I will give up some books if not in translation. If the topic in the original language is beyond my intellectual endurance level, a translation can add something interesting from the point of view of the vocabulary. My latest example is the humorous take on Trump´s presidency by Dave Eggers, an authors whose books did not disappointed me until now.
The Captain and the Glory - translated into German as Der größte Kapitän aller Zeiten by the duo Ulrike Wasel and Klaus Timmermann - is an allegorical comedy about a porn-lover capitain with a yellow feather getting in charge of the boat ´Glory´ and leading it successfully to failure. The analogies with the Trump obscenities are on purpose, as the references to his inabilities of all kinds - from leadership to intellectual. It is a grotesque character taking over the story and nobody else can really grow in his shadow.
Definitely I am not the target of such a book and did not have enough irony to consider Trump as a laughable literary character. Somehow, his very real presence at the White House was surreal enough to let my imagination flee over the mountains of stupidity.
However, I´ve found the context of the book and the comparisons used are relatively banal and predictable. A dictator comparing himself with a captain and the ship called ´Glory´. It´s like the author just re-assembled fragments of the reality into a literary narrative, without doing too much editing.
The result in my opinion hardly makes me laugh but also almost bored me to tears. Why you need to write such a book when in fact you can just make a collage of some news reports and add a video of the ´captain´.
I am not sure if I will give a try any time soon to any other Trump-inspired piece of literature. In any case, The Captain and the Glory is in my books labelled as an unsuccessful try. The translated version though, was worth my patience.
Rating: 2 stars
