Israel In Translation

On this episode, Marcela reads from Sayed Kashua’s fourth, and latest novel, Track Changes. The novel was published in December by Grove Press. Kashua’s protagonist is a nameless “I” who shares considerable biographical overlaps with the author. This suggests, perhaps even implies, the so-called truth of Kashua’s first-person fiction. Yet his character, whose job is to transcribe others’ memories onto the page, repeatedly reveals his elisions from and additions to strangers’ memoirs-for-hire, often inserting his own memories as their own, thereby erasing his life in scattered pieces. The narrator’s confessions are hardly reliable, making every level of his storytelling suspect, which Kashua further visually underscores by “track changes”-style crossed-out text.