Mrs. Lowe-Porter
"A captivating biographical novel... with Mrs. Lowe-Porter, Jo Salas has achieved the writing triumph that her never-met but vividly imagined grandmother-in-law hoped to write...a magnificent literary achievement." --BookTrib
A fascinating reimagining of the overlooked, complicated life of Thomas Mann's translator, Helen Lowe-Porter
The literary giant Thomas Mann balked at a female translator, but he might well owe his standing in the Western canon to a little-known American woman, Helen Lowe-Porter. Based closely on historical source material, Jo Salas's novel Mrs. Lowe-Porter sympathetically reveals a brilliant woman's struggle to be appreciated as a translator and find her voice in a male-dominated culture. Married to the charming classicist Elias Lowe, whom she met and fell in love with while in Munich, the story weaves one woman's journey as her husband Elias's career soars and her translation work earns Mann the Nobel Prize. The novel celebrates Helen Lowe-Porter as she learns to risk stepping out from the long shadow of the dominating men of her life to become a person of letters in her own right.
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I was completely seduced by the story, the recounted life, and the personality of the main character. How does Helen retain control of the central challenge of being Mann's translator without losing herself in his overwhelming grandeur as a world-famous novelist? Jo Salas brilliantly captures the shifting depths underfoot. Despite the strictures of sticking to some semblance of biographical truth, however elastic, she maintains the pact between her subject and the freedom to stray and invent.
-Adam Thorpe, Ulverton
Helen Lowe-Porter, like talented women who came before and after her, faced dilemmas that men have rarely needed to consider. As the woman behind two larger-than-life men, Helen's desire for her own creative expression will resonate with readers. Jo Salas skillfully depicts Helen's milieu and her rich inner world in this wise, engaging, and touching novel.
-Nava Atlas, creator of LiteraryLadiesGuide.com
"I gave him my creative spirit, my conscientious, painstaking labor.... I was just the translator. I was not an inventor of worlds." The deep contradiction between "I gave him my creative spirit" and "I was just the translator" defines the driving dilemma of Helen Lowe-Porter, the first English translator of Thomas Mann. Jo Salas's engaging novel, bordering on nonfiction and based closely on the life of this admirable woman, is a must not only for women writers who translate but for all translators, writers and readers who feel a connection with "the shadow of the mountain."
-Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction
An exploration of the complicated life of the translator of Thomas Mann-who is a writer in her own right. Salas asks difficult questions about work and gender-whose words should take precedence? Whose work? Whose needs? Salas uses the real life of Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter as the foundation for this fascinating novel.
-Roxana Robinson, Dawson's Fall
Mrs. Lowe-Porter beguiled me in its nuanced and insightful depiction of the dilemma common to so many women: how to balance one's own ambition and need for self-expression with the demands of families within a culture that neither values care nor prizes women's work equally. The author not only deftly commands the details of an earlier time and place but imagines Helen Lowe-Porter's interior life and struggles with such sensitivity and verve that I found myself moved to a deeper understanding and profound appreciation of a woman I barely knew, my own grandmother.
-Anneke Campbell, writer and documentary filmmaker
