- Paperback: 340 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (2 May 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099422190
- ISBN-13: 978-0099422198
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.4 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,808,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
" James Kelman is one of the new, true masters of millennial English." - Russell Banks
" It is a singular achievement that Kelman succeeds in so unsettling us, even as we make our well-intentioned attempts to decipher these texts. For this reason alone, "Translated Accounts" is an important book... a masterpiece." - John Burnside, "Independent"
" The examples of Beckett and Kafka are at work here. Kelman is one of their few English-speaking inheritors, and their bracing modernist presence reminds us that fiction can be more than parochial, more than glamorous literary noise, more than journalism." - Sean O' Brien, "Sunday Times"
" Kelman is searching for a way of representing voices silenced (or translated) by high culture. His novel ends with the words " if I may speak." At its core is a moral passion which is also a stylistic one: how to speak truly? This is a remarkable, ambitious book." - Robert Crawford, "Independent"
" It is a singular achievement that Kelman succeeds in so unsettling us, even as we make our well-intentioned attempts to decipher these texts. For this reason alone, "Translated Accounts" is an important book... a masterpiece." - John Burnside, "Independent"
" The examples of Beckett and Kafka are at work here. Kelman is one of their few English-speaking inheritors, and their bracing modernist presence reminds us that fiction can be more than parochial, more than glamorous literary noise, more than journalism." - Sean O' Brien, "Sunday Times"
" Kelman is searching for a way of representing voices silenced (or translated) by high culture. His novel ends with the words " if I may speak." At its core is a moral passion which is also a stylistic one: how to speak truly? This is a remarkable, ambitious book." - Robert Crawford, "Independent"
Sunday Times
‘A writer of vast and original talent'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
'nthibiginninwuzthiwurd', writes Tom Leonard the Glaswegian poet and good friend of James Kelman. Language as power, and the literary mediation of political cause and effect, have long informed the subject matter of James Kelman's estimable literature. At the centre of even his earliest work there is an absence; an acknowledgement that the social experience of working-class characters is not easliy represented by a literature that upholds a primarily middle-class system of values. Yet the absence is performative; a conscious and articulate expression of the less articulate political consciousnesses buried deeply at the bottom of many British novels' heirarchies of power. Kelman' subversion of the text un-silences the silenced by freeing characters' speech from standard English and its 'quotation mark' gaols; it invests the standard third-person narrative voice with doubt and the vocabulary of the story's protagonists, and allows elision when the narrator's mind strays. In 'How late it was, how late' a literal loss of sight means any understanding can only be gained through trusting the words both of characters and their almost indistinguishable narrator. Truth can no longer be found in order, only in a leap of faith. The word is not to be trusted.
Translated Accounts is Kelman's first novel not to be set in Glasgow or primarily concern the actions of working-class men, but the 'story' continues Kelman's investigation into the possibility of finding truth in a world which consistently mediates representations of human experience for political ends. In an un-named state ravaged by conflict, colleagues, family and friends disappear, and are searched for but not found. Records are hidden or go astray. Information services are corrupt or unavailable. Soldiers commit atrocities and people attempt resistence or flee. The enemy, if it is a singular enemy, or an enemy at all, is not named. Probably it is be the government of the country itself. But everywhere there is an enforced silence which amounts to much more than a brutal excercise in state propaganda. Absence, again, is at the heart of Kelman's text. Towards the end of the novel a man walks passed what he thinks is a corpse on a forest track. Hours later, he passes it again and notices that it has moved: it had perhaps not been dead. In the absence of certainty the wanderer has misinterpreted his factual relation to what exists and what does not exist and he 'roars' an existential roar which invests in his being all the knowledge of a savage history of imperialism. Whether Kelman draws parallels with the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, a future much closer to home, or a present still under wraps, this is an openly ethical literature which builds on Kelman's past linguistic and formal explorations. Though perhaps diametrically opposed in their politics, the result is that Kelman's literature has finally reached a Conradian 'heart of darkness'. The horror, the horror.
Translated Accounts is Kelman's first novel not to be set in Glasgow or primarily concern the actions of working-class men, but the 'story' continues Kelman's investigation into the possibility of finding truth in a world which consistently mediates representations of human experience for political ends. In an un-named state ravaged by conflict, colleagues, family and friends disappear, and are searched for but not found. Records are hidden or go astray. Information services are corrupt or unavailable. Soldiers commit atrocities and people attempt resistence or flee. The enemy, if it is a singular enemy, or an enemy at all, is not named. Probably it is be the government of the country itself. But everywhere there is an enforced silence which amounts to much more than a brutal excercise in state propaganda. Absence, again, is at the heart of Kelman's text. Towards the end of the novel a man walks passed what he thinks is a corpse on a forest track. Hours later, he passes it again and notices that it has moved: it had perhaps not been dead. In the absence of certainty the wanderer has misinterpreted his factual relation to what exists and what does not exist and he 'roars' an existential roar which invests in his being all the knowledge of a savage history of imperialism. Whether Kelman draws parallels with the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, a future much closer to home, or a present still under wraps, this is an openly ethical literature which builds on Kelman's past linguistic and formal explorations. Though perhaps diametrically opposed in their politics, the result is that Kelman's literature has finally reached a Conradian 'heart of darkness'. The horror, the horror.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4 stars
26 Jan 2003
Format:Hardcover
James Kelman won the Booker Prize for his novel "How Late It Was, How Late" a good few years ago now, but in the time since then he has produced superior work such as "The Good Times" and "Translated Accounts".
