Irena

Twenty years after his death, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño continues to cast a spell, thanks to the wild metaphorical reach of his tumbling sentences, his implausibly encyclopaedic grasp of global affairs and the seductive sense that 20th-century history is a nightmarish riddle to which only literature is the solution. The Savage Detectives and 2666, his best-known books, are at bottom mysteries involving vanished authors – a conceit shared by two new novels conceivably written under his influence.Winner of the Prix…

“Translators are like ninjas,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret wrote in 2017. “If you notice them, they’re no good.” The literary translation community must have felt delighted at this upgrade to their image: no longer dictionary dorks, but lithe, black-clad assassins! The thrilling story of ninja translators is yet to be told, but Jennifer Croft, an eminent translator whose English version of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker prize in 2018, has put her own spin on the profession with this ambitious,…