The complaint most often made about Kelman is not that his stories are elusive, or that his dialect is difficult to understand, but that the pace of narration is monotonous. Kelman's novels tend to proceed without troughs and peaks, suspense and climax. The favoured method is interior monologue, in which the dramas are little dramas of consciousness. In this type of fiction, the reader depends on a high degree of artistry, specifically of the linguistic kind, to carry the interest through until the end. Translated Accounts presents a new kind of linguistic variation for Kelman.
Nothing is made clear.
No one is named. While a number of speakers share the book's 54 chapters, their voices are scarcely differentiated. The author keeps us in the dark, and the reader of Translated Accounts should be prepared to spend a lot of time in the dark. Even when the words on the page add up to something recognisably meaningful, the action remains opaque. For the entire course of the book, the characters are no more than silhouettes flickering behind a curtain.