Notes Toward a Second Language

Elodie Basile translates Italian novels into English and has spent three years being the woman who does not go after people who leave rooms. Mateo Arrieta translates them into Spanish, moved to Edinburgh for her and back to Madrid after the divorce, and has never once organised what he felt about anything. They were married for eight years. They have not been in the same room since the decree.

Then Giulia Ferro, the novelist who loved them both and was a menace to everyone, dies and leaves them her last book jointly, on one condition: they translate it from the same pages, in the same room, within six months, or nobody ever reads it in any language. She has had a desk made for two people who used to argue about elbow room. Her forty pages of margin notes are addressed to E. and M. Her son will check every page. Twenty minutes into the first session they are fighting about a semicolon, and both of them know it is not about the semicolon.

Told in two voices, hers and his, between an Edinburgh study and a Turin archive, this is a second-chance romance about being understood at the sentence level by exactly one other person: a novel whose wife says the thing neither of them has said, a rule of one true sentence a session, a box neither of them wants to open, and a February date one of them has kept alone for five years. Nothing here is solved in a conversation. It takes the whole six months, and one bad week where the old habits work exactly as well as they used to, before either of them can say the sentence they have been translating around for a decade.