The Interpreter

By Diego Marani

The Interpreter follows on from New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs and forms a trilogy of novels on the theme of language and identity. The Interpreter is both a quest and a thriller, and at times a comic picaresque caper around Europe but also deals with with the profound issues of existence. An Interpreter at the UN in Geneva seems to be suffering from a mysterious illness when his translations become unintelligible and resemble no known language. He insists he is not ill and that he is on the verge of discovering the primordial language once spoken by all living creatures. His predicament is soon forgotten when he disappears and things can return to normal. The interpreter's boss starts to have problems in talking and seems to be speaking the same gibberish as the missing interpreter. He seeks help in a Sanatorium in Munich but reaches the conclusion he must talk to his missing colleague to understand what has happened to him and to have any hope of a cure. He follows the trail of the missing interpreter around Europe as his life undergoes profound changes and he is forced to confront the darker side of life. Essential reading for fans of Diego Marani.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Release date: Jan 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910213193

Diego Marani

Award-winning Italian novelist.

Reviews for The Interpreter

[bodachliath · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is a crazy postmodern mashup of styles. It is a picaresque comic nightmare story, but it is the kind of nightmare that could only be conceived by a professional linguist. Like Marani's earlier novels New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs it starts with a linguistic idea and develops a fantasy around it.The narrator of this one is a bureaucrat in charge of a simultaneous translation service. One of his interpreters is reported to be going crazy, his translations breaking down into primitive animal noises. The narrator meets the interpreter, who believes that these noises are part of an innate pre-human universal language, and he is determined to study it. This is just the starting point of a weird journey, full of dreamlike logical jumps, in which the narrator develops the same symptoms, goes to a bizarre language clinic in which the "therapy" consists of immersion in the strangest languages imaginable, and it then turns into a quest/conspiracy thriller.A very readable and memorable book, but like The Last of the Vostyachs, I felt it got rather too silly in places.