I took an honors seminar on Franz Kafka when I was an undergraduate, where we read all of his novels and a good dollop of his short stories. One day we had a guest sit in on our class, Todd Hasak-Lowy, who as I recall was a good friend of our professor, Sven-Erik Rose, from graduate school. Hasak-Lowy mostly just assisted in our discussion about Kafka, but as preparation for the class, Dr. Rose had handed out the first few pages of Hasak-Lowy's short story "On the Grounds of the Complex Commemorating the Nazis' Treatment of the Jews," and I was sufficiently interested to pick up the book when it was remaindered on Amazon. So now, some four years later, I've finally read the book! The Task of This Translator is a collection of fiction about relatively mundane events, usually told in a very pedantic style. Hasak-Lowy has a distinctive narrative voice, and sometimes that works... and a lot of the time it doesn't.

The book opens with "On the Grounds of the Complex Commemorating the Nazis' Treatment of the Jews," which was one of my favorites. It depicts a day in the life of a very bored worker in the pastry shop of the complex commemorating the Nazis' treatment of the Jews in Jerusalem, and his confrontation with an American Jew come to visit. A small misunderstanding is blown out of proportion by both men, and the narrator's distanced style works to make the events all the more shocking. It's a well-depicted moment of brutality in the middle of a mundane, dull universe. Coming next, "Will Power, Inc." was definitely the best story in the book. It's a newspaper article written by a graduate student about a dieting service that serves as will power for people who can't stop themselves from eating: participants are escorted by a bodyguard who physically intervene to stop them from eating when they are not hungry. The narrator has no need of such a service, of course... but once he obtains it as a trial so he can write his article and then his life completely falls apart. It's the funniest story in the book, but it's also a fairly strong indictment of the excesses of American consumer culture.

"The End of Larry's Wallet" is where the book when downhill for me. What is potentially an interesting story about a man who can't emotionally connect with his daughter's help problems juxtaposed against everyone's inability to understand the magnitude of the tragedy of an India/Pakistan nuclear exchange degenerates into obnoxious metafictional anxieties about depicting such a nuclear exchange, which overwhelm the interesting and involving aspects of the story. The stories after this are okay, good in concept but poor in execution. "The Interview" is about a man being interviewed about interview techniques, but it seems like Hasak-Lowy couldn't figure out what the plot of the story should be after coming up with such a good premise, and the ending is unsatisfactory and disconnected. The title story, "The Task of This Translator," was just baffling to me. I understood what happened (mostly), but not why.

It was the penultimate story, "Raider Nation," that really killed it. I couldn't figure out why this story was even written; the premise seems to be that graduate students are socially awkward and can't interact successfully with men who like football or women who are sexually attractive. The narrative and the main character's dialogue is bizarrely stilted, like a less socially aware version of Commander Data is telling the story: "I hope the Oakland Raiders win, because I'm certain such an outcome would bring you great joy." Who talks like that, except for Teal'c from Stargate SG-1? No one as bad as this character exists, and it drove me nuts to read about him. I don't even know what I was supposed to get out of it. This meant that I probably didn't give the last story, "How Keith's Dad Died," its proper due, but it was just more of the same, and by this point, I was bored of the same style and the same kind of protagonists again and again.

This is as bad a collection of short stories as I've ever read. Why on earth did this end up in print?

Two of the stories are borrowed from other sources who handled them far better, three are unpleasant incidents in the lives of people you don't care about, and two are what Hasak-Lowy will probably try to defend as "stylistic experiments", which is to say he's using storytelling techniques that have been tried elsewhere and used to good effect, but which he doesn't know how to use.

The worst thing about all of this is the constant sense that H-L is smirking at his own cleverness in thinking of this garbage.

If you're tempted to read this, you might really consider putting your own eyes out with chopsticks to spare yourself the greater agony of turning the pages of "The End of Todd's Wallet" (even the title screams awful) or the slow drifting tedium of "How Keith's Dad Died". I never found out how Keith's Dad died, the story nearly put me in a coma, but if it's anything like the rest of the stories, he died pointlessly after far too many pages of self-congratulatory bullshit from the author.

This, my friends, is not a book you want to read, unless you're really not very fond of life and want that opinion confirmed. ( )