Someone’s passed me the English edition, with the usual gibberish-infested flap. The Scotsman describes it as having “a dramatic tension that so many contemporary novels today seem to lack,” while Scotland on Sunday says, “The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, mixing formality with poetry, so the rambling prose occasionally sparkles with lovely phrases … The twists of the story which fold in on itself again and again like complicated origami, eventually reveal a simple shape. Love and deception are at the heart of the literary mystery – aren’t they always?” Reviewers are still preferable to literary critics, but there does seem to be a peculiar tradition in Scotland of entrusting the work to one’s slowest, weepiest cousin. High-falutin’ Anglo expats are terribly snotty about Zafón (“Well of course darling it was simply HOPELESS before Lucia (¡She’s SO like her father!) translated it”), which may have something to do with every last gin and tonic of them having a Transition novel pulverising irritably in the cabinet.
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