{"id":704,"date":"2013-06-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T04:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=704"},"modified":"2025-01-01T13:12:28","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T00:12:28","slug":"the-last-of-the-vostayachs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2013\/06\/22\/the-last-of-the-vostayachs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last of the Vostayachs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Diego Marani<\/strong>, <strong>translated by Judith Landry<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Text Publishing<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, June 22nd 2013<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Last of the Vostayachs<\/em> 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">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 \u2018lost\u2019 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t know if it is the dense and, to me, obscure passages on the linguistic and ethnographic divisions of Northern Europe, or Judith Landry\u2019s translation \u2013 an exercise that Aurtova regards as soiling language \u201c<em>like blood in a transfusion, which is gradually tainted by impurities\u201d<\/em>\u2013 but I really couldn\u2019t engage in the book.\u00a0 Marani is deliberately playing with the literary pretentions of his characters in such passages, but there\u2019s only so much of the fricative lateral with a labiovelar overlay a girl can take, and I think I\u2019ve reached my limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/linguistic-excesses-putting\">https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/linguistic-excesses-putting<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diego Marani<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOtago Daily Times review June 22nd 2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[180,185,370,18,407],"class_list":["post-704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-180","tag-diego-marani","tag-fiction","tag-odt","tag-speculative-sci-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=704"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1687,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/704\/revisions\/1687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}