Verba Mundi International Literature

An amnesiac searches for his identity, from Polynesia to Rome, in this novel by the award-winning author of “Dora Bruder.” Guy Roland is in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation. For ten years, he has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files-directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century, but his leads are few. Could he really be the person in that photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience. Published in France as “Rue des Boutiques obscures”, this is both a detective mystery and a haunting meditation on the nature of the self, Patrick Modiano's spare, hypnotic prose, superbly translated by Daniel Weissbort, draws readers into the intoxication of a rare literary experience.

From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to an eccentric English millionaire, who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life: A User's Manual is a symphony of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, and problems of chess and logic. All are there for the reader to solve.

The internationally acclaimed novel based on the heroic resistance during the Armenian genocide of 1915. This is the story of how the people of several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria chose not to obey the Turkish government's deportation order. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh-Mount Moses-and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while hoping for the Allies to save them ... Translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz have revised and expanded the original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original text to accommodate the Book-of-the-Month club and to streamline the novel for film adaptation. The restoration of these passages and their new translation provide a fuller picture of the characters' lives, especially the hero Gabriel Bagradian, his wife Juliette, their son Stephan, and Iskuhi Tomasian. What is more apparent now is the personal story that Werfel tells, informed by events and people in his own life, in which the author, his wife Alma, his stepdaughter Manon Gropius, and others in his circle are reinvented. Reidel has also revised the existing translation to free Werfel's stronger usages from Dunlop's softening of meaning, his effective censoring of the novel in order to fit the mores and commercial contingencies of the mid-1930s.