The Last of the Vostayachs

Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, June 22nd 2013

The Last of the Vostayachs by Diego Marani is the latest addition to the growing number Scandinavian crime novels to be published in English, albeit one with an academic twist. 

Linguist Professor Aurtova has spent his entire career trying to prove that Finnish is the first true European language. When he learns that a former colleague has discovered a wild man in the Siberian wilderness, one who speaks Vostayach (a ‘lost’ language that suggests Native American and Finnish people share common ancestry) he decides to remove this threat to his world-view, and a tale of violence and mayhem unfolds on the coldest night in living memory. 

I don’t know if it is the dense and, to me, obscure passages on the linguistic and ethnographic divisions of Northern Europe, or Judith Landry’s translation – an exercise that Aurtova regards as soiling language “like blood in a transfusion, which is gradually tainted by impurities”– but I really couldn’t engage in the book.  Marani is deliberately playing with the literary pretentions of his characters in such passages, but there’s only so much of the fricative lateral with a labiovelar overlay a girl can take, and I think I’ve reached my limit.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/linguistic-excesses-putting