The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of David Vogel's Married Life.
This is yet another book which it's taken me a long time to get to -- 2836 days since I received the review copy, to be exact -- but Vogel has been getting more attention since Australian publisher Scribe re-issued this, along with publishing his newly discovered Viennese Romance recently (see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). (Scribe, as I recently noted, are also the first English-language publishers of A.F.Th. van der Heijden -- another Australian publisher putting their US/UK counterparts to shame as far as works in translation go.)
These novels of early twentieth-century Vienna are notable, among other reasons, for having been written in Hebrew, and Married Life makes an interesting contrast to the German-writing Viennese authors of the same period (though the Jewish elements are, strikingly, often less prominent here than in some of the written-in-German works of the time); I hope to get to Viennese Romance, too.
One disappointing note: the translation, by Dalya Bilu, is: "Worldwide Translation Copyright © 1988 by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature". Much as I admire what the ITHL does -- and much as I appreciate their resuscitation and spreading-the-word of this novel abroad -- that's still a really, really disappointing and ugly business practice.
This is yet another book which it's taken me a long time to get to -- 2836 days since I received the review copy, to be exact -- but Vogel has been getting more attention since Australian publisher Scribe re-issued this, along with publishing his newly discovered Viennese Romance recently (see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). (Scribe, as I recently noted, are also the first English-language publishers of A.F.Th. van der Heijden -- another Australian publisher putting their US/UK counterparts to shame as far as works in translation go.)
These novels of early twentieth-century Vienna are notable, among other reasons, for having been written in Hebrew, and Married Life makes an interesting contrast to the German-writing Viennese authors of the same period (though the Jewish elements are, strikingly, often less prominent here than in some of the written-in-German works of the time); I hope to get to Viennese Romance, too.
One disappointing note: the translation, by Dalya Bilu, is: "Worldwide Translation Copyright © 1988 by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature". Much as I admire what the ITHL does -- and much as I appreciate their resuscitation and spreading-the-word of this novel abroad -- that's still a really, really disappointing and ugly business practice.