The Translation of Dr Apelles by David Treuer Review
Started strong, ended poorly. Boring, repetitive… I had to force myself to terminate. The meta ending was a big disappointment.
This volume is a story within a story—which I beloved. Beautifully written, both tales are compelling. Dr. Apelles is a translator who has found an old Indian story that is in a language that just he can read. His every day chore is to sort books in an archive, where he is slowly falling in love with the beautiful Campaspe (once he can believe that someone like her could exist interested in him!). This is complicated by his boss, who seems to accept feelings for him, and a coworker, who is also interested in Campaspe. Dr. Apelles has a rather passive life, so the book describes the process where he stirred to action by the chance of dearest and the gamble of having a life. The other story is the translated text. It is about two different Indian children who are each the alone survivor of their family/clan/hamlet, who are adopted into other families, and who fall in dear themselves. Once more, the path to true dearest is riddled with competitors, kidnappers, attempted murder, and the whims of fate. What I liked about this volume was the lyrical writing. It was a pleasure to read each sentence. I liked Dr. Apelles' character, he was inappreciably the typical leading man, and it was a heartwarming story to read of his romance. I loved the translated story, lots of lore from quondam Indian tales. The story seemed to me to exist function fable and part mayhap something that really happened and was mayhap handed down through oral tradition until it was written downwardly? Enjoyable, satisfying read.
The Translation of Dr. Apelles (2006) interleaves two stories: a semi-fantastical romance between two Indian youths apparently set in the nineteenth century, and a piece of pitiful semi-realism about a translator of Native American languages living a life of repose desperation in a common cold nameless modernistic city. At first, we are given to believe that the romance is an "authentic" Indian tale that the translator has found in an annal and is translating for us, even equally his own life begins to repeat the events of the old story. The clues mount, however, that Treuer is not telling a straightforward tale with a cracking division between translation and commentary (the influence of Stake Fire is palpable). For 1 matter, his translator-hero is named Apelles, later the painter whose picture of Alexander the Great'southward mistress Campaspe was so lifelike that Alexander kept the portrait and gifted the living woman to Apelles, thus proving that art can both substitute for and change life. Similarly, the woman who will go Apelles's lover in Treuer's fiction is named what else merely Campaspe. Apelles and Campaspe piece of work in a somewhat science fictional archive for unread books, a tightly-controlled maximum-security prison for all those stories that will go unheard, a dystopian/utopian institution—probably borrowed from Saramago's Registry of All the Names—that threatens Apelles with the threat that his ain story will never be told or read. Moreover, Treuer's narrative voice is itself never straightforward: it is a mobile, shifting, parodic i, now "doing" Hemingway, now the eighteenth-century novel, and now venturing upon philosophy. Finally, every bit we read on, we somewhen come to sympathise that Apelles's narrative is actually the novel nosotros have been reading nearly him, effectively his "translation" of his own life into literature, while the Indian romance is merely a slightly re-ethnicized variation on the ancient Greek pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe : the two books—Apelle's manuscript and the old Greek novel—coupled and produced this novel when, at this novel'due south climax, they were dislocated and interleaved in the archive. What tin can all this recursive Nabokovian metafiction mean? Kickoff of all, by elaborately retelling Daphnis and Chloe as if it were an enchanting magical-realist Native American historical novel, Treuer is, if I may use the colloquial, calling bullshit on the idea that anyone tin can e'er encounter cultural authenticity in a work of fiction, which is the product of the individual imagination interacting with literary tradition and non the product of collective racial essences. Private imagination is important because without information technology we would all, but specially those who have been and are stereotyped, be unable to articulate our atypical experiences of the world and sensibilities in perceiving and expressing them: Above all, Treuer rejects the thought of civilisation as a by that imprisons the nowadays, the Faulknerian Gothic mode ("the past is not even past") that even more than pastoral has overwhelmingly influenced American writing about race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, at least since Dearest (whose writer mentored Treuer at Princeton). No, Treuer seems to say, an imaginative writer's relationship to the by may exist a voluntary and creative 1, and if information technology is a Gothic one, well, that too is the free exercise of the aesthetic imagination: "Then it wasn't that his past haunts him. He haunts his past." But Treuer'south statement, similar his Möbius strip of a novel, goes the other way too, as a vindication of any and all modes of fiction-making, and so long equally you lot do non misfile them with life: Dr. Apelles's apply of Longus is a reminder that the novel is an older and more than diverse class than we tend to realize when we imagine it is the product solely of the Protestant middle classes in the eighteenth century. Daphnis and Chloe comes out of the cross-cultural ferment of belatedly artifact in the eastern Mediterranean, a period denounced as decadently effeminate by Nietzsche, who scorned "Alexandrian man" as a mere proto-postmodern librarian rather than an originator of culture—something that Treuer, with his ambiguous annal of forgotten books, must have been aware of. The Translation of Dr. Apelles is on the whole an ingenious and intricately written philosophical fiction that I recommend. I could criticize it, of course. Like all novels with obviously fix structures—this one alternates predictably from the romantic story to the realistic i—it begins to feel circumscribed, and Treuer's philosophizing becomes extravagantly explicit in the end. And similar all fictions composed to illustrate ideas, the novel sometimes feels more clever than wise, more than mechanical than live, as its allegory develops; this flaw contradicts Treuer's seemingly Nabokovian doctrine that fiction must be a affair of living detail rather than ideology. Treuer overcompensates for having over-intellectualized his book with a few direct authorial statements that seem to line up with a very '00s-era New Sincerity; these are sentimental rather than affecting considering they are comparatively anchored to a narrative Treuer expects us, by the finish, to believe in:What language could he use for himself that had not get part of those stories about his people, the pitiful ones and the funny ones and the ones about the ways and days of the past. What could he say that would exist on its own, that represented just him and his life?
