3 works in translation: History and literature intertwined
It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided.
Besides the fact that literature comes with a rich history of its own, it can give readers access to the past that is not less valuable for being, to some degree, imaginary.
Jenny Erpenbeck's and Oksana Lutsyshyna's offer this opportunity to connect with time past. takes readers into the final days of divided Germany, while , only a couple years and countries away, portrays the wobbly first moments of Ukraine's post-Soviet independence. On the other hand, Françoise Sagan's newly released is a reflection of mid-20th-century French bourgeois society — but, primarily, an item of literary history: an incomplete and previously unknown work by a legendary writer.
