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Translated Accounts
 
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Translated Accounts (Paperback)

by James Kelman (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • 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.co.uk Sales Rank: 876,671 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #31 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > K > Kelman, James

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Product Description

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"

Sunday Times
‘A writer of vast and original talent'

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13 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Mediated truths in a heart of darkness, 9 Oct 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Translated Accounts (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.
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