Macy Halford over to The New Yorker's book bench mentions that there is a free translation of a Russian novel that recasts The Lord of the Rings novels. I've read the books more than once and seen the movies, which are truly awful because their fidelity to the books exposes the impossibility of much if not all of the action, so I thought why not read The Last Ring Bearer?
It's a nice little book and the translator writes well and spins a nice story; I have no idea how much the same holds for the original Russian and to what extent the English-language version resembles its source material. One of the more interesting aspects of the LRB is recasting the conflict between east and west, leaving aside the now malevolent Elves, Gandalf, and Aragon, was the conflict between the pastoral and the mechanical on the question of progress. Mordor and its allies are, more or less, agents of industrialization, innovation, and enlightenment while the West, under the domination of the Elves, offers a cycle of stagnation and blissful ignorance. The novel is meant as a polemic against what its author sees as the agrarian authoritarianism, if not fascism, of Tolkien's master narrative.
The other aspect of this text as opposed to TLR is that its a spy story in which the tawdry and compromised world of Le Carre replaces Tolkien's gaudy two-toned world in which heroic heroism forthrightly battles the evil empire. It is, in other words, subtler and considerable funnier that TLR.
And the best sign from yesterday? Walker Take a Lesson From Palin: Quit
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