Translated Accounts [Paperback]

James Kelman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 3, 2002

In Translated Accounts, the Booker Prize-winning author of How late it was, how late, offers us a harrowing glimpse into a realm where power is unchecked and liberties are few or nonexistent. Taking us into an unnamed territory that appears to be under military rule, Kelman creates a world that many know or have known, a world that may one day be thrust upon us, conjuring a grim awareness of the instability that lurks behind the veneer of order in any country. Filtering the dark visions of Franz Kafka through the verbal brilliance of Samuel Beckett, Kelman has written a novel that is often shocking, yet surprisingly poignant, and totally unforgettable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scottish writer Kelman, author of the Booker Prize-winning How Late It Was, How Late, here offers up a novel that is like a test case of Adorno's famous phrase, "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Adorno meant that, in the service of mass murder, language had cut itself off from its emotional base, the affection that precedes communication. In Kelman's novel, language is deprived of both its beauty and its grammar, and studded with ugly political jargon and neologisms. A note at the beginning explains that the "accounts" that make up the book are narrations of incidents "transcribed and/or translated into English, not always by persons native to the tongue." The accounts are testimonies from some unspecified killing field, with elements reminiscent of Rwanda, Yugoslavia and even the Cultural Revolution in China. In "sections," which are, presumably, holding areas, enemies of some kind are processed. Women and men are beaten, raped and murdered. People are under observation by "securitys," foreign observers interact with suspicious locals and bodies strew the landscape. Resistance cells, or "campaign formations," engage in self-criticism sessions. The unnamed narrators emerge and vanish in a haze of broken English, through which we glimpse a man in a transit area or camp, a resister and a man who may be with the government securitys, as well as others. The language has an ugly, gears-jamming feel to it, with sentences pieced together like: "All concentration now was on this demonstration, fully placed to the elderly man whose role so was primary." Kelman's experiment ultimately fails, since exhausting and desensitizing the reader does not necessarily lead to insight into the nature of state-sanctioned atrocity. Admirers of How Late It Was, How Late will appreciate what Kelman is trying to do in his newest novel, but even they may find it close to unreadable.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Kelman's new novel takes place in an unnamed, vaguely European country in the present or not-too-distant future in the midst of what may or may not be a war. Moving through a landscape that appears increasingly bombed out as the book progresses, the unnamed narrator (or possibly, narrators) seem(s) to be involved in some sort of underground group opposing the country's totalitarian rulers. Ostensibly, these fragmented chapters are a series of first-hand accounts collected by another country's foreign office and roughly translated into English (or so the back cover blurb of the book says; there's nothing in the text itself, other than perhaps the title, to indicate this). Episodic by their very nature, these accounts have a shadowy, dreamlike quality that often makes it difficult to determine the actual truth of events described. Eschewing traditional plot, characterization, and dramatic structure, Kelman's experimental antinovel is a tour de force of a sort, but one that will lose all but the most dedicated readers long before its conclusion. For academic literary collections. Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (December 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 038549582X
• ISBN-13: 978-0385495820
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,747,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 stars, January 25, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Translated Accounts: A Novel (Hardcover)

James Kelman won the Booker Prize for his novel "How Late It Was, How Late" a good few years ago now, but in the time since then he has produced superior work such as "The Good Times" and "Translated Accounts".
This book is a series of narratives written/spoken/emailed by people (of uncertain geographical location) whose right to free speech has been denied to the extent that sometimes it is only by attempting a decoding of the censor's voice that anything can be understood.
The narratives are sometimes romantic, sometimes banal, and occasionally horrific. But because the language is garbled by translation or censorship, the images thrown up are general rather than specific. There is no doubt that the author knows a lot about the former Yugoslavia, but such reference points aren't really useful since the book is more concerned with this kaleidoscope of individual experiences, rather than shaking a leftist fist at governments.
In ways this book is a first. It's not the everything's-under-the-surface dream world of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". It's not the inner-city Glasgow of "How Late". Neither poetry nor prose. What it is is the glacial hardness of the human spirit under a strain so great that sense itself is broken.

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 stars, January 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Translated Accounts: A Novel (Hardcover)

James Kelman won the Booker Prize for his novel "How Late It Was, How Late" a good few years ago now, but in the time since then he has produced superior work such as "The Good Times" and "Translated Accounts".
This book is a series of narratives written/spoken/emailed by people (of uncertain geographical location) whose right to free speech has been denied to the extent that sometimes it is only by attempting a decoding of the censor's voice that anything can be understood.
The narratives are sometimes romantic, sometimes banal, and occasionally horrific. But because the language is garbled by translation or censorship, the images thrown up are general rather than specific. There is no doubt that the author knows a lot about the former Yugoslavia, but such reference points aren't really useful since the book is more concerned with this kaleidoscope of individual experiences, rather than shaking a leftist fist at governments.
In ways this book is a first. It's not the everything's-under-the-surface dream world of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". It's not the inner-city Glasgow of "How Late". Neither poetry nor prose. What it is is the glacial hardness of the human spirit under a strain so great that sense itself is broken.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Since Beckett Has There Been Such A Book, October 21, 2001

By 

"donkeye" (all up in your face) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Translated Accounts: A Novel (Hardcover)

There's so many books out there, and so many good ones (thankfully), so it's hard to explain exactly why, after reading this one, I felt I'd read something truly important.
Language forms the deep centre of this novel, the story of an un-named country under what seems to be a kind of stark martial law.
The whole book is written in a kind of elegantly broken English. These are the stories of a non-English country forced into English with little regard for the identities of the people or the importance of either language. You see how hard it is to explain?

After all that has happened recently, the fibre of this story feels desperately necessary. The human stuff that is so difficult to parse within this novel (due to the faulty translations--the really incredible style developed by Kelman, it's just amazing, really), is the struggle we're now all facing to find the right language to describe our horrors.

This book will immediately remind you of certain books by Nobel prize winning guy Samuel Beckett. It's not as heavy a read as say, The Unnamable, which is good. It's sort of like Beckett's later fictions, but instead of completely vanishing down the endless hole of despair and (let's face it) nonsense, Kelman is telling a fascinating story.

If when you read you don't like your time wasted on tripe, vacuousness, bull, sloppiness, hackwork, guile, smoke &/or mirrors, etc. then certainly this is a book worth reading. The essential truth here, is that like Faulkner, like Joyce, like Beckett, like Pynchon, like Bellow, this is a book for history. The deep history of great reading.