BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2010
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEKSANDAR HEMON
PREFACE BY ZADIE SMITH
BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2010
DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS
CHAMPAIGN AND LONDON
Copyright © 2010 by Dalkey Archive Press
Introduction copyright © 2010 by Aleksandar Hemon
Preface copyright © 2010 by Zadie Smith
All rights reserved
Please see Rights and Permissions
on Backmatter for individual credits
ISBN: 978-1-56478-616-6
www.dalkeyarchive.com
Funded in part by grants from Arts Council England; the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; and with support from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Please see Acknowledgments on Backmatter for additional information on the support received for this volume
LOTTERY FUNDED
Contents
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
[ALBANIA]
ORNELA VORPSI
FROM The Country Where No One Ever Dies
[AUSTRIA]
ANTONIO FIAN
FROM While Sleeping
[BELGIUM: DUTCH]
PETER TERRIN
FROM “The Murderer”
[BELGIUM: FRENCH]
JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT
Zidane’s Melancholy
[BOSNIA]
IGOR ŠTIKS
At the Sarajevo Market
[BULGARIA]
GEORGI GOSPODINOV
And All Turned Moon
[CROATIA]
NEVEN UŠUMOVI
Vereš
[DENMARK]
NAJA MARIE AIDT
Bulbjerg
[ESTONIA]
ELO VIIDING
Foreign Women
[FINLAND]
JUHANI BRANDER
FROM Extinction
[FRANCE]
CHRISTINE MONTALBETTI
Hotel Komaba Eminence (with Haruki Murakami)
[HUNGARY]
GEORGE KONRÁD
Jeremiah’s Terrible Tale
[ICELAND]
STEINAR BRAGI
The Sky Over Thingvellir
[IRELAND: ENGLISH]
JULIAN GOUGH
The Orphan and the Mob
[IRELAND: IRISH]
ORNA NÍ CHOILEÁIN
Camino
[ITALY]
GIULIO MOZZI (AKA CARLO DALCIELO)
Carlo Doesn’t Know How to Read
[LATVIA]
INGA BELE
Ants and Bumblebees
[LIECHTENSTEIN]
MATHIAS OSPELT
Deep In the Snow
[LITHUANIA]
GIEDRA RADVILAVIIT
The Allure of the Text
[MACEDONIA]
GOCE SMILEVSKI
Fourteen Little Gustavs
[NETHERLANDS]
STEPHAN ENTER
Resistance
[NORWAY]
JON FOSSE
Waves of Stone
[POLAND]
MICHA WITKOWSKI
Didi
[PORTUGAL]
VALTER HUGO MÃE
dona malva and senhor josé ferreiro
[ROMANIA]
COSMIN MANOLACHE
Three Hundred Cups
[RUSSIA]
VICTOR PELEVIN
Friedmann Space
[SERBIA]
DAVID ALBAHARI
The Basilica in Lyon
[SLOVAKIA]
PETER KRIŠTÚFEK
FROM The Prompter
[SLOVENIA]
ANDREJ BLATNIK
FROM You Do Understand?
[SPAIN: CASTILIAN]
JULIÁN RÍOS
Revelation on the Boulevard of Crime
[SPAIN: CATALAN]
JOSEP M. FONALLERAS
Noir in Five Parts and an Epilogue
[SWITZERLAND]
PETER STAMM
Ice Moon
[UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND]
DEBORAH LEVY
FROM Swimming Home
[UNITED KINGDOM: SCOTLAND]
ALASDAIR GRAY
The Ballad of Ann Bonny
[UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]
PENNY SIMPSON
Indigo’s Mermaid
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES AND PERSONAL STATEMENTS
TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES
ONLINE RESOURCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS
Preface
Anthologies are ill-fitting things—one size does not fit all. It’s no surprise to find the authors in this volume, collected under the broad banner “European,” voicing a consistently ornery resistance (with variations): “Well, yes, I am European, Slovakian, actually, but I am also an individual, and what really matters to me is Nabokov, Diderot and J. G. Ballard.”
Which is as it should be. Good writing cannot permit itself to be contained within checkpoints and borders. But still it’s tempting for readers to seek a family resemblance and I’m not sure we’re wrong to do so. It seems old fashioned to speak of a “Continental” or specifically “European” style, and yet if the title of this book were to be removed and switched with that of an anthology of the American short story, isn’t it true that only a fool would be confused as to which was truly which?
