The Translator - Softcover

Just, Ward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804110220 ISBN 13: 9780804110228

Publisher: Ivy Books, 1992

Synopsis

Unable to rid his mind of the brutal shooting deaths of a group of Englishmen by German soldiers shortly after World War II, German citizen Sydney van Damm abandons his homeland for Paris and becomes involved in an unscrupulous scam. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

Ward Just is the author of fourteen previous novels, including the
National book Award finalist Echo House and An Unfinished Season,
winner of the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award. In a career that
began as a war correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington
Post, Just has lived and written in half a dozen countries, including
Britain, France, and Vietnam. His characters often lead public lives as
politicians, civil servants, soldiers, artists, and writers. It is the tension
between public duty and private conscience that animates much of
his fiction, including Forgetfulness. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole,
divide their time between Martha's Vineyard and Paris.

From Kirkus Reviews

Two expatriates (he's German, she's American) make a life together in contemporary Paris; characteristically, Just makes us pay attention to the political/cultural context of his domestic story and then, almost as an afterthought, spices it with East/West melodrama. In a small town near Hamburg, in 1945, ten-year-old Sydney van Damm watches a Wehrmacht unit, unaware that the war is over, ambush and kill some friendly Americans; tied by blood to the Germans, but idolizing Americans in his fantasies, Sydney is heartbroken. His father, Major Klaus, has died mysteriously in a Berlin prison; his mother, Inge (``a figure from German folklore''), is keeping them alive on scraps. Inge represents continuity, the desire for a life of ``strict exactitude'' in a ``rightful place''; recurring phrases, these--they form the clearest expression of the German soul. She disapproves bitterly when Sydney emigrates to Paris in 1956; eventually she will return to her roots in the East. Sydney becomes the translator for the German-American Foundation, a CIA front; his boss is the American Junko Poole, a flamboyant opportunist. Through Junko he meets classy, independently wealthy Angela Dilion, who fled America after her brother was killed in Vietnam. They fall in love and marry (by now it's 1975); their son Max is born damaged, autistic. Sydney, the Foundation behind him, has become the best in his field, translating Germany's most respected novelist, a labor of love, though tinged with regret that his ``life has disappeared inside the product.'' Forward to 1989, Europe's tumultuous Year of Change; where the Germans see freedom, Junko sees big bucks. He involves the reluctant Sydney in a shady arms-deal, and the hapless translator reaps the whirlwind. There are some disturbing gaps in this novel-without-a-center; what happened, for example, to the long years when the van Damms coped with autistic Max at home, presumably the greatest challenge to their marriage? Just is one of fiction's free spirits, impatient with plotting, but meticulous with detail work. Fortunately, his spacious work charms and enriches more than it puzzles and confounds. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivy Books
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804110220
• ISBN 13: 9780804110228
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback