Best European Fiction 2014 Read online

  BEST

  EUROPEAN

  FICTION

  2014

  Preface by

  DRAGO JANČAR

  Contents

  PREFACE

  DRAGO JANČAR

  [BELARUS]

  VLADIMIR KOZLOV

  Politics

  [BELGIUM: FRENCH]

  THIERRY HORGUELIN

  The Man in the Yellow Parka

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  ELVIS HADZIC

  The Curious Case of Benjamin Zec

  [BULGARIA]

  KATYA ATANASOVA

  Fear of Ankles

  [CROATIA]

  OLJA SAVIČEVIĆ IVANČEVIĆ

  Adios Cowboy

  [ESTONIA]

  TÕNU ÕNNEPALU

  Interpretation

  [FINLAND]

  MOX MÄKELÄ

  Night Shift

  [FRANCE]

  ERIC CHEVILLARD

  Hippopotamus

  [GEORGIA]

  GURAM DOCHANASHVILI

  A Fellow Traveler

  [ICELAND]

  ÓSKAR MAGNÚSSON

  Dr. Amplatz

  [LATVIA]

  INGA ZHOLUDE

  Dirty Laundry

  [LIECHTENSTEIN]

  JENS DITTMAR

  His Cryptologists

  [LITHUANIA]

  HERKUS KUNČIUS

  Belovezh

  [MACEDONIA]

  VLADA UROŠEVIĆ

  The Seventh Side of the Dice

  [MOLDOVA]

  IOAN MNĂSCURTĂ

  How I Was Going to Die on the Battlefield

  [MONTENEGRO]

  LENA RUTH STEFANOVIĆ

  The New Testament

  [NORWAY]

  KJELL ASKILDSEN

  My Sister’s Face

  [POLAND]

  KRYSTIAN PIWOWARSKI

  Homo Polonicus

  [PORTUGAL]

  RUI MANUEL AMARAL

  Almost Ten Stories

  [RUSSIA]

  NINA GABRIELYAN

  Quiet Feasts

  [SLOVAKIA]

  VLADIMÍR HAVRILLA

  The Teacher and the Parchment

  [SLOVENIA]

  VESNA LEMAIĆ

  The Pool

  [SPAIN: CASTILIAN]

  SUSANA MEDINA

  Oestrogen

  [SPAIN: GALICIAN]

  XURXO BORRAZÁS

  Pena de Ancares

  [SWITZERLAND: GERMAN]

  CHRISTOPH SIMON

  Fairy Tales from the World of Publishing

  [UKRAINE]

  YURIY TARNAWSKY

  Dead Darling

  [UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND]

  TOM MCCARTHY

  On Dodgem Jockeys

  [UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]

  ROBERT MINHINNICK

  Scavenger

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

  Praise for BEST EUROPEAN FICTION

  Preface

  In recent years, a number of European institutions and journal editors have asked if I would write about whether such a thing as European literature exists. Ever since East and West shook hands across the debris of the Berlin Wall and began living together politically and economically—and particularly since the last tragic experience of Europe’s twentieth century, the wars in the former Yugoslavia—some people apparently have assumed that the all-encompassing European idea of international coexistence and maximum tolerance must of necessity also lead to an all-encompassing European literary aesthetic. I believe that Europe, just as the rest of the world, needs these values in order to live and survive, but should it be the job of literature to build and promote them? I’m doubtful, because that would mean we view literature as a pseudo-religion. And what sort of aesthetic would that have? Would it need to combine—as I read somewhere—the “profundity” of German, the “artistry” of French, the “humor” of English, and the “suffering” of Russian literature and of the so-called Russian soul? I’d say a few ingredients are missing from this mess of clichés—for instance, the Švejkism of Czech and the intense longing of Slovene literature. And what would the Poles, Irish, Serbs, Estonians, or Catalunyans have to add to this literary melting pot? All in all, not a good sign for attempts to define European literature in questionnaire format, most of which seem to be stuck at the superficial level of “What ten books would you want to have with you on a desert island?”

  The question becomes less amusing if we look around and consider the environment that literature actually inhabits today. A few snide jokes at the expense of clichés aren’t going to make what is so obviously taking place in every European literary market go away; to wit, the erosion of well-defined aesthetic criteria and a flood of literary commercialization that demands and rewards superficiality, easy reading, and bestsellerdom. Even in the eyes of a growing number of publishers’ manuscript readers, these qualities have apparently replaced the elitism, challenge, and tedium of Great and Profound literature. It’s apparent that not only publishers, but even authors and critics have come to equate quality with commercial success, just as culture has given way to the “culture industry.” The confusion is considerable, especially in the eastern reaches of the European literary continent, where the collapse of dictatorships was accompanied by a collapse of that tension between literature and society that paradoxically kept writers at the center of readers’ attention. These countries witnessed a sudden flood of mediocrity engineered by the publishing market. Hugely disparate ideas about literature and its functions inhabit this part of Europe, jostling and undermining each other—from former literary and cultural eschatologies that still eke out a living, to postmodernist scholasticism, to the kind of writing that mistakes the aesthetics of screenwriting and genre for literature and would like nothing more than to sate the publishing industry’s hunger for enormous and immediate success. To the regret of most of these authors, who have developed a characteristic way of poking fun at Great and Profound literature, their dreams of bestsellerdom have for the most part had only a limited trajectory. While it’s true that amid the countless new literary soap operas that keep getting produced, and more recently the countless new detective stories with a human face, plumbing the depths of the seven deadly sins and weaving countless new criminal, political, and even historical plots for us, occasionally some refreshingly distinctive heroes and original stories do shine through, publishers and even quite a few talented writers have interpreted their successes in this mode as proof of some imperative to go on following the trend. Of course, the publishers, for their part, have long since figured out what’s at stake and what has to be sacrificed in order to win it: domestic or foreign literature (in translation or otherwise) that requires exertion on the part of the reader, literature featuring any kind of linguistic experimentation or thematic “depth”—in a word, the “tedium” that only a hopelessly small minority of bookworms can afford as a luxury.

  In Eastern Europe, there is no shortage of disappointment in this brave new world. Many writers who once thought that democracy and the new, relaxed atmosphere it lent society would validate the deep longing for freedom that was present in their works and that once brought them renown, now look upon the general apathy of their societies in despair. Others, who were convinced that their literature spoke from out of the depths of the nation’s spirit and expressed an authentic genius loci, look at the literary kitsch everywhere around them in disgust. And still other writers, who joined in on the easy minting of generic entertainment, which in their case was supposedly still literature despite all, are discovering to their amazement that democracy is in fact
a very majoritarian affair, well-suited to mediocrity, and always happy to welcome in even more superficiality, even more facile tricks than their still literature could ever accommodate. And with it, even bigger sales figures.

  The problem is that art isn’t democratic, much less capitalistic. In the century of democracy’s great rise, Witold Gombrowicz understood this early on and wrote that art loves grandeur, hierarchies, feudalism, and absolutism, while democracy wants equality, tolerance, openness, and fraternity.

  Back in 1984, when I visited America for the first time, on my very first day I noticed to my surprise that, try as I might, I wasn’t going to find a section labeled Culture in any of the newspapers. Exhibits, plays, even literary readings were all listed under Entertainment. I actually found it amusing that as sacred a European word as “Culture” was practically nowhere to be found, and that the next most sacred European word “Literature” only appeared in the supplements of a very few, major newspapers, and that even there its meaning was broadened to admit reviews of books from disparate disciplines—psychology and history, for instance. This amusing misunderstanding continued in my course on creative writing, where to my misfortune I had to teach students who were curious and hungry for literature and who already knew perfectly well how they would have to write their first sentences—those fateful first sentences that are supposed to grab the reader’s attention—when they became writers. My students’ questions kept coming back to one of the few European authors who was being read in America at the time, Milan Kundera. Reading Kundera is entertaining, but why does the author make fun of optimism? The trigger event in Kundera’s novel The Joke is a sentence that the protagonist writes on a picture postcard: “Optimism is the opiate of the people!” What’s wrong with optimism? I didn’t want to start lecturing about Marx in a creative writing class, so I tried to explain that in Central Europe literature often contains a kind of anxious laughter that’s neither funny nor entertaining, but rather the expression of a sense of humor that’s by turns ironic, sarcastic, or just plain hard to figure out, which writers from Kafka on have recorded in rather darkly comedic tones, because they know that great optimistic ideas often culminate in the crowning idea of a concentration camp filled with political minorities and sometimes entire nations. We weren’t getting through to each other. I see your point, one student said, but optimism is part of the spirit of individualism itself, it’s at the heart of American democracy. I see your point, I said, but it’s also at the heart of the collective spirit of Soviet communism, including its literature, in which writers were referred to as “engineers of human souls” and they all knew that their job was to write interesting, entertaining books to make people optimistic. Although our conversation was polite, and it was all very entertaining, the gulf in understanding between us remained unbridged.

  Aleksandar Hemon will appreciate that little story.

