Like a Beast, by Joy Sorman, II, translation by Lara Vergnaud
Joy Sorman
[Photo: C. Hélie. All rights reserved.]
Part I of this translation can be found on this site here.
The original French text of part II can be found here on Salon .ll.
David McDuff, translator of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Other Stories (1994), describes the author as a shadowy figure. His life, which is for the most part undocumented, ended obscurely with his arrest by the Stalinist secret policy and his death in 1940 at the age of 46.
His daughter Nathalie was ten years old and living in France at the time. In her introduction to The Lonely Years, a collection of stories and correspondence published in 1964, she says that she grew up
...wishing that some day, somewhere, a door would open and my father would come in. We would recognize each other immediately, and without seeming surprised, without letting him catch his breath, I would say, "Well, here you are at last. We've been puzzled about you for so long; although you left behind much love and devotion, you bequeathed us very few facts. It's so good to have you here. do sit down and tell us what happened."
© Linda Leith
.ll.
Joy Sorman
[Photo: C. Hélie. All rights reserved.]
Part I of this translation can be found on this site here.
The original French text of part II can be found here on Salon .ll.
Marie-Soleil, a woman approaching forty, wants to have a baby. She has no partner and no opportunity of finding a donor whose identity she knows in her host country, Canada.
Translation by Jonathan Kaplansky of an excerpt from Cristina Montescu's unpublished novel A Hole in the Belly.
Writers are always complaining they don’t have enough time to write, even those who are “full-time” writers. I used to find that puzzling, but now that I have joined the ranks of full-time writers, I understand better. The question, “When do you write?” is not a silly question. This is why writers are careful to broach it only with close friends. The answer has something to do with what I write – and a lot to do with whether I write at all.
The Tiger is a Poe-like thriller, an analysis of post-perestroika economic disintegration (with plenty of black humour included), a treatise on biodiversity, an overview of paleoanthropology, and a completely absorbing read. But its essence is an intricate and measured plea for humans to understand and value our co-existence with the natural world.