Diego Marani

Diego Marani continues his engagement with the Finnish language with The Last of the Vostyachs. At the start of the novel, Ivan walks free from a Soviet labor camp and heads into the tundra to live on his own. Ivan hasn't spoken for years, because he is the last living speaker of Vostyach, a proto-language long thought lost to the world. When he comes into a little town to sell some skins he meets a Russian linguist, and she prevails on him to come with her to Helsinki for her to show off at a language conference.

From there Marani takes his story into a really trite and silly direction where the last of the Vostyachs becomes the centre of a passionate and arcane academic dispute over the origins of the Finnish language. The book is full of linguistic jargon and has some of the worst sex scenes you may ever read. A tiresome and silly book, all the more disappointing because the book's opening premise could have been developed into a much more interesting and moving story. This is a good idea totally wasted.… (mais)

The most polyglot of a group of interpreters at an international conference centre has some sort of breakdown and starts producing random strings of sounds. He believes the original human language is manifesting itself. He disappears and then the director of the conference centre starts suffering a similar breakdown and goes looking for him.

Not as good as the author's other books in this loosely connected trilogy. Some good ideas but he needs to pay more attention to the details. For a story about language and identity, it is very vague about what language is being used at times. In the end it wasn't bad enough to DNF it but I was conscious of reading it quickly to get it out of the way.… (mais)

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.… (mais)