Translator Jeffrey Zuckerman will appear in conversation with Annabel Kim on Friday, November 22 as part of Harvard Book Store’s Works in Translation series to promote the English language publication of THE LIVING DAYS, winner of a French Voices Award.
This novel, by Francophone master Ananda Devi, follows an unsettling, magnetic attraction between Mary, a seventy-five-year-old white British spinster, and Cub, a thirteen-year-old Jamaican boy from Brixton.
Mary increasingly clings to phantoms as dementia overtakes her reality, latching on to Cub and channeling all of her remaining energy into their relationship. But their macabre romance comes to a horrific climax, as white supremacy, poverty, and class conflict explode on the streets of London.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.