About the book: 2013 / Noelle Revaz - writer, author of the novels “Concerning Cattle” [“Rapport aux bêtes”, 2002, prize Schiller] and “Efina” [“Efina”, 2009, Russian. translation 2012].Her latest work, the dramatic monologue “When Granny...”, tells the story of endless waiting - waiting for Granny’s death, which will change everything: they are waiting for her to put things in order in the house, change jobs, play sports, in short, to start living according to - for real. As in Revaz's previous books, the main character here is language. If in her first novel this is the common, clumsy speech of the uncouth peasant Paul, who prefers his cows to his wife; if in the second novel it is, on the contrary, the lyrical, upbeat language of a failed romance between a man and a woman whose love feelings did not coincide in time, then this monologue, in which many voices sound, is built according to the laws of polyphony; they intertwine, complement or, on the contrary, abruptly interrupt each other, displaying a complex symphony of feelings of the characters who are waiting, like the heroes of Beckett’s famous play “Waiting for Godot,” for the fulfillment of the impossible. These voices, anonymous, stylistically completely different, cannot be attributed to either women or men, and it doesn’t matter - they all talk about one thing, ask one thing: when will Granny finally die, pass away, repose, give up her soul to God, stretch out her legs, give oak, will go to the grave... this list can be continued for a long time: the text contains about seventy synonyms of the verb “to die”, and this alone poses an interesting linguistic task for the translator. So, will life change for the better when Granny…?