The Closer Look Book Club meets throughout the year to discuss novels and other works of fiction. To participate in a Book Club conversation, all you need to do is read the book and then join us in the Dorothy Rubel Room at the Poetry Center. No sign-up is necessary: the Club is free and open to the public, and you’re welcome to participate in as many or as few meetings as you like.
This fall, the Book Club reads a wide range of narratives translated into English: The Hour of the Star, a novella by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector; the Inferno transmuted as a brand-new translation by poet Mary Jo Bang; and Swann’s Way, one of the great influences on twentieth-century literature, rendered by brilliant Lydia Davis. Please be sure to read the editions specified so that we’re all on the same page! All book club selections will be available for purchase at the Poetry Center gift kiosk.
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust (translated by Lydia Davis)
“Relax: it’s fantastic. There’s no question that Davis’s American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff’s archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting.”—Publisher’s Weekly
