David Treuer

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excerpt reviews: Star Tribune , LA Times , Washington Post DR APELLES won a WASHINGTON POST CRITICS CHOICE AWARD FOR FICTION 2006 Fiction, Hardcover (1-55597-451-1)SS 374 pages, 6x9, $23.00; September 2006 publisher: Graywolf Dr Apelles, Native American translator of Native American texts, lives a diligent existence. He works at a library and in his free time he works on his translations, and without his realizing it, his life has grown small around him. One day he stumbles across an ancient manuscript only he can translate. What begins as a startling discovery quickly becomes a vital quest—not only to translate the document, but to find love. Through the riddle of Dr Apelles’ heart, The Translation of Dr Apelles explores the boundaries of human emotion, charts the power of the language to both imprison and liberate, and maps the true dimensions of Native American experience. As Dr Apelles’ quest nears its surprising conclusion, the novel asks the reader to speculate on whose power is greater, the imaginer or the imagined. The lover or the beloved? In this brilliant mystery of letters in the tradition of Calvino, Borges, and Saramago, award-winning author, David Treuer, excavates the persistent myths that belittle the contemporary Native American experience and lays bare the terrible power of the imagination. “A myriad of false documents, questionable authorships, stalled sexual encounters, and narrative disjunctions, Dr Apelles is not to be mistaken, like the books that take the most heat in Treuer’s essays, for an anthropological project. To the contrary, Treuer pushes the metatextual games of writers like J.M. Coetzee and A.S. Byatt past the point of parody.” —Village Voice "Dr Apelles...provides new layers of information and meaning with every pass. This Escher-esque craftsmanship dazzles even as it confounds.—The Seattle Times

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