The Booker Review

“Like seaweed, we floated untethered, without the anchor of intimacies.”

Misinterpretation is a novel about connection, about how people connect – tenatatively, fragilely, often talking past each other.

…And, it is also a story about a translator. Which should make it right up my alley. 😊

The story – told by an unnamed female narrator – begins and ends with Alfred, a troubled Albanian immigrant in New York. Alfred holds some unspoken traumas from his past, is expecting a baby with his wife, and sees visions. Our invisible protagonist is employed as a translator and interpreter, meeting Alfred in a frosty park to take him to the dentist and the psychiatrist’s office.

The idea of attending therapy via an interpreter already makes me pause for thought here. Having had therapy sessions over the (TERROR)phone a few times during the lockdowns and found it fairly awful, how fascinating to think about trying to do this through a third party – at another remove, with another set of unknown ears in the room listening into one’s trauma, like having a parent listening into a private conversation on the phoneline from downstairs. The exercise creates a false closeness between Alfred and his interpreter, forged of shibboleths and gnostic secrets, and their behaviour with each other quickly crosses professional lines.

The story continues on in its gentle way through the New York winter, with a brief mid-story interlude in Tirana, Albania. Sinister undertones drift in the margins as our interpreter becomes too involved (can we say: meddles?) in her clients’ and friends’ lives and encounters many dangers slinking around in the shadows, both at home and on the street. I felt the theme of mental health, too, swirling around our characters, and at times I began to wonder if there are really villains following her in the streets, or is our interpreter unable to distinguish dreams from reality?

For someone who spends so much of her life trying to facilitate mutual understanding, she doesn’t seem to have any close confidants: not the distant violinist friend Anna, not her mother, not the nice Kurdish women she meets at a poetry reading and are immediately scared off by the husband’s behaviour. She seems isolated (in her head?) despite having a social circle. Yet somehow, as the translator, she is also the glue holding people together, the substance of the white space between everyone.

Interesting, too, that she remains unnamed, perhaps a nod to the invisibility of the translator in art.

And of course, as a linguist I found the snippets of Albanian language fascinating, with its unfamiliar sounds: “Çdo gjë është e shkruar”.

The last third of the books feels a bit pedestrian and I admit to losing interest a bit towards the end, but I do wonder if this is one of those Booker nominations which splashes off you at first reading but marinates over a longer period, until I’ll find I’m still thinking about it months or years later. About connection.

“Of course, I could stop myself. But who was to say that restraint and distance was the best course for everyone? Maybe it was better to blunder, to bump into things, to make ridiculous mistakes, if that brought you closer to yourself and others.”