Nina SchuylerRezensionen

As the book opens, Hanne Schubert, living in San Francisco, is finishing the first Japanese to English translation of a book by a celebrated Japanese author. She relates closely to the book’s protagonist and feels she thoroughly understands his personality and motivations. She is convinced her work will be acclaimed as a masterful translation. Her personal life is secondary to her work. Her son and his family live in New York, and she has been estranged from her daughter for six years. Then, she suffers a fall, which injures her brain in an unusual way, rendering her able to speak only Japanese. Feeling isolated, she travels to Japan, where she is profoundly changed by her experiences.

This book is a deep character study of a woman gifted in language but impaired in emotional connections. Hanne is intelligent, confident, disciplined, and hard working. She believes she is “right” about pretty much everything, and anyone that sees life differently is “wrong.” As her own backstory is revealed, she becomes an empathetic character. She is believable and the reader will likely know people with similar traits.

Schuyler subtly explores how people impose their own views on others rather than valuing them for their unique qualities. I think the author does a magnificent job with Hanne’s emotional epiphany. The book also imparts an appreciation of Noh, a Japanese theatrical art. I found myself riveted by the performance scenes. Highly recommended to those that appreciate novels about personal transformations.

We all have a little cop in our heads. An inner voice that tells us what is necessary and proper to do. Many times this is the voice of our parents, a point of view that we have internalized as a child and have accompanied us all our lives. Hannah Schubert, a respected Japanese-English-language translator, also has a voice of that kind. This is the sound of her German mother, who was strict and meticulous in teaching her through language learning, hard work, devotion and without too many complaints and treats. Hannah had become a kind of replica of her mother. A responsible, serious and thorough working woman, a strict mother to her two children. Hannah is a fifty-three-year-old widow living in San Francisco. Her eldest son, Thomas, is a busy, successful lawyer who lives far away with his family on the East Coast of the United States and Brigitte, her sensitive young daughter, had cut off contact with her six years ago. Hannah knows nothing about her.

We meet Hanna at the end of a year of intensive translation work of a significant Japanese-English novel. She feels she has been very successful in her work and is almost in love with the main character - the musician Jiro. In a nostalgic fit, she goes to visit the town hall where she married many years ago to her Japanese husband whom she loved. When she leaves the building, she stumbles down the stairs. The accident has strange results. Hannah cannot use any of the languages ​​she knows except Japanese. In a fit of despair and loneliness, she decides to go to Japan to lecture at the conference she invited too. This trip will lead her to a surprising encounter.

Nina Schiller manages to build a sensitive and reliable world of a non-young woman who met with some very unpleasant truths about herself. The accident and the journey to Japan become a journey of acquaintance with her internal policeman, with its initial assumptions and as a result of its understanding and change. Of course, language and the work of translation play an essential role in the book. The interpretation is Hanna's work, the center of her life and her pride, but it is also a metaphor. Hannah believes in the power of translation to create meaning in the text. The text discusses more than one facet of understanding, communication and a gap between cultures, people, parents, and children. This is not the first novel that describes an internal change following a journey to a different lifestyle and the encounter between East and West, but this time I felt that the journey, as well as transformation, are real, complex and very personal. And the more personal the mission, the more universal it is, and the more it speaks to me, it is a unique book with exceptional qualities.

I wish I could give this book 5 stars! Such a beautiful story... but I found it to be poorly structured and loaded with historical inaccuracies.

Could be Spoilers
I'm not sure how I heard about this book. I should keep track.
I finished it. I read it. I wasn't sure I would but I did. It was OK. The main character reminded me of my mother occasionally, which isn't necessarily a good thing. She sure was a harsh mother. But the daughter was impossible. I am not sure if all the stuff in Japan was more than a device. But it was interesting to see her viewpoint change.

Plus I agree with the other reviewer who pointed out that the main character is an older (50's) woman who has a real life and has sex.

I enjoyed this book a lot for several different reasons: quality prose; excellent characterisation; a subtext; and an ending that was just about perfect, neither too much nor too little. Schuyler is definitely an author to watch.

Hanne, a translator, has just finished work on the book that should cement her career, but accidents and authors intervene. Now she must take a voyage of discovery, internally, and externally.

My very vague plot summary is an effort not to give away too much. There are no great twists to this book, but every event is quite integral, and I found the blurb was one of the variety which actually summarises half the novel - and there's just no need for it.

Schulyer gives us a protagonist we rarely see in fiction - a woman in her fifties. Moreover, a woman in her fifties that is not primarily a mother or a wife, is still a sexual being, and invested in her career. It's remarkable (and sad) how unusual this, and it instantly made me interested. Hanne defies archetypes - her prickly, somewhat awkward presence is believable, not always likeable, but always interesting and sympathetic.

The novel really hinges on her characterisation - it is a book about her - and it's a testament that Schulyer can takes inside someone's head so thoroughly.

Of course, this isn't just a character study. Underneath it all are deep, very crucial questions to the novel and the act of reading, about meaning; about the ways we construct and deconstruct it. And it's (mostly) rendered with light touch; through the characters and their environment rather than superimposed above them, or breaking down the walls to expand on a thesis.

