I. LOVED. THIS. BOOK. I sat riveted, reading the last hundred-plus pages last night. Had to pee for the final hour, but couldn't be bothered. Had to know what happened next. That's how damn GOOD this book is! And I don't really want to write a standard kinda book review. I just want to tell everybody about what a terrific read this is. But okay. I'll try. The protagonist of John Crowley's THE TRANSLATOR is Christa 'Kit' Malone, and we meet her as a young girl, then as a high school and college student, and also as an adult, thirty-some years later, traveling to St Petersburg for a poetry conference. As a girl, she brought to mind Carson McCullers' Frankie, from MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, because of her close bond with her older brother, Ben. Kit was devastated when Ben left her to join the Army, and felt even more betrayed when he re-enlisted for Special Forces. In retaliation she has sex with an older boy she barely knows and becomes pregnant. It's the early sixties, and the Malones are devout Catholics, so Kit is sent away to a home for unwed mothers administered by nuns. Then we meet her at college, enrolling a semester late. There she meets the expat Russian poet, Innokenti I. Falin, enrolls in his class and, infatuated, falls deeply in love with him, though he is easily twice her age. A mysterious figure, we learn Falin's story in bits and pieces, and even those fragments are questionable. He confides to Kit how he was a homeless street child - a la Dickens - in the Stalin years, served in the army in the war, and spent time in prison. But he was also a recognized poet, and was supposedly deported to the U.S. as an undesirable. Is he a Soviet agent, a double agent for the U.S.? Falin's status remains murky, as the two spend a summer session collaborating on translating his poems, but their love affair seems genuine, particularly in that Falin is very reluctant to consummate it. And then, in the fall, their story suddenly collides with the tense times of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the narrative begins to accelerate towards an uncertain climax.

Oh yeah, and Kit was a poet too, something Falin encouraged, and she was also taking an intensive summer course in Russian at the university's Language Institute where her classmates were mostly young Air Force guys. This is where I figured out that the unnamed midwestern university must be Indiana, because in the 1970s I met a number of Air Force linguists who got their Russian training at Indiana in Bloomington.

But I digress, and I know this is all a poor excuse for a book review, but I guess I'm just trying to explain why I loved this book so much and how I could relate to so much if it. In fact I was just halfway through Army basic training when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. So yeah, I was really caught up in this story. That and Kit. She was just such a heartbreakingly real character. (I was reminded of Natalie Wood as Deenie in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS. That kind of vulnerability and innocence.)

Ah well. Enough. Loved this book Absolutely loved it. My hat is off to Mr Crowley. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )

A beautiful book. Sad in many places, but neither pathetic or tragic. Eleagic, maybe? The protagonist suffers three or four great losses, but these loses aren't just some stuff that happens (pathetic), nor are they unavoidably impossible situations (tragic). Instead, these losses are transformed into something else. It's not sacrifice or redemption, where the losses serve some greater good or purpose: this, I think, would cheapen or demean them here. Instead, they are I don't know transformed maybe, into something beautiful. An elegy. An elegy to the death of poetry, that does not restore poetry to life, but transforms it, translates it, into another form of language: something certainly not the same, but for that no less beautiful.

BLABLABLA. These are just my thinking out loud first impressions. Not really a review of course. My recommendation: read it now, and then later, read it again. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It focuses on the relationship between a dissident Russia poet who is a professor at a midwestern college and his student, a female undergrad who helps him translate his work from Russian to English one summer. It is also a study of the early 1960's in America. During the course of the novel the Cold War is on, America is getting involved covertly in Viet Nam, the Cuban Missile Crisis takes place, and JFK is assassinated. These events are an integral part of the story. The characters were never as alive for me as I would have liked, but I was blown away by the poems and the description of what translating them was like. Not only did English words have to be found for Russian ones, but rhythm and meter had to be maintained. More difficult yet to handle were Russian phrases that would trigger automatic cultural connections among Russian readers but which had no counterpart in English. If this was the work of an American novelist who was also a poet I would have been impressed. But John Crowley is know for his large body of fantasy writing. I am both mystified and bowled over by his choice of subject matter and the manner in which he carried it off. = ( )

John Crowley is a great writer. I love the way he uses language. I enjoyed reading the words of this book, the way he strung sentences together, and it was a quick read. Which was for the best, because, frankly, it was kinda boring. So, I liked it, but it's not one I'd be really quick to pass along. ( )

What amounts to a minor work from Crowley (though to be fair, a 'minor' work from him is still pretty amazing). Much quieter and a little less ambition than Little, Big or the Aegypt novels, though with many of the same preoccupations - an unknowing individual caught up in the winds of history. The poetry is wonderful, and the writing is pristine and complex. ( )