The Translator’s Bride

Presented as a series of snaking, frenetic sentences, Reis’s brief, funny novel—his first translated into English—opens with a nameless 30-something translator sitting in a streetcar in an unnamed city in the 1920s, moping and complaining about his fellow passengers. He has just bid adieu to his bride, Helena, who boarded a ship for the promise of work abroad, and, pining for his absent love, he fills his head with vicious assessments of everyone he encounters, from his generally kind landlady to a publisher owing him money. Meanwhile, a foreign word, “kartofler,” lodges itself in the translator’s head, torturing him as he moves about town and tries to finagle a way to buy a house for Helena and lure her home. Adhering to a rather loose plot, Reis follows the translator for two days, and the action stays rooted in the character’s rambling thoughts, written as paragraph-length run-on sentences, which often clash with his faux cheerful conversations. These juxtapositions result in hilarious exchanges as the translator gradually loses his patience with humanity. Reis’s novel is both surprising and hilarious. (Aug.)