The Task of This Translator [Paperback]

Todd Hasak-Lowy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

Stylistically daring, morally perplexing, and outrageously funny, Todd Hasak-Lowy's The Task of This Translator marks the debut of a writer of extraordinary talent. In these seven stories, Hasak-Lowy captures the absurdity that often arises when very personal crises intersect with global issues such as ethnic violence, obesity, and the media.

A journalist sets out to write an investigative piece on a dieting company that uses bodyguards to protect overeaters from themselves but loses his bearings when he becomes a client and is paired up with a bodyguard of his own. In the coffee shop of Israel's Holocaust memorial museum, a stale pastry triggers a brawl between an American tourist and the Israeli cashier. A man misplaces his wallet shortly before a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. An unwilling and mostly unqualified slacker finds himself cast into the role of translator for the bitter reunion of a family torn apart years earlier by unspecified brutality.

A standout story collection, The Task of This Translator is funny, intricate, and deeply human.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Overeducated and underemployed protagonists bottom out on stalled careers and foundering relationships in Hasak-Lowy's intelligent collection. In the strongest stories, he locates the depressive slumps of his pained, emotionally true characters in a pointed critique of American culture—the alienation of late capitalism, the superficiality of mass media, the corrosive effects of consumerism and the national obsession with gluttony and dieting. A grad student cum journalist profiles an expensive weight-loss company in the wry "Will Power, Inc." But when, for the piece, he retains a "diet escort" to forcibly prevent him from eating, he's tempted to binge, and his body balloons. Hasak-Lowy artfully reveals layers of personal and national identity in the grim "On the Grounds of the Complex Commemorating the Nazis' Treatment of the Jews," about an Israeli ex-journalist working in the cafe at Yad Vashem who clashes with an American businessman over a stale pastry. The most ambitious story, "The End of Larry's Wallet, " weaves Larry's personal struggle with a failed marriage and sick daughter with a critique of TV coverage of destruction on a near-unimaginable scale: 18 million dead in a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. The collection's more modest—and more mannered—stories feature alienated young men with estranged or deceased fathers. Though the selections are uneven, the collection's best work indicates the arrival of a cogent new Jewish-American voice. Agent, Simon Lipskar. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Newcomer Hasak-Lowy has a disarming style: pared-down, ineluctably male, confidingly first-person, and intelligently ironic. His characters are vexed and desperate; his stories are transparently structured, yet events escalate quickly and unpredictably. A job interview yields oddly therapeutic yet potentially damaging disclosures. A demoralized Israeli journalist ends up working as a snack-shop cashier at Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial. Another floundering journalist gets overly involved in his investigation into a weight-watcher company that provides bodyguards to enforce its rules. In the tense yet darkly funny title story, a poseur finds himself playing the role of translator at a violent confrontation instigated by the Bosnian War. In this altogether powerful and provocative collection's most far-reaching story, "The End of Larry's Wallet," a shattering tale about helplessness and the limits of empathy, one man's life unravels against the backdrop of the confused, insipid, suddenly shockingly personal TV coverage of a nuclear "exchange" between India and Pakistan. Timely, perceptive, magnetic, and real in the way only fiction can be, Hasak-Lowy's tales reflect the paradoxes of the global village. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; First Edition. pb original edition (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156031124
• ISBN-13: 978-0156031127
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #799,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funnier than Ecclesiastes, March 18, 2006

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Task of This Translator (Paperback)

Small things often bother us more than they should, and big things sometimes bother us less than they should. I think that's the central theme of Hasak-Lowy's collection. It's most obvious in "The End of Larry's Wallet" where losing a wallet upsets a man so deeply that he lacks concern about his daughter's illness and an atomic war that kills millions.(Ecclesiastes has the same theme, but Hasak-Lowy is funnier).

The central character in the stories is essentially the same person, although he's given different names. He's clever but ineffective, financially unsuccessful but not poverty-stricken, and is unlucky in love but not virginal. The women in his life are out of James Thurber and so practical and savvy as to be slightly threatening. The men in his life are more aggressive or materialistic than he is. The blackness of the humor and the penetration of the insights have to be read to be believed.

One mystery to me is where has this guy been. Only one of the stories has been previously published (in the Iowa Review). I understand that there was a rave review in the New York Times but I missed it. I was lucky enough to pick this up in a bookstore at Kennedy airport, otherwise I might have missed this wonderful writer. I`ll be careful not to again.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An imaginative and entertaining collection of stories., March 15, 2006

By 

Perpetual Student - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Task of This Translator (Paperback)

I cannot say that the stories are all brilliant but they are all very creative and entertaining. The author refuses to put down any thought without examining it from many angles and perspectives. One of the stories has an American tourist get into a fight with an Israeli cashier at Yad Va Shem. Does the austerity of the surroundings excuse the staleness of the muffins being sold at the museum? Does the fact that English is an "international language" excuse the fact that an American Jew in Israel will address people in English fully expecting them to understand... The conflict in the situation produces a great read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some dazzling writing--a promising first collection, August 15, 2005

By 

Richard Stein (San Juan Capistrano, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Task of This Translator (Paperback)

Read the Eder review in the NYTimes, and bought this book. Although Hasak-Lowy's metafictive ambitions occasionally distract from a few of the stories (the India/Pakistan nuclear war idea achieved its initial shock value but little else), this writer uses language in an astounding way, such as the repetetive use of a euphemism for Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial or the absurd way a naive, lonely, geeky, intellectual student speaks of his willing victimization by a low-life who befriends him. And most of his stories allow authenticity to blossom from the fertile artifice.