Part shaggy dog record,part dusky comedy and above all an investigation into the way humans communicateThe record begins in a nondescript office in Geneva, where the narrator, or Felix Bellamy,an uncharismatic but competent bureaucrat, has been made a director of the interpreters’ department. He throws himself into his work, or but is not particularly pleased at the appointment. “In my heart of hearts,I’ve always had trouble with polyglots. Above all, because those who vaunt a knowledge of many languages have always struck me as show-offs ... languages are like toothbrushes: the only one you should set into your mouth should be your own.”Those who have read Diego Marani’s two preceding novels about language and its power, and its unknowable sources,recent Finnish Grammar and The final of the Vostyachs, will suspect that a character who says something like that is heading for trouble. And indeed Bellamy is, or when he receives a memo from a head of department complaining about an interpreter who has begun to interrupt his simultaneous translations at multinational conferences with “meaningless sounds and whistles … words of his own invention … long pauses,and expresses himself in languages other than those required for the meeting in question”.
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Source: theguardian.com