Treuer is moreover accusing a largely white or at to the lowest degree not-Indian readership and publishing industry of wishing to export Native Americans to the genre of the pastoral, seeing them equally forever midweek to some simplistically redemptive idea of nature that is itself traditionally European. In this connection, Apelles reflects on what he sees as cultural pandering past other Indian writers: "The writers are only too glad to tell anecdotes or give the audition small cultural pearls." …the imagination can produce more than than illusion…it does not affair whether the illusion is truthful or non considering the imagination tin can create both pleasure and happiness, too. someday.
The novel'due south flaws are negligible, though, because they do not really detract from its main involvement, which is Treuer's compelling argument and his admirably and amusingly diverse styles of developing information technology in narrative, equally if conducting a main grade in the possibilities of contemporary American prose.
An intriguing book, with two interwoven stories -- one of a modern Native American translator, and the other of the very onetime manuscript he is translating. The story of the translator was at times repetitive and fifty-fifty boring, but the story that he was translating was very pleasurable to read. I wish I could say that I empathize the ins and outs and the circular nature of the 2. Possibly it is enough to say that, as the narrator advises, 1 could start over and read it once more after reaching the finish. I know that I could plough it over in my listen in diverse means.
Two beloved stories in ane, the past and the present entwined. Very dissimilar than many books I have read. I loved it!
I'm not really sure what I was doing when I picked this book out... But somehow I managed to completely overlook the fact that it's near Native Americans, and was completely surprised when I saw the embrace before cracking it open on the railroad train... Then is it any proficient? Yes! Only more probable than not, his next book will exist completely phenominal and accident this one away. While it was enjoyable to read, y'all can tell that he worked at writing information technology. Non necessarily a bad thing, but not fantastic for the catamenia, either. Dr. Apelles is a solitary, bachelor translator (fantastic name for a translator, by the way, and then evocative: Tu t'appelles comment?), and the novel alternates between the story of his life and the story he'south working on translating, from an Indian language that, somehow, he grew up speaking but is at present the only person who knows it. And so at the cease it gets meta. Kind of unneccesarily. Merely don't let that finish you. He passes the square outside the archives. They have jazz concerts there during the summer, which makes about equally much sense as talking with your rima oris closed or having sex with your dress on -- the beauty of the thing destroyed by the very act. I thing I actually liked near the book is the way Apelles's identity as an Indian is articulated. He hates telling people about it, considering he knows they'll have never met one whatsoever more, and he hates being weighed down by the history of it -- he feels like when somebody knows he'southward an Indian, he's forced to be in the by rather than the future/present. Did I mention that Dr. Apelles works at a book depository? And his boss'due south name is Mrs. Millefeuille? (1000 sheets!)
This novel tries to be a metatextual tale equally it is about a Native American scholar who realizes he has never fallen in beloved himself as he translates a manuscript, a love story, written in a Native American language only he can understand. Equally he translates, the reader follows the story of the ii young lovers and their many trials(fictional? historical? we are never told, though their story is told in a straightforward, folktale-like way); simply the reader too follows the story of the translator as he falls in honey and simultaneously pursues his work, which is terribly difficult to make interesting, even in popular novels like A.S. Byatt's Possession. Sitting in a library poring over manuscripts and papers may be fascinating to the scholar caught upwardly in the thralls of research: but to the observer information technology is only a sedentary activeness that is about as thrilling as watching a Goggle box infomercial on a snow day. Treuer doesn't quite take the chops to brand Apelles' story a page-turner, and the novel at times seems like a formal exercise in literary theory, becoming at one point (for me, anyway) so slow that I constitute myself flipping forrad to detect out what was going on with the lovers in the translation. I admit I don't accept much patience with novels that play on the trope of literary study and the life of the listen---Borges is the only author whose piece of work on these themes have been able to engage me---merely a love story should sweep the reader off of his/her feet, should engage his/her passion every bit well as the intellect. This novel doesn't do that.
