Eugen Ruge’s Novel Reviewed in the New York Times

Adam Langer has a terrific review of Eugen Ruge's novel In Times of Fading Light
(Translation in English by Anthea Bell).  Why is this news? First, it
is rare that a contemporary novel in German gets translated and
published in the United States these days.  Second, it is rare that
translations are reviewed by major media outlets.  Third, if reviewed,
they are often panned.  Happily, Ruge's book gets very good treatment in the New York Times: 

"Mr. Ruge’s novel is a pulsing, vibrant, thrillingly alive work, full of
formal inventiveness, remarkable empathy and, above all, mordant and
insightful wit. Yes, this is a serious, ambitious work with the scope of
a Russian epic, juxtaposing the disintegration of the Umnitzer family
with that of their political system. But the novel doesn’t plod forward
in a predictable, linear way; with self-assurance and playful erudition,
it seems to follow the unreliable chronology of memory, hopscotching
back and forth over critical moments in family and world history,
displaying an extraordinarily bearable lightness of being even as it
describes weighty, tragic events."

Read my review of In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts. 

To understand better how unusual the Times review is, here is a rather depressing video from earlier this year of Michael Krüger, publisher of Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich, talking about the American aversion to translation.   Krüger's goes on to bemoan the demise of German language and the global hegemony of English:

For those English speakers who have difficulty with the video, here is an interview in English with Michael Krüger which covers some of the same terrain: 

Krüger: Of course I am unhappy with the fact that European publishers
are translating a lot of the good, and a lot of the mediocre, and even a
great deal of the bad books from the States into European languages,
whereas our American friends are very reluctant. With the exception of
Knopf, only the small houses like New Directions or Other Press are
constantly translating from Europe. For example, much of the work of
Robert Walser, one of the best German writers of the 20th century, is
coming to an American audience only now. But he was a contemporary of
Franz Kafka! And only very few European poets have been translated into
English, whereas German translators and publishers take the risk of
translating great English and American poetry.