Reviewed by Pedro Ponce
12.21.07

If you can’t find anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all—unless you’re responding to a writer, in which case you have a number of viable euphemisms to choose from: “interesting,” “well-crafted,” “clever.” The latter is a standard response to the experimental writer, which suggests, in rough translation, “It’s amazing how much you squeezed out of a premise completely lacking in plot or interesting characters.”

It would be tempting to apply such a backhanded compliment to David Treuer’s latest novel. The Translation of Dr. Apelles channels Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Borges’ Labyrinths, and Kafka’s anti-parables to tell the story of Dr. Apelles, a “mere translator […] of languages that have ceased to matter to most people.” Apelles, who lives a solitary life shelving books and translating Native American languages, stumbles upon a manuscript that tells the story of Bimaadiz and Eta, two Indian youths whose growing love for one another is threatened by a series of dramatic misadventures. When he compares his own life to the characters coming to life through his translation, Apelles ruminates on its emotional poverty:

If he died then and there (by the release of poison gas in the archive’s ventilation system), no one would understand his shirts and his four slacks, the importance of his toaster or the wonderful comfort of his bed; no one would hear or understand, much less cherish, his singular and heretofore solitary morning sigh. If he were to die (a heart attack was not out of the question), he would die as languages do: with no one left in this world to speak him.

The rest of the novel, at least apparently, alternates between sections of the found manuscript and Apelles’ attempts to make up for lost time. By the conclusion, Treuer insinuates a possibility that significantly changes the way each layer relates to the other.

It would be a mistake to separate these elements—one a more conventional adventure story, the other a series of meditations on the art and purpose of storytelling. Treuer intentionally puts these very different narratives in dialogue to reveal how stories are both expressions of and limits to their subject matter. To the reader who wishes he had stayed with the more sympathetic tale of Bimaadiz and Eta, he responds implicitly with Apelles’ own struggle as an Indian to define and tell a story for himself: “if he told it in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons it would cease to be real, it would no longer be his life because it would become a story like all the other stories about his people, and if he told it he would only become a character in that story and would be only the Indian they knew and the Indian they told their friends about.” The character’s dilemma is embodied in his relationship with Campaspe, a young co-worker, who longs to learn more about Apelles, a desire for revelation that is portrayed more as violation: “she longed to lift his cover and read him, to bring him home and read him immediately and completely, and, ultimately, to shelve him in her most private and intimate stacks in her warm, cozy, red-hued apartment.”

Late in the novel, Apelles thinks, “What could he say that would exist on its own, that represented only him and his life?” The Translation of Dr. Apelles is an ambivalent answer to this central question. If story is what the reader brings to the table, with all of its literary and cultural conventions and expectations, story is also a place—perhaps the only place—where such barriers can truly be broken.