This book is a series of narratives written/spoken/emailed by people (of uncertain geographical location) whose right to free speech has been denied to the extent that sometimes it is only by attempting a decoding of the censor's voice that anything can be understood.
The narratives are sometimes romantic, sometimes banal, and occasionally horrific. But because the language is garbled by translation or censorship, the images thrown up are general rather than specific. There is no doubt that the author knows a lot about the former Yugoslavia, but such reference points aren't really useful since the book is more concerned with this kaleidoscope of individual experiences, rather than shaking a leftist fist at governments.
In ways this book is a first. It's not the everything's-under-the-surface dream world of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". It's not the inner-city Glasgow of "How Late". Neither poetry nor prose. What it is is the glacial hardness of the human spirit under a strain so great that sense itself is broken.
This book is a series of narratives written/spoken/emailed by people (of uncertain geographical location) whose right to free speech has been denied to the extent that sometimes it is only by attempting a decoding of the censor's voice that anything can be understood.
The narratives are sometimes romantic, sometimes banal, and occasionally horrific. But because the language is garbled by translation or censorship, the images thrown up are general rather than specific. There is no doubt that the author knows a lot about the former Yugoslavia, but such reference points aren't really useful since the book is more concerned with this kaleidoscope of individual experiences, rather than shaking a leftist fist at governments.
In ways this book is a first. It's not the everything's-under-the-surface dream world of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". It's not the inner-city Glasgow of "How Late". Neither poetry nor prose. What it is is the glacial hardness of the human spirit under a strain so great that sense itself is broken.
4 stars
26 Jan 2003
Format:Hardcover
James Kelman won the Booker Prize for his novel "How Late It Was, How Late" a good few years ago now, but in the time since then he has produced superior work such as "The Good Times" and "Translated Accounts".
This book is a series of narratives written/spoken/emailed by people (of uncertain geographical location) whose right to free speech has been denied to the extent that sometimes it is only by attempting a decoding of the censor's voice that anything can be understood.
The narratives are sometimes romantic, sometimes banal, and occasionally horrific. But because the language is garbled by translation or censorship, the images thrown up are general rather than specific. There is no doubt that the author knows a lot about the former Yugoslavia, but such reference points aren't really useful since the book is more concerned with this kaleidoscope of individual experiences, rather than shaking a leftist fist at governments.
In ways this book is a first. It's not the everything's-under-the-surface dream world of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". It's not the inner-city Glasgow of "How Late". Neither poetry nor prose. What it is is the glacial hardness of the human spirit under a strain so great that sense itself is broken.
This book is a series of narratives written/spoken/emailed by people (of uncertain geographical location) whose right to free speech has been denied to the extent that sometimes it is only by attempting a decoding of the censor's voice that anything can be understood.
The narratives are sometimes romantic, sometimes banal, and occasionally horrific. But because the language is garbled by translation or censorship, the images thrown up are general rather than specific. There is no doubt that the author knows a lot about the former Yugoslavia, but such reference points aren't really useful since the book is more concerned with this kaleidoscope of individual experiences, rather than shaking a leftist fist at governments.
In ways this book is a first. It's not the everything's-under-the-surface dream world of Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". It's not the inner-city Glasgow of "How Late". Neither poetry nor prose. What it is is the glacial hardness of the human spirit under a strain so great that sense itself is broken.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Not Since Beckett Has There Been Such A Book
22 Oct 2001
Format:Hardcover
There's so many books out there, and so many good ones (thankfully), so it's hard to explain exactly why, after reading this one, I felt I'd read something truly important.
Language forms the deep centre of this novel, the story of an un-named country under what seems to be a kind of stark martial law.
The whole book is written in a kind of elegantly broken English. These are the stories of a non-English country forced into English with little regard for the identities of the people or the importance of either language. You see how hard it is to explain?
Language forms the deep centre of this novel, the story of an un-named country under what seems to be a kind of stark martial law.
The whole book is written in a kind of elegantly broken English. These are the stories of a non-English country forced into English with little regard for the identities of the people or the importance of either language. You see how hard it is to explain?
After all that has happened recently, the fibre of this story feels desperately necessary. The human stuff that is so difficult to parse within this novel (due to the faulty translations--the really incredible style developed by Kelman, it's just amazing, really), is the struggle we're now all facing to find the right language to describe our horrors.
This book will immediately remind you of certain books by Nobel prize winning guy Samuel Beckett. It's not as heavy a read as say, The Unnamable, which is good. It's sort of like Beckett's later fictions, but instead of completely vanishing down the endless hole of despair and (let's face it) nonsense, Kelman is telling a fascinating story.
If when you read you don't like your time wasted on tripe, vacuousness, bull, sloppiness, hackwork, guile, smoke &/or mirrors, etc. then certainly this is a book worth reading. The essential truth here, is that like Faulkner, like Joyce, like Beckett, like Pynchon, like Bellow, this is a book for history. The deep history of great reading.
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