At Warscapes, Frank Smith’s Guantanamo is excerpted and reviewed by Noam Scheindlin.

Smith’s Guantanamo, and Place’s translation of it, emphasizes this placelessness, the lack of context of these events in language. The re-translation mirrors the lack of an original text. Smith makes use of a variety of styles, from theatrical dialogue to reported speech. Above all, Smith exploits the ambiguity of the French on, modulating the pronoun so that it is at times impossible to delineate the speaker, to separate detainee from interrogator.

Read an excerpt of Guantanamo and Scheindlin’s full review at Warscapes.