The language in this book is absolutely cute. Having read non-fiction by Treuer, I was surprised at how differently he writes fiction. Different form for different functions, peradventure. In any case, it was the writing that I nigh enjoyed - the words called and how they are put together. As for the story itself . . . I tend to enjoy books that take place primarily in a character'due south caput - it's like experiencing someone else's inner life, which isn't really possible exterior of books. The interwoven story of the young Indian couple living in the treaty era was less interesting for me (but apparently the contrary was true for some other readers, so something for everyone, I suppose). In any case, after about 3 quarters of the book, the main story but gets very abstract and sort of folds in on itself; I'm not entirely certain how, in the writer'south mind, it actually ends. Simply information technology was definitely worth reading, and information technology held my attending all the way through. P.S. (2019) I just saw an overview of this book that compared it to Calvino, and something clicked. Yep! The last third of this book felt very much like If on a Winter'south Dark a Traveller. Very different story, but the same kind of feeling.
I discovered David Treuer through an essay he wrote for Slate, which led me to another he wrote for the Los Angeles Times. Both are beautiful intellectual expressions: succinct thought, harmonious linguistic communication. The 2nd essay touches on Dr. Appelles, and made me eager to read the novel. I was captivated past both stories in Dr. Appelles - the folk tale and the modern love story. I institute both wonderfully imaginative and captivating. Dr. Appelles is a smart volume, so the intellectual evaluations are not misplaced; however, it is also a lovely conveyance of a place - the heart of a man who has never loved and earnestly tries to - and needs to be felt more than analyzed. To paraphrase St. Exupery, what is essential is invisible to the mind; it must be felt with the heart.
3.5 stars It'due south a unique look at being Native American in the modern American world. Through ii parallel storylines, Treuer examines the traditional, sometime version of native stories contrasted & compared with the version of a modern man'due south story. Treuer's work too weaves in questions virtually stories, books, histories, our inner lives, & our outer lives. I recollect I found it especially intriguing because dd has ever been interested in Native American life & we have spent many hours over the years at the Smithsonian'due south National Museum of the American Indian (& a few other places as well), which provides a glimpse non merely of history just also of mod life. Treuer's volume fit neatly with all the exhibits I've seen & read about; Treuer is well-placed to muse on some of these topics every bit he is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. Worth reading.
Fascinating in an understated sort of way. I'1000 enjoying Dr. Appelles' own feel of translating the story and his cocky-revelations fifty-fifty more than the story he'southward translating of the tale of colonial-era Native Americans.
As the story goes on it, so little happens and in a less engaging way than at first, so I abandoned it.
The book is definitely written in an interesting way and presents some interesting points merely is overall very skillful. It presents a different portrait than that of a "typical" American Indian.
Again, unfortunately, need a new category of "didn't carp to finish". More internal monolog interspered with historic native american fable.
A mystery romance. Sweet story only likewise one of a man integrating his beloved cultural heritage into his mod life. Author is Ojibwe from northern Minnesota and a teacher of artistic writing. This book is a beautiful expression of his heritage. The book inside the book is the beautiful loving portrayal of a Native American family from the past. This volume would be my option for a book club and for inclusion on a high school reading listing.
A delightful find as I was ruthlessly boxing up my dear books to donate to the library in grooming of our motion. A fascinating love story and favorable description of Native American life back in the 19th century. A wonderful read.
Loved information technology! Sure, there were times when the story dragged a bit, only so does life sometimes. The author really made me care about these characters and it will be a long time before I forget them.
More like 3.5. I'thousand then...enchantedly confused.
very deadening offset, but i really liked this volume by the finish.
