A Girlfriend's Manuscript in a Language She Doesn't Speak

By Andy — 2026-08-18 — Literary News

A manuscript in Maltese sits on Max's desk. Leonie can't read a single word.

That's the entire problem, right there. The opening line of Katy Simpson Smith's *The Maltese Version* does something deceptively simple: it shows us the exact moment a couple stops being lovers and starts being strangers. No divorce needed. No blowout fight. Just papers trembling in a Chicago breeze, a language barrier, and the slow understanding that you can live with someone and still not know what they're doing.

Smith's fifth novel is described as a "stimulating and slippery anti-detective novel", which sounds like the kind of thing critics say when they're not quite sure what they're looking at. That tracks. The book splits into four labeled sections—A Romance, A Fantasy, A Mystery, A Thriller—the way someone might divide their marriage into chapters they don't want to reread.

In the excerpt, we're with Leonie and Max in their early days of fracture. She translates languages in her head; she likes "putting things to rights," that untranslatable English phrase that means both order and moral correction. He's a translator too, though Max is described as an "underemployed academic" with a mysterious mentor and vague assignment. When Leonie tries to make sense of the Maltese sounds—"Eesh shmara mazurka," "Im-zer-zuh"—Max refuses to explain. He just tells her to put on pants. Let's make lunch.

What's brutal about this isn't the secrecy.

It's that they're still trying. Still going through the motions of togetherness. There's a bird feeder. A shared apartment. He's read breakfast with someone else and come home; she's been filling the feeder and avoiding chores. The resentment is so casual it barely registers. This is what a relationship looks like when it's already over but nobody's announced it yet.

When Max disappears for a month in Malta on a translation job, Leonie discovers she might be pregnant and asks her friend Rhoda, another travel writer, to find him. From there the novel spirals into something weirder. Translation becomes an entry point for characters to think about love, truth, poetry, and relationships. It's all tangled together—the language barrier and the emotional one, Malta's physical remoteness and the psychological distance that's been growing in Chicago all along.

Smith is the author of *The Story of Land and Sea*, *The Everlasting*, and *The Weeds*, which means she knows how to make small domestic moments carry the weight of everything unsaid. That's her gift. She doesn't tell you that a marriage is dying. She shows you a man sliding a plate off the edge of a counter, asking to be wrecked.

What's worth noticing is how the opening works on you. It's not romantic at all. The novel "upends the stability of language, desire, and the ways we make meaning"—meaning nothing feels solid anymore, not even the words. Especially not the words. Leonie copies the Maltese sounds in her shower, trying them out like foreign objects in her mouth. She still can't translate what Max means. And by the end of that first scene, you understand neither can he.