The Translator Lib/E

*Starred Review* As a translator, Hanne Schubert believes in language—its power to convey and emote, to create common ground and bridge gaps in understanding. After a serious fall, Hanne awakes to find she can speak only one of her many languages, Japanese. Her native English is gone, which means her teaching career, translation projects, and life in San Francisco is, for the time, on hold. Rather than recover in isolation, she travels to Japan for a conference at which she’s accused of mistranslating the famous Kobayashi’s latest novel. Wounded, ashamed, and purposeless, Hanne reexamines her life thanks to the philosophy of a curious new friend. Multilingual readers will be delighted by how Schuyler weaves the intricacies and the process of translation into the novel without interrupting the story or its tone. Monolinguals, too, will relate to Schuyler’s carefully sculpted, complex characters and their relationships, the most tender of which involves Hanne’s poignant transformation in regard to her daughter, Brigitte. Evocative, powerful, and well-paced, Schuyler’s novel illuminates how interpreting a person is as complicated an art as translating a book because of the risk of reading what one wants to discover rather than what one needs to learn. --Katharine Fronk