The Corpse Washer

Начало книги

“A poem is never finished, only abandoned,“’ according to Paul Valéry. This is often true. Can one say the same about a novel?

Novels do end, of course, with the last word on the last page. But even before becoming a writer I always wondered as a young reader about the lives and trajectories of events after the act of reading comes to an end. As a novelist I still wonder what became of my characters. Alas, there is no way to communicate with them. I know more about the characters and the events than I have written on paper, but I don’t know everything.

Novels inhabit a liminal space between the real and the imaginary. The experience of translating my own novel has allowed me to return to that space and to inhabit it once again, temporarily. This time, however, the characters spoke English. Their lives (and deaths) did not change at all, but they said a few words here and there differently and left a few others unsaid.

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