The Translator's Bride

August 5, 2019
Presented as a series of snaking, frenetic sentences, Reis’s brief, funny novel—his first translated into English—opens with a nameless 30-something translator sitting in a streetcar in an unnamed city in the 1920s, moping and complaining about his fellow passengers. He has just bid adieu to his bride, Helena, who boarded a ship for the promise of work abroad, and, pining for his absent love, he fills his head with vicious assessments of everyone he encounters, from his generally kind landlady to a publisher owing him money. Meanwhile, a foreign word, “kartofler,” lodges itself in the translator’s head, torturing him as he moves about town and tries to finagle a way to buy a house for Helena and lure her home. Adhering to a rather loose plot, Reis follows the translator for two days, and the action stays rooted in the character’s rambling thoughts, written as paragraph-length run-on sentences, which often clash with his faux cheerful conversations. These juxtapositions result in hilarious exchanges as the translator gradually loses his patience with humanity. Reis’s novel is both surprising and hilarious.