It’s more than the obvious matter of foreign names and places. It’s hard not to notice, for example, a strong tendency towards the metafictional. Characters seem aware of their status as characters, stories complain about the direction they’re heading in, and writers make literary characters of themselves—and of other writers and artists. When the real Christine Montalbetti (France) has breakfast with a notional Haruki Murakami in a Japanese hotel, the fantastic threatens to overwhelm them (“leaves were trembling behind the windowpanes, as if they were crouched, dying to pounce”) and we know for sure we’re not in Kansas anymore. Meanwhile Goce Smilevski of Macedonia wants us to believe Gustav Klimt’s fourteen illegitimate sons were all called Gustav, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint—in one of my favourite pieces—boldly enters the soul of Zinedine Zidane to reveal the philosophical Weltschmerz hidden deep within that footballer-enigma.
What else? An epigraphic, disjointed structure. Many of these already short stories are cut into shorter, sub-titled sections, like verbal snapshots laid randomly on top of each other—and they end abruptly. They seem to come from a different family than those long anecdotes ending in epiphany, popularized by O. Henry. And their authors name different progenitors, too. Certainly no one mentions O. Henry. Or Hemingway. Laurels are offered instead to the likes of John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Meanwhile poor Dickens is dismissed in a single line by a young Icelandic experimentalist: “I weep with boredom over every single page he’s written.” More likely to be name-checked: Beckett, Bernhard, Sebald, Claude Simon and Kafka, who, “of course, is always there,” as Josep M. Fonalleras (Catalonia) asserts, and he’s right. Judging from this collection, Kafka is literary Europe’s primary ghost and heaviest influence. He’s there in Antonio Fian’s (Austria) concretely expressed dream-stories, and in David Albahari’s (Serbia) frustrating trip through Lyon, with its many obstructions and misdirections. And when this Kafkaesque respect for digression unites, in an author, with the headier brews of Laurence Sterne and Jorge Luis Borges, then we get baroque shaggy-dog tales like Julián Ríos’s (Spain) “Revelation on the Boulevard of Crime,” and Giedra Radvilaviit’s (Lithuania) “The Allure of the Text,” both of which offer mazy structures in which readers may get blissfully lost.
Finally, in Europe the violent distortions of Dostoevsky seem to have trumped
the cool ironies of Tolstoy. In this vein I particularly enjoyed Peter Terrin (Belgium), who revives the archetypal axe murderer in a banal and futuristic landscape, and Micha Witkowski’s (Poland) “Didi,” which brings notes from the underground of hungry hustlers. Of course, sometimes in Europe the reality outstrips all but the most garish literary fantasies and so a satirist in the Gogol-mode need only touch upon his subject very lightly. Thus the masterful Russian, Victor Pelevin, finds the perfect metaphor for the oligarch cash-grab of the 1990s, and the story seems to write itself.
For me this anthology and the series that is to follow represent a personal enrichment. Books-wise, I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day. I was always refreshed to discover those windows that open out on to Kafka, Camus, Duras, Genet, Colette, Bely…as I imagine some equivalent Russian schoolgirl marvelled at the vista through the Muriel Spark window, or the John Updike. There should be more of that sort of thing—so we’re always saying—and now here are Aleksandar Hemon and Dalkey Archive Press to encourage it.
ZADIE SMITH
Introduction
Not so long ago, I read somewhere that only three to five percent of literary works published in the United States are translations. It stands to reason that a few of those translations are reworkings of the classics like Tolstoy and Mann. At the same time, many lesser-known foreign writers are published by struggling university presses with neither marketing budgets nor strong distribution networks. Thus the presence of translations in the American literary mainstream is uneasily divided between the couple of recent Nobel Prize winners, the odd successes that go down well in American book clubs, like Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses or Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and the confrontationally controversial European blockbusters, like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones or Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, which tend to fail embarrassingly in the U.S. But if you are curious about the state of contemporary Polish literature or the lively writing scene in, say, Zurich, Switzerland or Lima, Peru, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any stories or novels that would allow you to enter that particular field of knowledge. The American reader seems to be largely disengaged from literatures in other languages, which many see as yet another symptom of culturally catastrophic American isolationism. And all this before the deluge of recent recession, before the American publishing industry entered a full panic mode and started busying itself with deciding what not to publish.