  But even in Europe, despite the economic crisis—which is leading many people to wonder anxiously, what’s next? will life tomorrow be as good as today?—a spirit of optimism still prevails. Why, with the exception of a few eccentric Euroskeptics and frightened nationalists, do all of us cling so tightly to the idea of a united Europe? Often because we want to escape our own provincialism, the suffocating national self-satisfaction and the interpersonal nastiness that this sort of environment generates. And escape our own history, as well. In twentieth-century Slovenia, a person could have spent his whole life in some mountain village and still have seen the uniforms of numerous armies, dealt with tax collectors and policemen from various countries, and listened to religious, nationalist, or social evangelists who kept promising him the best of all possible worlds—and each time, he would have been disappointed. Instances of courage and nobility aside, in the process of loading themselves down with history during that century, so many Europeans, and especially those from the so-called East, also took on burdens of brutality and, in a variety of countries and systems, burdens of foul deeds great and small. This is why for the majority of people the European idea is so redemptive and new, and possibly their last great hope. But literature carries within it the memory and experience of Europe’s insane century as it was lived by fragile, frightened, and vulnerable human beings, who often had to salvage their dignity and sanity not just with the balm of melancholy, but also with laughter, skepticism, irony, and black humor. I suspect that the stories in this and the previous Best European Fiction anthologies offer individual, unique human experiences that are more European than tirades about European solidarity, tolerance, and cooperation. In Mr. Hemon’s past selections, for example, I can see distant reflections of his life and writing, his understanding of Europe and America, the convulsions of his complex Bosnian microcosm and the ease of the so-called wider world, but above all the open landscapes of the literary imagination.

  Perhaps it’s presumptuous to say that this anthology and the poetics of its authors are giving birth to something that in the future might, without any clichés or qualifications, be referred to as “European literature.” Not just because European literature is quite simply everything that’s written in Europe’s various languages and out of its various traditions and experiences, both historical and personal. No, because an ongoing awareness of the individual aesthetics emerging in various languages leads to an interpenetration and merging of their content and the linguistic and stylistic solutions they bring to bear. Perhaps it’s odd for this sort of understanding of European literature to emerge thanks to translations into English, and this at a time when none of us has any intention of abandoning the beauty and linguistic power of our individual European languages. Just as Latin was the language of European intellectuals in the Middle Ages, so indisputably is English the European lingua franca today. Younger authors, especially, use it not only to communicate with each other, but thanks to the creative force and assistance of translators, our literary brethren, they read each other in it. This is not to say that we’re moving in the direction of linguistic unity, and much less that we’re giving up creating in our own languages: phenomena like Beckett, Conrad, Makine—and Hemon—who have taught themselves to write in a second language, are rare. It does mean, however, that precisely with the help of these anthologies we can at least provide some information to each other, as well as to readers—if only in the form of short stories, whether fragments, sketches, impressions, or even the hints of novels—about the diversity of our authorial quests and methods. In fact, these anthologies provide us with a surprising view into Europe’s enormous writing workshop. In them we experience human distress and misunderstandings as we travel through the labyrinths of the world of the present and the past and the mazes of the human spirit and mind. This is an awareness of writing that is emerging now, in Europe’s capitals and its provincial backwaters, of writing that is in the process of being shaped by its authors. These are no national literary canons that we’re getting to know fifty years after the fact (if at all). This is, instead, the live ferment of creative diversity. The awareness of literature in Europe today that these anthologies offer has not been dictated by publishers’ marketing departments, but by a selection made, to the best of their abilities, by people who have devoted their lives to as beautiful and useless a thing, as Oscar Wilde might have said, as art. A continually new world emerges with the stories that come to us out of this big creative workshop, a world that isn’t necessarily the author’s homeland or region or city or history, but is most assuredly a personal experience, individual and unique, connected to a specific milieu. In previous editions of Best European Fiction, as in this one, one can observe the authors, with few exceptions, moving away from the so-called great themes and immersing themselves in decidedly personal and, at first glance, minute literary explorations. It’s obvious that these stories shy away from the more and more powerful unification of European and global space that new communications technologies are facilitating at tremendous speed, and instead seek creative meaning in markedly personal worlds, in tiny inte
rpersonal plots or simply—bewilderment. The world is present in the details. The more unified it is in its Europeanizing and globalizing tendencies, the more individually focused, atomized, and fragmented it is in this literature. While the absence of so-called great themes may not necessarily align with my own perception of literary art, these stories’ intensity, the tension between their forms and subjects, give them, if we read them carefully, the power of a significant existential response to the individual’s place in the world today.

  In contrast to the superficial storytelling that the publishing industry would like to force on us, in this and previous Best European Fiction anthologies, we encounter a taut authorial relationship to the world and to language. Mathematicians use the term “congruence,” which in this instance would refer to an unshakable harmony of content and language. This kind of harmony grows out of the inner tension of a literary organism, not out of the mass production of detective stories or screenplays. And although these are small, though never marginal stories and fragments, they have the confidence of Gombrowicz’s textual absolutism. These are stories that grow out of humanity’s restlessness, this is literature that expresses humanity’s restlessness, but also the restlessness of this era of European history and the consequences of its past, which have precipitated out into our unseen experiences. The tension in all writing is also the tension springing from the dissatisfaction that we all feel in recognizing the social or historical sediment underlying our experiences, or even just the contours and rhythm of one human life. It’s precisely that restlessness which creates the taut congruence of plot and language whose fascinating and awkward merits necessarily surpass the limits of “mere” entertainment and mechanical storytelling. Literature as an organism with its own internal dynamics, literature that serves nothing else, yet is by itself, and in and of itself, something more.