Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  DANILA DAVYDOV The Telescope (Russia), 134.

  DAVID DEPHY Before the End (Georgia), 117.

  AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ PAZ This Strange Lucidity (Spain: Galician), 34.

  RÓBERT GÁL Agnomia (Slovakia), 173.

  BRANKO GRADIŠNIK Memorinth (Slovenia), 285.

  SANNEKE VAN HASSEL Pearl (Netherlands), 258.

  DESMOND HOGAN Kennedy (Ireland: English), 121.

  MAJA HRGOVIĆ Zlatka (Croatia), 19.

  MARIJA KNEŽEVIĆ Without Fear of Change (Serbia), 301.

  ARMIN KÕOMÄGI Logisticians Anonymous (Estonia), 159.

  JIŘÍ KRATOCHVIL I, Loshad’ (Czech Republic), 145.

  GERÐUR KRISTNÝ The Ice People (Iceland), 218.

  MARITTA LINTUNEN Passiontide (Finland), 267.

  PATRICIA DE MARTELAERE My Hand Is Exhausted (Belgium: Dutch), 1.

  DONAL MCLAUGHLIN enough to make your heart (United Kingdom: Scotland), 240.

  CLEMENS MEYER The Case of M. (Germany), 403.

  ANDREJ NIKOLAIDIS The Coming (Montenegro), 347.

  SANTIAGO PAJARES Today (Spain: Castilian), 375.

  PEP PUIG Clara Bou (Spain: Catalan), 327.

  BERNARD QUIRINY Rara Avis (Belgium: French), 419.

  NOËLLE REVAZ The Children (Switzerland: French), 229.

  GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK “. . . everything emptying into white” (Ireland:Irish), 66.

  LEE ROURKE Catastrophe (United Kingdom: England), 341.

  JANUSZ RUDNICKI The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus (Poland), 49.

  MICHAEL STAUFFER The Woman with the Stocks (Switzerland: German), 360.

  SERHIY ZHADAN The Owners (Ukraine), 384.

  RUI ZINK Tourist Destination (Portugal), 101.

  Index by Country

  BELGIUM: DUTCH Patricia de Martelaere, My Hand Is Exhausted, 1.

  BELGIUM: FRENCH Bernard Quiriny, Rara Avis, 419.

  BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA Muharem Bazdulj, Magic and Sarajevo, 209.

  CROATIA Maja Hrgović, Zlatka, 19.

  CZECH REPUBLIC Jiří Kratochvil, I, Loshad’, 145.

  ESTONIA Armin Kõomägi, Logisticians Anonymous, 159.

  FINLAND Maritta Lintunen, Passiontide, 267.

  FRANCE Marie Darrieussecq, Juergen the Perfect Son-in-Law, 183.

  GEORGIA David Dephy, Before the End, 117.

  GERMANY Clemens Meyer, The Case of M., 403.

  HUNGARY Zsófia Bán, When There Were Only Animals, 79.

  ICELAND Gerður Kristnỳ, The Ice People, 218.

  IRELAND: ENGLISH Desmond Hogan, Kennedy, 121.

  IRELAND: IRISH Gabriel Rosenstock, “. . . everything emptying into white”, 66.

  LIECHTENSTEIN Patrick Boltshauser, Tomorrow It’s Deggendorf, 315.

  MONTENEGRO Andrej Nikolaidis, The Coming, 347.

  NETHERLANDS Sanneke van Hassel, Pearl, 258.

  NORWAY Bjarte Breiteig, Down There They Don’t Mourn, 195.

  POLAND Janusz Rudnicki, The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus, 49.

  PORTUGAL Rui Zink, Tourist Destination, 101.

  RUSSIA Danila Davydov, The Telescope, 134.

  SERBIA Marija Knežević, Without Fear of Change, 301.

  SLOVAKIA Róbert Gál, Agnomia, 173.

  SLOVENIA Branko Gradišnik, Memorinth, 285.

  SPAIN: CASTILIAN Santiago Pajares, Today, 375.

  SPAIN: CATALAN Pep Puig, Clara Bou, 327.

  SPAIN: GALICIAN Agustín Fernández Paz, This Strange Lucidity, 34.

  SWITZERLAND: FRENCH Noëlle Revaz, The Children, 229.

  SWITZERLAND: GERMAN Michael Stauffer, The Woman with the Stocks, 360.

  SWITZERLAND: RHAETO-ROMANIC · GERMAN Arno Camenisch, Sez Ner, 95.

  UKRAINE Serhiy Zhadan, The Owners, 384.

  UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND Lee Rourke, Catastrophe, 341.

