Good on Paper

Good on Paper, by Rachel Cantor is about love, trust and and second chances.  Though I am not a Dante scholar for the most part I did enjoy the story and the relationships explored in this novel.

Shira Greene had a complicated childhood and her attempts to keep her adult life on a straight course are not working out so well.  She is a single mom raising her daughter, Andi, along with her gay friend Ahmad.  Ahmad was there to rescue her when she left her husband with baby Andi and needed a place to live.  She is working for a temporary employment agency though she has a PhD and wanted a career as a translator.  Ahmad, a college professor shares his benefits, both health care and his large apartment with them while his wife and four children have abandoned him moving to Pakistan.  Shira's life seems to take a turn for success when a Nobel Prize winning Italian poet calls insisting she is the only one who can translate his new book.

Throughout the book are interesting passages about translating the written work of novels and poems to other languages.  Author, Cantor examines information about how nuances are lost in trying to explain some words or phrases in another language.  Shira sat in the local coffee shop working on
the translation of Romei's pages, sent by fax for translation, "Weighing poetic elements, deciding which to highlight, which to sacrifice - because not everything can survive translation. ...What's a translator to do? Preserve the length of the original line by padding the translation? Sacrifice meter for concision, semantic accuracy, the original line breaks?...Hence the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor; traduttore e traditore."

This is a story that uses the classic Vita Nueova and its main characters Dante and his lover Beatrice to set the scene for Shira and her romantic involvements and to also give her a background for her translation work for Romei and his characters.  As the story progresses the story goes from abstract to personal, as the characters on the page start to become more real to Shira.  The fragile life she has created, to protect her from her feelings about her past, begins to unravel and it is up to Shira to correctly interpret the pages she is translating to save herself, her daughter and the wonderful life she has established.