Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Last Wolf / Herman > Status Update

Oh wow! Bakti has quotation marks all over the shop.

"at which point the interpreter in the back seat dissolved in tears and José Miguel continued, piling sentence on top of another, one Spanish sentence running into the next" - so much for the man of short sentences. Hungarian doesn't distinquish between sentence and clause: Szirtes misses a trick here.

""the love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed"" - which, apart from making me tear up over my poor, dear departed cat, are the only quotation marks in the story. Amid the all the other idiosyncratic punctuation, it's worth pointing out that Hungarian doesn't use quotation marks. Something that greatly impressed James Joyce.

"...to check whether the warden did actually use that word in Spanish" - so I'm reading the English translation of a Hungarian novella narrated as a conversation in German about a conversation in Spanish that was interpreted into English: plenty of scope for error then.

"José Miguel, a man who...once he started speaking, clearly preferred short sentences..." - this must be the dark irony reviewers attribute to Krasznahorkai.

...ones, all of which leave me hoping I can put their distracting nature behind me and work out whether they add anything to the narrative, or if there is a story of any value beneath the obstructive prose, while bearing in mind that it may have been much more successfully executed in its native Hungarian

...translator of Hungarian, being both bilingual and a poet, but or perhaps because this has not stopped from uncapitalising the word that follows a question mark, writing run-on sentences with unnecessary conjunctions, presenting separate clauses as apposite phrases, replacing demonstrative pronouns with relative ones, equivocating between direct and reported speech, and preferring infinite constructions to finite..