The Story of the Paper Crown

Wafer-Thin Books

February 10, 2024

“A beautiful story of a young man’s revelatory coming into being sexually, intellectually, and emotionally, I was struck on multiple readings that I came back to the same idea. I was reading something that felt as if I were looking at both the gilded depictions and strict perspectives in religious paintings and Barbara Hepworth’s hospital drawings: full of light and haze, a Giotto-like rendering of awareness with a certainty of focus. Frank Garrett’s translation leaves the reader in no doubt that the process of translating Czechowicz was a labour of precision and delicacy, the picking through endless pebbles on a beach in order to find the ones which reflected the sky and sea in full.”