Customer Reviews

Grammar Is a Sweet, Gentle Song: A Novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love, love, love, love, heart, heart, heart this book. I read it in French a few months ago, and I was curious about how some of the elements were translated (like the gender of nouns, as English doesn't have that feature). Obviously, for those who need it, this is a way of accessing a foreign language book. I was just a little disappointed by the force of the profanity. It's one of the hardest things to translate, but I think the "c-word" was a little bit strong for what was there in the first place. I give the original French version 5 stars. Lost in translation, indeed.

I received this book as a gift from my former colleagues. Although I don't like reading too much I was through with this wonderful written novel in one day.

It is the story of two children who are stranded on an island - an island consisting of people with love for language and words and shops with wonderful words: long words, short words, rare words, nonsense words.

Jeanne and Thomas are fascinated by the beauty, wealth, amount and variety of words: Lonely nouns are looking to marry well suiting adjectives. Superlatives escaping their dominant owners...

And then Jeanne and Thomas meet some words on another island who escaped the people using them. Will these words find their way home, jump into the people's mouth and enjoy their lives in wordy symbioses with them?

Or will our two young heroes understand the necessity of mixing up languages (like it is heavily done in German), forget about using the words of their ancestors, bury the words of their dialects, or have no words at all? Less words, less to talk about, less problems?

Read the book and you will find out yourself!

I read the German translation and loved it!