It was, in my opinion, quite gracefully done. This grace extends to Schulyer's clean prose and her structure. Though the plot is not the raison d'etre of this novel, I genuinely had no idea how it would end and where it would go. I was surprised, pleasantly, especially by the ending - which I found very satisfying without that neatness that cloys sometimes. The idea of the story ending, but these lives and people going on. An excellent novel.

In a trip to Japan to understand her difficulties with translating a new work by an up-and -coming Japanese author, Hanne comes to consider her relationship with her estranged daughter. This is a major character study. Not a lot of action, but there is a lot about language and expectations.½

The Translator by Nina Schuyler

I was not expecting much when I checked out this book from the library, but I was soon deeply immersed in the story and impressed by the author’s storytelling skills.

It’s the story of Hanne Schubert, a translator with skills in a number of languages due to having lived in various countries as a child. We learn soon on that she lives by a rigid set of rules and interprets life by those same rules. Due to her hard-assed attitude about life, forged by an equally hard-assed mother and a complete witch of a grandmother, she has estranged her beloved daughter whom she hasn’t seen in six years.

Then her world turns literally upside down when she falls down a set of stairs and hits her head. After that accident she finds that she can still understand English, but the only language she can speak is Japanese. This is a known side effect of certain head injuries and thus completely believable.

Hanne had just finished translating a novel from Japanese into English and is suffering from lack of human contact due to the language barrier, so she accepts an invitation to speak at a conference in Japan on the topic of translation. There she is accosted by the author of the book she has just translated, and he accuses her of destroying his book and making a “jerk” out of the book’s hero.

This attack is the second time that her foundation undergoes a seismic tremor, and she begins to have doubts about herself and her talent as a translator. So when she learns that the hero of the book is based on a real person, a famous Noh actor who lives in Japan, she decides to meet the actor to find out whether her interpretation of the book’s character was correct.

Meeting Moto Okuro does not reassure her, however. On the surface his life does indeed parallel the life of the character in the book, but what is going on under the surface seems to constantly shift and change, and Hanne cannot make it match up to her interpretation or expectation.

Through her relationship to Moto, who challenges her worldview at every turn, she begins to see the rigidity of her world more objectively, to see the wrong decisions she has made in her life, and to understand how she has driven her daughter away by not offering her unconditional motherly love and not allowing her to become who she truly is instead of who Hanne wants her to be.

As a writer and as a speaker of various languages, I could understand the book’s message about creating and getting lost in a world of words and losing sight of the real world with its ineffable levels of meaning and feeling. When Moto steps behind a Noh mask, he loses himself and completely identifies with all the levels of reality of that character. While watching him act his role, Hanne finally discovers the world beyond words and goes in search of her daughter to beg forgiveness.

I wish the author had ended the book at this point and allowed us to imagine the reunion of mother and daughter for ourselves. Unfortunately the reunion with her daughter was clichéd and treacly. There were a few things in the book that were hard to swallow, but I could get past them and go with the flow. The ending, however, did not live up to the power of all that led up to it.

Nevertheless, this a book that is well worth reading.

Review first published on my blog: http://memoriesfrombooks.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-translator.html

Hanne Schubert has an affinity for languages. She works as a freelance translator. Her current project is the translation of the most important work of a well known Japanese author. She is completely immersed in the project, feeling as if she knows the characters as people and understands the author's intent. It is with this confidence that she translates the work.

Soon after completing the project, she is in an accident and suffers a head injury with the rare effect of loss of her native language. They only language she is able to speak and understand is Japanese. Attempting to deal with this, she travels to Japan for a conference. There, she is surprised that the author of the work she translated is angry and accusing her of sabotaging the English translation.

Trying to understand, she seeks out Moto, the actor on whom the main character in the book is based. She develops a relationship and comes to question and change some of the beliefs by which she lives her life.

Along the way, the reader learns that Haane is divorced with two children - a son and a daughter. In addition, the reader learns that she is estranged from her daughter. The history of that relationship is slowly revealed as Hanne learns more about herself in her time with Moto.

My biggest concern with this book is that I had to get more than half way through the book until I got what the story is truly about. Before that, it seems to be pieces going in different directions. Is it about the injury? Is it about Haane's work? Is it about her new relationship with Moto? Is it about her history and her children? The different aspects take a long time form a whole. It eventually comes together, but far too late in the book for me.

Historical fiction about VERY loosely connected stories in Japan and Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. Characters connected (sort of) through a beautiful painting that is sent as packing materials around Japanese pottery.

I thought this book was dreadful! For one thing, I don't know that much about Japanese history during the Meiji restoration, but I'm pretty sure there were some anachronisms on that end of things. And I'm positive that women in 1870 France didn't wear "bras"! Beyond this, the writing was very "pretty" but nothing spectacular, and I found it hard to care about any of the characters.

HD9696 .M843 U67 1995 (IP)

Set during the Franco-Prussian War.