The Translator's Bride - by João Reis (Paperback)

About the Book

After his bride leaves him, the Translator tries to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren't paying him, he's trying to survive a woman's unwanted advances, and he's trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions. Darkly funny, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace, this work is an incredible ride--whether the reader is a translator or not. not.

Book Synopsis

At the start of The Translator's Bride, the Translator's bride has left him. But if he can only find a way to buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator's mind as he walks around an unnamed city in 1920, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren't paying him, he's trying to survive a woman's unwanted advances, and he's trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions. All while he struggles with his own mind and angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Darkly funny, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace, The Translator's Bride is an incredible ride--whether you're a translator or not!

Review Quotes

"The circuitous absorption of The Translator's Bride is sustained by its novella-like structure and dark, gleaming humor. . . . [Its] language is beautiful, mordant, and tragic."--Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."--Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books

"The Translator's Bride is a great little book that brings a breath of fresh air to today's moment in Portuguese literature, asserting itself as an excellent novel not to be forgotten."--Jorge Navarro, O Tempo Entre Os Meus Livros

"João Reis . . . is a great connoisseur of literary comedy, in a subtle way in which everything is so natural, but simultaneously rude, with the cruel ways in which various characters are depicted, thus creating a blackly comic web that weaves together the world of the book."--Nelson Zagalo, Virtual Illusion

"João Reis' great success in The Translator's Bride is to convince his audience that they are reading a work written at modernism's mid-twentieth-century zenith . . . pulling us out of our own times and holding us in the era of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway."--West Camel, European Literature Network

"Reis's novel is both surprising and hilarious."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

João Reis born in 1985, is a Portuguese writer and a literary translator of Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic). He studied philosophy and has lived in Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the UK, having worked in several different occupations, from book publisher to kitchen chef. He has written various short stories published in digital format or zines, and his first major work is his novel The Translator's Bride. Though still an emerging author, Reis's work has already been compared to that of Hamsun and Kafka, and represents a literary style unseen in contemporary Portuguese writing.

Sónia Oliveira was born in Luanda, in 1972. She studied Portuguese and English Literature and Translation, at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH), and Portsmouth University. She's worked as a freelance translator, an editorial coordinator for EXPO '98, Lisbon World Expositon, and in a renowned design studio. For the last ten years she has been translating for major Portuguese publishing houses, as well as for a number of film festivals, such as IndieLisboa, Doclisboa, and MOTELx.