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longer getting ingénue roles. Their arguments echo in the script the narrator is sketching—and in everything else. Nothing is as it should be. The house seems to have extra rooms. Pictures appear where none had been before. And the words “Get away” appear mysteriously in his notebook, even within the script. Low on provisions after a few days, he descends the treacherously serpentine road to the tiny village below and its one general store. As he gathers his items, the surly shopkeeper cryptically asks, “Anything happen yet?” People have been known to mysteriously disappear—lots of dangerous crevasses, and the rescue-service chief is mostly drunk. A woman who overhears this waits by his car and tells him, “Get away quickly.” It’s certainly a narrative tour de force: as Kehlmann deftly demonstrates, a good writer can get his readers to believe pretty much anything. We are obviously to be reminded of Steven King’s The Shining, but the way Kehlmann depicts that lonely road up to the chalet may make us think, too, of the door that Kafka’s doorkeeper shuts. This is the door “before the law” that had been reserved solely for the supplicant; just as the solitary road leads only to that chalet, a chalet had just been newly built, as if expressly for him. We are thus kept in thrall not by some lurking horror but by the skewed qualities of the narrative. We get an inkling of how off-kilter everything is getting when the narrator cannot remember the little white lie he told his daughter the first time she asks where mommy is. As Ross Benjamin conveys it in elegantly straightforward English, this is a writer who has truly gone over the edge. Ulf Zimmermann Kennesaw State University Gabriela Alemán Poso Wells Trans. Dick Cluster. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2018. 128 pages. Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows journalist Gustavo Varas as he investigates the disappearance of a prominent presidential candidate. In Poso Wells, women vanishing into nothingness is a common reality, but no one in town seems concerned. The townspeople are Eric Dupont Songs for the Cold of Heart Trans. Peter McCambridge QC Fiction With literary talent as well as peculiar imagination, Eric Dupont has long been hailed as spearheading the Quebecois literary revival, and in this English translation of his runaway bestseller La Fiancée americaine, we can see why. A book with enormous wingspan and a wonderfully dark wit, this novel offers a panoramic view of the twentieth century as the Lamontagne family struggles to adjust, as all families do, to the swiftly passing years. Silvana Gandolfi Run for Your Life Trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz Restless Books An acclaimed Italian young-adult writer and winner of the Andersen Prize, Silvana Gandolfi has penned a true-to-life thriller portraying the lives of two boys forced to grow up quickly when they are separated from their families. The book provides an unflinching and unromantic portrait of everyday life under the thumb of the Sicilian Mafia, written in an accessible but gripping manner for younger, English-speaking readers. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 77 quiet and fearful as the military remains a constant and aggressive presence. Varas’s investigation leads him into a literal underworld beneath the town. He encounters a mysterious woman named Valentina inside the mucky tunnels and brings her back to the surface with questions he is not sure he wants the answers to. He learns of five blind men who seem otherworldly and powerful. As he investigates further, a story of terror unfolds. Poso Wells is a perfect complement for the current political state of the United States and the hopelessness caused by constant access to terrible news via social media. The story speaks to the delusion and god complex involved in wanting to lead an entire nation and the destructive power of indifference and greed. It also touches on the silence behind the pervasive violence women encounter in their daily lives. Alemán has created a disturbing, absurd, at times heart-wrenching story about the atrocities committed by patriarchs in...

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