You often hear sighs about the lack of translated literature in the UK, but if translation can be a bridge between cultures, it can also show up the gulf between them. For every Elena Ferrante, whose books have met the same rapturous welcome here as in Italy, there is a Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, the Swiss-French phenomenon that left many here and in the US scratching their heads.
This novel falls into the latter camp. An international bestseller, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, on paper The Age of Reinvention has a lot going for it. It is a high-concept drama that shuttles between Paris, New York and Afghanistan, playing with notions of religion, terrorism and identity – Arab and Jewish – sex and literature. On the page, however, it is repetitive, melodramatic and ridden with cliches.
The story revolves around three characters who met at law school in the 80s: Samir, the son of Tunisian immigrants who has remade himself as a hotshot lawyer in the US, shortening his name to Sam and passing himself off as Jewish; Samuel, whose backstory Samir stole; and Nina, the woman who came between them, blackmailed by Samuel into staying with him instead of being with Samir. Things kick into play when Samuel and Nina see Samir feted on CNN, and decide he owes them. The switches and reversals that follow – terror arrests, adultery, literary success – should be worthy of that great manipulator of fates, Tom Wolfe, but something comes between the reader and the pleasure they are owed. Partly it is the plotting, which offers less a rollercoaster ride than one of those swinging ships, flinging the characters from one extreme to the other.
Then there is the writing. If the mantra of creative writing classes is “Show, don’t tell”, then Tuil is all “Tell, tell, tell some more”. The bulk of the book is made up of authorial explanations of what everyone is thinking and feeling, unless they are talking to each other, in which case they usually repeat what we already know. A 40th birthday party for Sam is reduced to a list of animals shipped in as entertainment: “He saw the lynx, the two wolves of the east, the golden tigers and the white tigers, the Saharan leopard, the Asian lion – caged, tamed by the whips of panther-women in tight-fitting bodysuits that left nothing to the imagination, an elephant striding, magnificent, on a foam-covered carpet … ” This should have been a mind-blowing set piece: instead, it is snatched away from the reader before they can see it – and, more important, see the characters through it. Samir “may have wanted to be a lawyer, but he hadn’t imagined being one of the most influential members of that profession in New York”, Tuil reminds us, halfway through the book. We know. Forty pages on: “He has always loved the company of beautiful women.” You can almost hear the readers’ chorus: We know! You already told us!
There are sections that fare better, such as the chapter describing Samir’s brother’s radicalisation in Yemen and Afghanistan. It is possible, too, that some of this is the price of translation. Much of the book is written in the present tense, which in French has a lightness missing in English, where it can lurch and judder like a kangarooing car. And while an elegant style is not always necessary, as Michel Houllebecq has shown, surely translator Sam Taylor should have paused when he found himself typing the words: “He is the prisoner of his urges. This dusky maiden drives him mad with desire.”
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