We will be reading Lydia Davis's translation of this novel, published by Penguin Classics in 2004. Copies will be available at the Poetry Center gift kiosk. This book club discussion will be led by fiction writer and Tucson Weekly theater reviewer Laura Owen.

“Relax: it’s fantastic. There’s no question that Davis’s American English is thinner and more literal than C.K. Scott Montcrieff’s archaically inflected turns of phrase and idioms, at least as revised by Terence Kilmartin and later by D.J. Enright. The removal of some of the familiar layers of the past in this all-new translation gives one a feeling similar to that of encountering an old master painting that has just been cleaned: the colors seem sharper and momentarily disorienting.”—Publisher’s Weekly