I was drawn into it right away. Bakopoulos' writing is clear and contemplative. The book's narrator is a writer and translator. As a person who reads a large volume of literature in translation, her musings on translation were really interesting to me. At one point, another character in the book who is a writer describes the experience of being translated as a kind of violence. Over the course of the book, the narrator is translating another work – from modern Greek into English – and contrary to her usual practice, she begins the translation without reading the book in full first, so she is discovering and creating the story at the same time. It left me thinking a lot about my own experience as a reader, occasionally a reader of works in languages other than my own native tongue. I am not fluent enough in any language to avoid translating as I go, but reading in another language forces you to think very hard about the sense of each word – to notice where translation fails. I think it leaves a deeper impression of the work because you've had to really contemplate it. Whereas when you read in your native language, it's easy to glide right through.
A dark mood hangs over the whole book, which left me feeling always on the precipice – reading with a sense of dread, but wanting to go on. If I have one complaint about this book, it's that it didn't quite deliver on the mood. There is a constant foreboding in the book, an implication of terrible events to come, which make the actual events of the narrative a bit anticlimactic. And yet, I was also relieved by this. I didn't want whatever terrible violence might lay in wait to happen, and then ... it just didn't. I could see some readers finding this unsatisfactory, but overall I really enjoyed the book.
