The Translator

An old friend betrays linguist Sydney Van Damm by revealing his language skills to intelligence sources who are trying to create a new Eastern Europe out of the remnants of the old communist order

Just's ( Twenty-one ) extraordinarily suggestive intelligence is given full play in this commanding psychological and political novel. Sydney Van Damm has exiled himself from his native Germany, establishing himself in Paris at a German-American foundation impurely funded by "Uncle Sugar," then becoming a literary translator. Angela, his wife, has similarly rejected her heritage--the daughter of a leisure-loving Maine widower, she trades an upper-class upbringing for Sydney's modest Paris flat. Having foreclosed on their pasts, the couple faces a not particularly promising future: their only child is irremediably handicapped and the flat grows claustrophobic. Meanwhile, the 1990 economic and political upheavals throughout Europe and the U.S. bring unhappy surprises. They also bring opportunities, as Sydney's old connection to the Uncle Sugar circuit points out, proposing that Sydney serve as translator for a shifty deal involving stolen Warsaw Pact arms. Ward discloses his story with a card shark's timing and shrewdness, allowing events to serve a symbolic role without compromising their dramatic value, flattering the reader with his restraint and insight.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Sydney van Damme is a German translator living in Paris with his American wife and severely retarded son. This account of his cosmopolitan but troubled life explores the theme of personal identity and its relation to one's family, homeland, and history. Sydney comes of age amidst the wreckage of World War II, meets his wife as Saigon falls to the Vietcong in 1975, and becomes involved with a friend in a dangerously illegal arms deal while the Berlin Wall crumbles. As its root suggests, translation is a metaphor for change, and for Just the major responsibility of a translator--fidelity--becomes also a moral touchstone. With its compelling mix of psychological drama, international intrigue, and astute political commentary, this novel recalls Conrad and le Carre and should appeal to many readers. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/91.
-Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.