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Apr 22, 2020I didn't similar Dr Apelles' side but oh well
An Ojibwe translator and linguist who lives in a metropolis that feels a lot like Minneapolis finds an old manuscript that only he tin can decipher. Two dear stories entwine in this beautifully constructed novel that gives postmodernism a skilful proper noun. Written past, yes, an Ojibwe author, this is a lovely, lovely novel. Annex: I read Monty'due south review, which linked to an interview w/ Treuer, who says the volume takes place in an E Coast metropolis. And then much for my ability to tell one common cold region from another. Hey, I'chiliad a southerner, severe winters whether in Boston or Milwaukee are too cold for me. Apelles was a 5th century Greek painter who was very famous in his own fourth dimension and, thanks to Pliny's History, his prowess intrigued the great Renaissance artists, although none of his paintings survived. Pliny made famous the legend that Alexander the Great gave Apelles his slave/lover Campaspe, a model for one of Apelles' all-time known works, Venus Ascent from the Sea, which centuries later inspired Botticelli. Campaspe became synonymous with "mistress." The English poet John Lyly wrote a play by that name in 1584 and also the verse form that begins "Cupid and my Campaspe play'd/At cards for kisses—Cupid paid." In 1651 Pedro Calderón de la Barca also wrote a play on the Campaspe story, "Darlo todo y no dar nix." Truer says in the same interview, "Apelles' life is a lot like my own, except that I found beloved, thank you very much, and I was wise enough to take hold of it when it came my style. So, I'chiliad much luckier than Apelles, and probably much happier for more of my life, too. He's a quirky guy, I merely love him. I would love to spend time with him." It's a multilayered novel that engages the reader in play, circles of meaning, imagination. There are hints of Borges, Calvino, Saramago. Treuer says of Apelles, "Office of his dilemma is that he feels like he'southward got no linguistic communication for himself, in that how he feels he actually is, he can't communicate. And so translation is a metaphor for beloved. How exercise you translate your inner-cocky into a language that so someone else outside of you can understand, and nothing's lost in translation? And information technology'due south besides a metaphor for culture. He falls outside of what people take as an 'authentic Indian,' so he's got no manner to limited himself. He hasn't communicated this to anybody, and it's painful for him."
This confusing novel follows Dr. Apelles as he is working on an important translation. During the mean solar day, he works at a book cataloging company, where books are sent to be stored abroad forever. His other life includes translations in his native language of Ojibwe. Throughout the book, Dr. Apelles recalls childhood memories and falls in beloved. A secondary story takes place underneath, which details two teenage Indians who were abased at birth and eventually autumn in love. In the end, the book turns out to exist his translation. This novel gets very confusing as time goes on, considering the book is a behemothic circle, only making sense if you consider it every bit a giant loop. "Stories are meant to exist heard and are meant to be read. And translations, no affair what the field of study, are similar stories in that regard, only more so. Twice the effort has been put into a translated document than has been put into the original: it has to be created in the first identify, and so it has to be recreated." 24 "We could do something or not do something and it wouldn't matter because it would have no perceptible effect on the world. What we feel is freedom. And what we feel is also oblivion." 25 "Considering, for stories, the sky is fabricated of the endless dome of readers and freckled with constellations of the kindly and curious." 31 "Subsequently all, when confronted with expiry we mourn the past, but when confronted with silence we mourn the present and the future equally well." 167 "Hope is simply the endeavor to introduce to the future some by happiness, an try to change the ending – with different characters and new environs – of some distressing little episode of the past. And the terrible prospect and nigh difficult chore is to create, from scratch, some unforeseen, some hereafter happiness that has no hold in the soil of our years." 267
this is i of the nigh beautiful and understated books that i've ever read that is, at the same time, so fiercely postmodern in its agenda and conception of itself. this is a wonderful demonstration of all the promise of the most avant-garde of innovations and literary cocky-awareness but without any of the clinical coldness that unremarkably comes with the territory. a real achievement, particularly from such a young author. possibly fifty-fifty more important than all this is the fact that he has gone a very long way toward completely recreating the idea of a "native american" artform. the native writer writes about a native human being who does not, due to the events of his life, identify with the native -- and thereby gets around nearly all of the conflicts that accept get the trite hallmarks of so much contemporary native artwork. the author gets to write about all the things that he wants to transmit about his civilisation, people and traditions without having to tread the same old ground of "identity" and "self-image". this allows a beautifully-written book about the greater topic of simply being human to resound with and exist enriched past native themes in a very organic, believable style.
This is exactly the kind of book I dearest. It'due south literary and complex, visceral, historical, and the revolves library plays a central role. I've only started reading it, but the opening stories of the 2 different American Indians is both taut and tender and brings the harsh reality of life in an Indian village into abrupt perspective. 6/one/08 - The pacing slowed down considerably and I found the mod story less compelling. It makes sense that Apelles would exist a quiet wistful person and once he falls in love his life is enriched and he blooms. His back story is fascinating, but I thought his gimmicky story was flat and the character implausible. Although the Bizmandiz & Eta story started out with a fascinating element of magical realism, I felt that it slowed downward considerably. Perchance I'd read information technology ameliorate if I had greater understanding of Native American storytelling and mythology. Lastly, the plot twist at the finish lacked excitement and surprise. I do appreciate the vitality of linguistic communication and story and their human relationship to cultures, what happens to a narrative or text when no one is able or cares to read it.
