Word Limit

In Don Coles’s first novel, Doctor Bloom’s Story, Marianne Logan, a psychotherapist struggling to understand a woman’s rationalization of her husband’s abuse, asks her lover, the cardiologist Nicolaas Bloom, “how do you press language out of grief?” This question is at the heart of both Doctor Bloom’s Story and Maggie Helwig’s Between Mountains. In the former, Daniel Bryant, a war correspondent, and Lili Stambolovic, a professional translator, both press grief into language for a living: Daniel every time he writes another tragic account of the war and Lili, half-Albanian and half-Serbian, as she translates for recalcitrant diplomats, “charged only with accurately conveying words, as the pieces of her heritage ripped each other apart.” Both Coles and Helwig question the act of writing, and implicate the writer in the very events he or she strives to convey.