
daughter, Brigitte. Evocative, powerful, and well-paced, Schuyler’s novel
illuminates how interpreting a person is as complicated an art as translating a
book because of the risk of reading what one wants to discover rather than what
one needs to learn.”
—
Booklist (starred review)