  UNITED KINGDOM: SCOTLAND Donal McLaughlin, enough to make your heart, 240.

  UNITED KINGDOM: WALES Duncan Bush, Bigamy, 276.

  Author Biographies

  For additional information on the authors and countries included in Best European Fiction 2012, visit www.dalkeyarchive.com.

  ZSÓFIA BÁN was born in 1957 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and grew up in Brazil and Hungary. A writer, literary historian, and critic, she made her fiction debut in 2007 with her much acclaimed book Night School: A Reader for Adults (forthcoming in German). Her stories have been widely anthologized, and she is working on a new volume of short stories and a novel. She lives and works in Budapest, where she teaches American literature and visual studies at Eötvös Loránd University. She has received several national prizes for her essay and fiction writing, and she was one of the writers representing Hungary at the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival.

  MUHAREM BAZDULJ was born in 1977 in Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He received a degree in English and American studies from the University of Sarajevo. He has published several award-winning short-story collections, including Druga knjiga (2000; The Second Book, 2005), and Čarolija (Magic, 2008), from which the two stories in this anthology were selected. Bazdulj’s texts have been featured in a number of prestigious international anthologies such as The Wall in My Head, published on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. His short stories and essays appear in World Literature Today, Creative Nonfiction, Habitus, Absinthe, and other literary reviews.

  PATRICK BOLTSHAUSER was born in 1971 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and grew up in Schaan, Liechtenstein. After high school he went to the University of Bern to study biology. During this time he began to work for several theater groups as actor, dramatic adviser, director, and playwright. In 1996 he completed his diploma in behavioral ecology. Since 1996 several of his plays have been performed in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. After spending several years in Berlin, he lives in Zurich, writing his second novel with the working title Meander.

  BJARTE BREITEIG was born in 1974 in Kristiansand, Norway. Bjarte Breiteig’s three short-story collections combine simplicity and density, often dealing with the experience of loss and longing. His first book, Fantomsmerter (Phantom Pains), was published in 1998 to glowing reviews. “Down Here They Don’t Mourn” was taken from his second collection, Surrogater (Surrogates, 2000). In 2003 Bjarte Breiteig was one of five authors included in the European literary project Scritture Giovani’s Borders anthology. His third collection, Folk har begynt å banke på (Someone’s Knocking at the Door, 2006), introduced a more epic dimension in his writing, probing deep into his characters while making incisive insights into differences of social class and social realities. Breiteig has won numerous literary awards in his homeland.

  DUNCAN BUSH was born in 1946 in Cardiff, Wales. He was educated at Warwick University, Duke University, and Wadham College, Oxford. He has won numerous awards for his poetry collections Aquarium, Salt, Masks, and Midway; his most recent collection is The Flying Trapeze. He has published three novels, including The Genre of Silence, set in the USSR during the Civil War; Glass Shot, a psychological thriller in South Wales during the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike; and Now All The Rage, which unfolds in an obsessive imaginative borderland between fame and obscurity. He teaches and currently divides his time between Luxembourg, France, and Britain.

  ARNO CAMENISCH was born in 1978 in Graubünden, Switzerland. He writes in both Rhaeto-Romanic (Sursilvan) and German. He debuted in 2005 with Ernesto ed autres Manzegnas, but is best known for his award-winning novels, Sez Ner (2009) and Hinter dem Bahnhof (Behind the Station, 2010)—the first two parts of a widely acclaimed trilogy. A brilliant performer of his own work, with links to the Spoken Word scene in Switzerland, he has recently been publishing poetry in literary magazines and anthologies. In 2010, he was awarded both the ZKB Schillerpreis and the Berner Literaturpreis for Sez Ner. He maintains a
website at arnocamenisch.ch.

  MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ was born in 1969 in Bayonne in the French Basque Country. After graduating from the École Normale Supérieure with a doctorate in French literature, she became a writer and a psychoanalyst. Since her 1996 best-selling debut, Truismes (Pig Tales, 1997), she has published ten novels, several short stories, and a play; she has also contributed frequently to art magazines in Paris and London. She lives primarily in Paris and is a mother of three children.

  DANILA DAVYDOV was born in 1977 in Moscow, Russia. He is best known for his poetry and also writes short stories, essays, critical articles and reviews, and philological studies. A graduate of the Literary Institute in Moscow, he completed a PhD on “Russian Naïve and Primitivist Poetry: Genesis, Evolution, Poetics” in 2003. He is currently writing a doctoral thesis on “Russian Poetry of the 1930s–’60s as a Sociolinguistic and Sociocultural Phenomenon.” Davydov is widely published in Russia and abroad in such periodicals as Strelets, Chernovik (New Jersey), Vavilon, Vozdukh, Oktyabr, Arion, Novy Mir, NLO, Reflection (Chicago), and many others. He is a coeditor of several magazines and often compiles collections of contemporary poetry.

  AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ PAZ was born in 1947 in Vilalba, Spain. Having graduated in educational science, he became a primary school teacher and later taught Galician language and literature in a Vigo secondary school; he retired to devote himself exclusively to writing. During his writing career, he has published over forty books in Galician, including the best sellers Cartas de inverno (Winter Letters, 1995) and O único que queda é o amor (Nothing Really Matters in Life More than Love, 2007). This latter collection, from which the story “This Strange Lucidity” is taken, won him Spain’s National Prize for Literature in 2008.

  DAVID-DEPHY GOGIBEDASHVILI was born in 1968 in Tbilisi, Georgia and is a poet, novelist, performer, and multimedia artist. He graduated from Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts (Faculty of Architecture). During the Rose Revolution he was one of the leaders of the disobedience movement, and during the Russian invasion in 2008, he joined a volunteer army to set up the headquarters for civil solidarity. He is the creator and copyright owner of the famous slogan “STOP RUSSIA.” His writing has been praised by Georgian critics as being full of innovative ideas and new sounds; his novels and poetry have become a cult event for the new Georgian generation.

  RÓBERT GÁL was born in 1968 in Bratislava, Slovakia. Having resided in various cities as a student (Brno, New York, Jerusalem, Berlin), Róbert now lives in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of several books of philosophical aphorisms and two novels, Krídlovanie (On Wing, 2006) and Agnomia (2008), both of which are forthcoming in English translation.

  BRANKO GRADIŠNIK was born in 1951 in Ljubljana, Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia). He received his MA in creative writing at Lancaster University, England. Once the originator of Slovenian metafiction with acclaimed collections of short stories Zemlja zemlja zemlja (Earth Earth Earth, 1982) and Mistifikcije (Mystifictions, 1986), he started—in novels like Leta (Lethe, 1985) and Nekdo drug (The Other One, 1991)—to lean toward suspension of disbelief; his lifelong endeavors to breach the divide of faction and fiction have reached their acme in the diaristic Roka voda kamen (Hand Water Stone, 2007), an extraordinary bildungsroman exploring the interplay of nature, society, history, the Self, and the Other.

  SANNEKE VAN HASSEL was born in 1971 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where she lives and writes short stories. She studied history of civilization and theater studies and was a member of the theater collective ’t Barre Land. She made her literary debut in 2005 with the short-story collection Ice Rain, followed two years later by the collection White Feather. For both collections she received the BNG New Literature Award. She wrote Pieces of Sarajevo (2006) and the novel Nest (2010), about a teenager with an unwanted pregnancy. She has organized and curated an international short-story festival in Amsterdam, Hotel van Hassel. She maintains a website at www.sannekevanhassel.nl.

  DESMOND HOGAN was born in 1950 in Ballinasloe, Ireland. He has published five novels: The Ikon Maker (1976), The Leaves on Grey (1980), A Curious Street (1984), A New Shirt (1986), and A Farewell to Prague (1995), as well as several books of stories: A Link with the River, introduced by Louise Erdrich (1989), Larks’ Eggs (2007), and Old Swords and Other Stories (2009). The Edge of the City, selected travel and review pieces, appeared in 1993. In 1971 he won the Hennessy Award, and in 1977 the Rooney Prize for Literature. He won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1980 and was awarded a DAAD Fellowship in Berlin in 1991.

  MAJA HRGOVIĆ was born in 1980 in Split, Croatia. She studied theater and women’s studies. Since 2003 she has worked as a journalist in the culture section of the Novi List Daily, and has been a member of the editorial board at Zarez—a Journal of Cultural and Social Affairs, where she publishes literary reviews. In 2009 she was awarded first prize for journalistic excellence organized by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). Her work has also been published in magazines and news portals such as Nulačetvorka, Cunterview, Kulturpunkt, Op.a, Grazia, and Libela. She regularly writes for the portal ZaMirZINE, concentrating on women’s rights and their treatment in the media. Her first collection of short stories, Pobjeđuje onaj kojem je manje stalo (He Wins Who Cares Less), was published in 2010.

  MARIJA KNEŽEVIĆ was born in 1963 in Belgrade, Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia). She earned her MA in comparative literature from Michigan State University. She has published thirteen books ranging from poetry and essays to stories and novels. Her novel, Ekaterini (2005), was also published in Austria and Poland. Her poetry has been included in New European Poets. The story presented in this selection belongs to her as-yet-unpublished story collection, Fabula rasa.

