New edition of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

       At Tablet Liel Leibovitz praises The Best Holocaust Novel Ever, Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
       This is out in a new edition from Godine, who explain on their publicity page that:

The original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop has been revised and expanded by translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original two-volume text to accommodate the Book-of-the-Month club and to streamline the novel for film adaptation.

       Hey, it only took ... 78 years until the full translation could be published ..... (The Dunlop translation first appeared in 1934.) (But: great that Godine has managed to do it.)

       Leibovitz suggests that:

Read in chronological order, Franz Werfel's work leads through all the dreams and nightmares that Europe had withstood in the first half of the 20th century.

       And about The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in particular:

Werfel's narration is weighted down by his predilection for bombastic turns of phrase, but he impressively soars and dips in and out of numerous characters' consciousness, narrating the unfolding events from various points of view. And just as some bit of symbolism begins to feel too cumbersome, he delivers stunning passages about cruelty, compassion, and the strange logic of extermination attempted on a very large scale.

       Get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.