2 days ago
A tale of compassion fatigue — can you care too much?
When proofs of Misinterpretation arrived in the office in May the blurb was a little off-putting. A novel about a woman who interprets therapy sessions for a Kosovar torture survivor? It didn't scream weekend reading. But first impressions can be deceptive. When the Albanian-American writer Ledia Xhoga's debut was longlisted for the Booker prize, I gave it a second chance — and spent a weekend gripped.
First things first — the torture therapy takes up a single scene. This is a book about immigration and cultural differences, about when helping others turns into self-sabotage, and about the lies that can hold a marriage together.
Best of all, it balances evocative imagery ('Random garments were hanging over the trees and the bushes … It was as if the bodies inside had vanished unexpectedly, and the outfits had collapsed in despair') with a thrumming sense of tension. I soaked up the atmosphere of the novel so much that I found I was on edge, anxious to get back to reading it, to find out what would happen.