This entire review has been hidden considering of spoilers.
While this is ostensibly the story of Dr Apelles, a lonely translator of dying Native American languages, interweaved with the story that he is translating, the 2 stories overlap far more (maybe?) than they offset announced to. The narrative of two immature Native Americans blossoming into love and desire seems to be the field of study matter that has shocked Dr Apelles out of his ordered, sterile existence. However, Dr Apelles and the narrator are reticent upon this betoken: what exactly is he translating? And how does it reflect or affect his admiration of his coworker, Campaspe? I found this ambivalence intriguing and sometimes exasperating. Treuer adds all sorts of interesting effects, such as the delineation of his repetitive routines, sometimes in identical or about-identical linguistic communication, so that it's not clear whether nosotros're seeing the same mean solar day over again; also the occasional dip into the heed of a peripheral character to see Dr Apelles from a different viewpoint. Meanwhile, the prose is magnificent, sometimes to the point of intrusiveness, so that it made me end and chew over a description or the expression of a thought.
Alone and seemingly satisfied with this, Dr Appelles lives a anticipated and well-ordered life working at a library-type system and translating American Indian texts 1 day every two weeks. His new translation somehow makes it obvious to him that he has never known honey and needs it. Told as two stories: that of Dr Appelles and the story from translation. The translation story is American Indian myth of two people destined for each other and the tragedies that nigh come between them. Dr Appelles story tells of his routines and their slow methodical breakup, including a relationship with a coworker. But does the translation really exist? Does the love matter? Treuer weaves an enticing tale with two stories. Events announced and reappear throughout the book, at first seemingly repetitve, only then yous realize they are always seen from a unlike perspective. I enjoyed the use of Ojibwe linguistic communication throughout, and was particularly pleased that information technology was non translated.
In this novel, David Treuer weaves two stories together in interesting and ambiguous ways. One strand follows a 40-something translator of Native American languages who works archiving unwanted books in a behemothic volume depository (I picture that warehouse at the stop of the get-go Indiana Jones). Every other Friday, Dr. Apelles visits a library archive to piece of work on translation projects. At the start of the book, he has found an heady new text to translate and i that changes him in the process. The other strand seems to be the story that Dr. Apelles has plant-a story of 2 Native American young people, who are destined to be together--though they must survive many challenges to exercise and then. By the end of the novel, it is not clear what is being translated and what is truth and it left me with many questions (in a good way) and a desire to talk about this volume with a book group and lots of coffee.
I guess I'm on a kicking of reading stuff written by professors at the U of MN - I but finished Charles Baxter's Start Light, which was swell. And now this novel by David Treuer was even improve. I loved the narrative structure of the novel - capacity of a Native American story interwoven with chapters from its translator'due south life. Appelles is a fascinating grapheme who is seeking a mode to express himself, falling in beloved for the first time, and trying to maneuver between the Indian heritage others project onto him and his own agreement of himself. It's a book for people who similar to retrieve about reading - not but textual reading, just reading the world around u.s.a., reading other people, and reading our own lives. I really liked this novel, and I'g looking forrard to reading more than of Treuer's work.
David Treuer is coming next week to speak at Santa Atomic number 26'south School for Advanced Research, which has been around since the 50s. He'll exist talking about his nonfiction work Life on the Rez, so I wanted to read some of his piece of work first. And what a sweet surprise this love story is. One reviewier, Edmund White?, nails it past saying "Imagine Longefellow's The Song of Hiawatha written by Nobokov and you will get some thought of the linguistic fireworks and suavity of the prose in this extraordinary book." Plus, Treuer is Ojibwe from northern Minnesota. I grew upwardly in MN and never had any sense at all of the life and culture of our dominant tribe.
I loved this book. Dr Apelles, whose first name we never learn, is translating a Native American love story written in a language only he understands. For the story to be alive, it must be read. While working on the translation, Dr Apelles, who has for many years resisted being read or known, embarks on a relationship with a co-worker, his desire to be read by another human existence sparked by his translating work. Although in many ways this is a novel most Dr Apelles' inner life, information technology is a multi-layered work, with the story of the young Native American couple alternate with Apelles' own story. Treuer is an elegant writer and his beautiful prose is a joy to read.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/231742
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