  ARMIN KÕOMÄGI was born in 1969 in Moldova. He received his BA in economics from the Technical University of Tallinn. Since 1992 he has been an active entrepreneur mainly in the fields of trade and logistics. In 2003 his first short stories were published in several literary magazines; the short story included in this anthology, “Anonüümsed Logistikud” (“Logisticians Anonymous”), received the Tuglas Award in 2006. His first novel, Pagejad (The Runaways), was selected as one of the best novels in 2009 by Cultural Foundation of Estonia. Kõomägi has also supported and sponsored several Estonian art and film projects.

  JIŘÍ KRATOCHVIL was born in 1940 in Brno, Czech Republic. He is a distinguished Czech novelist, short-story writer, essayist, dramatist, and publicist who has won the Tom Stoppard Prize (1991), the Czech Booksellers’ Prize (1993), the Prize of the Literární Noviny Weekly (1993), the Egon Hostovsk( Prize (1996), the Karel Čapek Prize (1998), and the Jaroslav Seifert Prize (1999). His works have appeared in eleven languages. His recent novel Slib. Requiem na padesátá léta (The Promise: Requiem to the Fifties, 2009) has been enthusiastically received in its German translation, Das Versprechen des Architekten. He lives in Moravsk( Krumlov as a freelance writer.

  GERÐUR KRISTNÝ was born in 1970 in Reykjavík, Iceland. She graduated in French and comparative literature from the University of Iceland in 1992. After a course in media studies at the University of Iceland from 1992 to 1993 she trained at Danish Radio TV. She was editor of the magazine Mannlíf from 1998 to 2004, but is now a full-time writer. Gerður Kristnỳ has published poetry books, short stories, novels, and a book for children, and has received the Halldór Laxness Literary Award and the Iceland Literature Prize. She lives in Reykjavík with her husband and two sons.

  MARITTA LINTUNEN was born in 1961 in Savonlinna, Finland. She holds a Master of Arts in music. Lintunen has been nominated for several Finnish literature awards since 1999 and she was awarded the WSOY Literature Foundation Prize for her literary achievements in 2010. She describes herself as writing in three languages: those of poetry, short story, and novel. Her experience as a musician comes through in the skillful and controlled rhythm of her writing. As a result, her language doesn’t give in to unnecessary vanities, and the cha
racters in her short stories struggle, try to be brave, and continue to strive.

  PATRICIA DE MARTELAERE was born in 1957 in Zottegem, Belgium, studied philosophy at the K.U.Leuven, and worked as a writer and professor of philosophy. Between 1988 and 1992 she published four novels: Nachtboek van een slapeloze (Night Book of an Insomniac, 1988), De schilder en zijn model (The Painter and His Model, 1989), Littekens (Scars, 1990), and De staart (The Tail, 1992). She received the J. Greshoff Award and the Belgian State Prize for Essay and Criticism for her essays. In 2004, she published another novel, Het onverwachte antwoord (The Unexpected Answer), to wide critical acclaim; the first section is included in this anthology. De Martelaere died in 2009 from complications of a brain tumor.

  DONAL MCLAUGHLIN was born in 1961 in Derry, Northern Ireland, and has resided in Scotland since 1970. His short-story collection, an allergic reaction to national anthems & other stories (2009), was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award and nominated for the EIBF Readers’ Best First Book Award. He is a recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award, was Scottish PEN’s first écrivain sans frontières, and is a former Hawthornden Fellow. His translations include a stage version of The Reader (with Chris Dolan), the poetry of Stella Rotenberg, and over one hundred writers, to date, for the New Swiss Writing anthologies. He is currently translating three books by Urs Widmer. Donal has also edited anthologies of Slovene writing (with Janice Galloway), Latvian writing, and contemporary Scottish writing. He maintains a website at donalmclaughlin.wordpress.com.

  CLEMENS MEYER was born in 1977 in Halle/Saale, East Germany, and now lives in Leipzig. He studied at the German Literature Institute, Leipzig, and he has worked as a security guard, forklift driver, and construction worker. Seen by many as a star among young German writers, he won a number of prizes for his first novel, Als wir träumten (As We Were Dreaming, 2006), in which a group of friends grow up and go off the rails in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has also published the Leipzig Book Fair Prize-winning Die Nacht, die Lichter (All the Lights, 2008) and Gewalten (Forces, 2010), a diary of 2009 in eleven stories.