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A review by gerhard
What's Left Of The Night by Karen Emmerich, Ersi Sotiropoulos
5.0
The weekend I finished reading this, there was an article in the Sunday Times about 19-year-old South African Adam Seef taking his own life because he feared he could be gay. That this kind of tragedy can still occur in our supposedly enlightened times beggars the imagination.
While I don’t know anything about Cavafy other than what I’ve read on Wikipedia, I was pleased this did not prove a hindrance to me enjoying Ersi Sotiropoulos’s sensational reimagining of his three-day sojourn in Paris. This seemed to have been both an artistic and personal catharsis for the young Cavafy, placing him firmly on the path of future literary immortality.
Though given his naivete and callousness as evinced here, it is a wonder that the poor young unconfident poet was barely able to scratch together a single line. There is a lot about the meaning of art and life in the course of the book, sandwiched between wonderfully homoerotic passages, but nothing dry or preachy.
Karen Emmerich’s translation is truly sensational. The writing is both deep and erotic at the same time, astute, and acutely descriptive. Paris lives and breathes from these pages. Oh, and then there is that ending, which I am sure Samuel R. Delany would give a nod and a grin to.
One thing is for sure, I am never going to look at a baguette in the same way again. Sotiropoulos does for the baguette what Andre Aciman did for oranges in Call Me By Your Name.
Though bear in mind that this version involves the decidedly unromantic locale of a pissotière: “As obscene as it was, he thought, there was also something sacred about that feast …”
While I don’t know anything about Cavafy other than what I’ve read on Wikipedia, I was pleased this did not prove a hindrance to me enjoying Ersi Sotiropoulos’s sensational reimagining of his three-day sojourn in Paris. This seemed to have been both an artistic and personal catharsis for the young Cavafy, placing him firmly on the path of future literary immortality.
Though given his naivete and callousness as evinced here, it is a wonder that the poor young unconfident poet was barely able to scratch together a single line. There is a lot about the meaning of art and life in the course of the book, sandwiched between wonderfully homoerotic passages, but nothing dry or preachy.
Karen Emmerich’s translation is truly sensational. The writing is both deep and erotic at the same time, astute, and acutely descriptive. Paris lives and breathes from these pages. Oh, and then there is that ending, which I am sure Samuel R. Delany would give a nod and a grin to.
One thing is for sure, I am never going to look at a baguette in the same way again. Sotiropoulos does for the baguette what Andre Aciman did for oranges in Call Me By Your Name.
Though bear in mind that this version involves the decidedly unromantic locale of a pissotière: “As obscene as it was, he thought, there was also something sacred about that feast …”