Böcker av Joao Reis

After a car crash lands him in the hospital, while reluctantly sharing beers with an acquaintance, a man obsesses about the decisions that brought him there, including the fate of a woman he was driving to see.

"The nights were terrible, during the day we were occupied, but at night we got to thinking, picturing food, our houses, food again, painful memories from our childhoods--that abominable era--would mix with images of food and our torture would grow and grow, I recalled my impotence before the plate I was ordered to clean, the impossibility of choice in a world into which I had been thrust unwillingly, war was indeed an extension of the torture of being born . . . Set during the difficult era of the Great War, The Silence Devastation is the story of a captain in the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps who, with no documents showing his rank, finds himself in a German prison camp forced to share the circumstances of his poorer countrymen. He is hungry, constantly plagued by the sound of incessant detonations--and trying to finish his oral account of a strange story about a German scientist and voice recordings. In all this, he must seek meaning in his observations, his dreams, and, above all, silence."--

At the start of The Translator''s Bride, the Translator''s bride has left him. But if he can only find a way to publish a book, and buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator''s mind as he walks around an unnamed city full of idiots, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren''t paying him, he''s trying to survive a woman''s unwanted advances, and he''s trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions - all while he struggles with his own angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Translated by the author himself, The Translator''s bride is a darkly funny meditation on life and language, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace. An incredible ride, whether you''re a translator or not.