Also of interest ... in reissues and rediscoveries
The Last Cavalier
by Alexandre Dumas (Pegasus, $32)
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Alexandre Dumas, “the Napoleon of storytellers,” died before he finished this marvelous page-turner about the Napoleonic era, said Michael Dirda in The Washington Post. Still, we’re lucky it was recently rediscovered. “Corny at times,” and “obviously padded,” The Last Cavalier is nevertheless packed with romance, adventure, pirates, tigers, and a noble-born hero who can’t manage to die even when a valiant death is his dearest wish.
Fire in the Blood
by Irène Némirovsky (Knopf, $22)
This “deceptively quiet” novella comes from the second of two unpublished manuscripts discovered among papers left behind by France’s Irène Némirovsky, before her 1942 death at Auschwitz, said Peter Kemp in the London Sunday Times. Though the other find, Suite Française, was more topical, the subtly suspenseful Fire in the Blood “brilliantly depicts a closed-in, inward-looking” rural French community. Their flaws and secrets feel timeless.
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf, $37)
Every translation of Tolstoy’s timeless epic has its virtues, said Robert Belknap in The New York Sun. What distinguishes the new, 1,300-page version, from the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is that no previous effort catches Tolstoy’s “verbal brilliance” as faithfully. A hundred years ago, readers of English needed a watered-down version. These days, Tolstoy can be allowed to be himself.
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy; translated by Andrew Bromfield (Ecco, $35)
In the battle of new War and Peace translations, said Alex Beam in The Boston Globe, the shorter book shouldn’t be overlooked. A Russian scholar, taking his cue from Tolstoy’s original, 1866 manuscript, recently “axed the philosophical musings that have bedeviled so many Russian Lit majors,” saving us all 400 pages of reading time. But for that questionable shortcut, said Natasha Randall in the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Bromfield’s translation for Ecco would rate as “one of the best yet.”
Novels in Three Lines
by Félix Fénéon (New York Review, $14)
Ultra-short newspaper items can ascend to literature when they’re written by an anarchist-aesthete with a “wry, zinging voice,” said Marilyn Johnson in The New York Times. Here’s one of the hundreds collected in this volume, tucked into a Paris daily by Félix Fénéon in 1906: “There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who had mistaken the window for a door, is dead.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”