Fun and Fast-Paced

The premise of this book is quite funny and unique. Maria Garcia, a smart, talented but unpublished author is given the task by a publisher to translate a book from English into Spanish. But the book, a detective story from a series, is crude and poorly written and Maria just “can’t understand how someone like him (the author) can get his book published and (she) can’t.” She feels compelled to become “creative” in her translation and starts to make changes. She begins with changing the main protagonist, the detective himself, from a man to a woman, and from there she says “everything else was easy.” Her loosely translated version becomes a hit in Spain. When the author, Mike Grey, travels to Madrid for the book launching, that’s when the love story between Mike and Maria begins to unfold, though it’s not always a smooth ride, especially when he finds out he’s been “loosely” translated.

When Maria takes Mike on a tour of her hometown, Cordoba, here the author provides his audience with glimpses of the town’s history and culture, which makes for interesting reading. Maria explains, “…Cordoba used to be one of the centres of the Muslim world in the Middle Ages.” And later she shows him a monument in “homage to Saint Rafael who supposedly saved the city from an earthquake in the eighteen century.” It is here in Cordoba that the two grow closer.

As the novel draws to an end, the author has fun with it and turns it into a very untypical ending. Although he writes “The End”, the next line reads, “Or is it …?” and that’s when Maria and Mike embark on writing their own ending. When they’re done, the reader finally comes to “The Real End.” The Real End is then cleverly followed by a series of epilogues, where loose ends are tied up and where we learn the fate of the characters.

Loosely Translated is a really fun, fast-paced romantic comedy, which makes for easy and pleasurable reading. It’s because of Maria’s loose translation of Mike’s book that Maria and Mike not only fall in love, but develop into better people and better writers.

(Loosely Translated was written by a translator himself, and he got the idea when he was handed some business letters that were appallingly written and he was asked to translate them. He admits, “… the thought crossed my mind on a number of occasions to make some improvements.” This brings to question – is it possible for a translation to be better than the original? Could it be possible that Maria’s version really was better than Mike’s? Garcia Marques, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, was known to say that he much preferred the English translation to his own original; and some of Oe Kenzaburo’s books are said to be more popular in their English version than in the original Japanese. So, in answer to the question, it looks like the answer is yes.) ( )

I really liked this book. A nice story about a Spanish writer called Maria who has not yet been published and an English guy called Mike who has written and published a series of corny private eye novels. However the novels are not overly succesful.
When Maria is asked to translate them into Spanish and takes the liberty of changing some parts of the story.

It was fun to read since I live in Madrid and there were descriptions of parts of Madrid which are known to me.

I thought it was a well written book which kept me entertained right up til the end.

I would like to think that Simon is going to continue entertaining us with the story of Maria and Mike by writing a follow up novel.