Customer Reviews

The Book / The Writer

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Impregnated with a subtle but mischievous sense of humour, "The Book" is entirely made up with the rants and lamentations of a book who intends to give the reader more than a piece of its ink-and-paper mind on the subject of its "species'" history, life cycle, and relationship with their human creators and enslavers. It's a very curious beast, in that it works remarkably well for a novel with virtually no plot and only a handful of characters who aren't even named (in part a consequence of the book's contempt for humans). The wording was edited by Tamar Yellin, who did a phenomenal job by turning what could have been a rather clunky translation from the Serbian into a piece of fluid and delightful prose that hardly betrays its origins. On the other hand, "The Book" could have been packed more tightly, as there is some redundancy that detracts from the overall enjoyment of the novel, but this is nevertheless a very worthy and brave attempt by Zoran Zivkovic, who recently won a World Fantasy Award for his superior work on "The Library" (published in _Leviathan 3_, and in my opinion the perfect companion to this volume).

"The Writer" is a slighter piece, more like a novella than a novel, about a serious case of writer's block. Unlike the first and more substantial part of the book, the translation here was not edited, but it's still highly readable.