EDWARD GAUVIN

Scattered newsicles and web mentions:

• Live at the blog Largehearted Boy is a partial soundtrack (song listings for specific stories + liner notes) for Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s A Life on Paper. Check it out!
• “Writing is itself a translation,” begins Rick Kleffel’s great review at The Agony Column, echoing Borges’ bon mot, “the only difference between an original and a translation is that a translation can be measured against a visible text.”

“Brain-wrapping is an appropriate description of the reading experience with regards to Châteaureynaud. His surreal, slippery style offers readers one absurdity after another rendered with a relentlessly precise style. It’s a happy union of opposites that makes head-scratching incomprehension a joie de vivre…

Remarkably enough, it’s the prose, translated by Edward Gauvin, that shines here. The straightforward thrust, the matter-of-fact descriptions give Châteaureynaud’s work a power that cuts through his weird and fantastic situations.”

• Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray singles out A City of Museums”, a “particularly intriguing short story by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud” in LCRW 25. “It’s all very quick and yet not slick but rather old and museum-ish, if that makes any sense.”
• SFRevu, reviewing the same issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, calls it “a beautifully written piece.”
• The press service of the University of Iowa has announced its seven Fulbright scholars for the coming year, and my grinning mug (photo courtesy Megan McDowell, circa ALTA 2009) can be found among them here.
• Some title fun: Twilight: Eclipse is titled Hésitation in French, in case you weren’t sure of the subtext, but they kept the “Twilight” part. The Hangover became Very Bad Trip, and Pirate Radio, which we Yanks retitled from the original British The Boat That Rocked, became Good Morning England.
• A fascinating piece at Publishing Perspectives by American crime author David Fulmer about his French translator, the blind Frédéric Grellier, who uses mostly audio, and not his fellow countryman’s invention, Braille.