Other, equally significant events make their way into the narrative as well. “Season of Ash” is about nearly everything that has happened over the last 50 years: Chernobyl, the collapse of Communism, the rise of biogenetics and environmental terrorism. On page after page of “Season of Ash,” novelistic eccentricity plows headlong into harebrained modernism.
REVIEW ALFRED FOR MAC MAC
The larger absurdity of the exchange is not Mac Adam’s fault it is Volpi’s. The reader met Kevin only three paragraphs ago. To make matters worse, this is not the long-delayed eruption scene of some volcanic relationship. I never wanted anything, I never asked you for a thing! Nothing! Why are you doing this to me? Bastard! I don’t want anything from you, do you hear me. Couldn’t you just keep quiet? You’ve ruined everything! I’m sorry, I never dared to tell you the truth. Why Mac Adam has not continued this (as it turns out) exceedingly helpful Spanish-to-English convention is anyone’s guess, but the result reads like Smeagol trying to talk himself out of throttling a snoozing Frodo Baggins: So most Spanish-language literature translated into English has them added by the translator. Spanish-language literature does not typically employ quotation marks or line breaks within dialogue. Or rather, not in the way his translator, Alfred Mac Adam, has forsworn them.
It says something about Volpi’s strange achievement that quotation marks are frequently what the reader misses most.Ī few great novelists - Gaddis, McCarthy - have forsworn quotation marks, but not in the way that Volpi has forsworn them here. What it lacks: any occasions of arresting language or appreciable drama. What it is not: surprising, involving or at all interesting. It is thoughtful, has epic sweep and contains many notionally appealing characters. John Updike once opened a review with this cruel gallantry: “I wanted very much to like this book, and the fact that I wound up hating it amounts to a painful personal failure.” The Mexican writer Jorge Volpi’s latest novel, “Season of Ash,” is also a book one very much wants to like.
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