Moreover, there appears to be a widespread consensus among the all-knowing publishing pundits that short fiction is, yet again, well on its way to oblivion, dying in the literary hospice room adjacent to the one in which the perpetually moribund novel is also expiring. Given that poetry is already dead and buried, soon the only things left for a committed, serious reader to read will be Facebook status updates, funny-text-message anthologies, and confessional memoirs. This time around, the short-story demise is due to the general vanishing of the printed word (good-bye newspapers, magazines, paper books!), the mass transference of readership to the Web, the volcanic rise of mindless entertainment as the main form of brain stimulation. Consequently, the reputation of the short story as a pinnacle of literary art, gloriously practiced by Chekhov, Joyce, O’Connor, Nabokov, Munro, has been steadily waning, to the point where many new writers have come to believe that writing short stories is merely a warm-up exercise for writing a novel. Thousands upon thousands of ambitious young writers enrolled in American writing programs are churning out half-dead short stories, creating suffocating hyperinflation, all in the hope that one day they’ll be skillful enough to write a death-defying novel.
With all that in mind, we have decided to offer you a selection of short fiction from throughout Europe, some from writers working in English, but the majority translated from myriad languages. It includes a few select novel excerpts, but is primarily and unreservedly composed of short stories. Taking up a doubly lost cause could appear noble to some, but, frankly, we think that all that death and demise talk is nothing but a crock of crap.
For one thing, the short story is alive and well, thanks for asking. No further evidence ought to be necessary beyond the stories in this anthology, which is more interested in providing a detailed snapshot of the contemporary European literatures than establishing a fresh canon of instant classics. The short story, these nimble selections show, is marked by vitality and ingenuity that is not always easy to commit to in a novel, which is almost always an unwieldy undertaking. Working equally well in the hands of a witty experimenter (Finland’s Juhani Brander) and an earnest storyteller (Wales’s Penny Simpson), a scorching satirist (Ireland’s Julian Gough), and a sharp realist (Latvia’s Inga bele)—just to name a few—the short story is always capable of bridging the false gap between the avant-garde and the mainstream. The sheer diversity of narrative modes and strategies evidenced in the selections in this volume is mind-boggling. Rather than accepting the situation of perpetual death, the European short story, sparklingly capable of transformation, is eager to embark upon a new life.
This formal diversity is, naturally, directly related to the intellectual wealth, cultural richness, and historical conflict contained in a geographical space that is, by North American standards, fantastically, ridiculously small. European history is at the same time a history of fragmentation, caused by wars and political reconstitutions, and a history of transcending—by necessity—differences, borders, and distances. No country in Europe can be understood outside its historical relations with other European countries, no culture in Europe can be comprehended outside its interactions with other cultures. Europe is a fragmented space that always strives toward some form of integration. This has, I believe, always been the case, but the simultaneous processes of fragmentation, interaction, and integration have certainly been intensified with the formation of the European Union. In this context, European literatures have found themselves stretched between the reductive demands of national culture (the culture that is for us, by us, whoever we may be) and the transformative possibilities of transnational culture that can exist only in the situation of constant flow of identity and exchange of meaning—in the situation of ceaseless translation.
Hence the stories you will find in this volume (which have not been selected for any kind of thematic continuity) inescapably question and probe and sabotage various national myths, often featuring migrants and vagrants, unabashedly questioning the propriety of the old forms in the new set of historical and political circumstances. These stories not only cross and trespass all kinds of borders, they are, quite literally, generating translation in doing so.
At the heart of this project, which we hope to undertake annually, is a profound, non-negotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be. The same need is at the heart of the project of literature. That project is most obviously impossible without translation and if the communication is to be immediate and uninterrupted—which seems to be a self-evident need in today’s world—the process of translation must be immediate and uninterrupted. We simply have to keep in continuous touch, translation has to be a ceaseless process. Not only do we have to provide a continuous flow of literary texts from other languages into English, we also have to be able to monitor in real time, as it were, the rapid developments in European literatures.
And there is no better gateway than the short story, which has retained, from the days when every decent newspaper or magazine printed short stories, the immediacy that comes with the daily engagement of the press with the world; the immediacy, I might add, that is currently flourishing on the Web. The short story still has the flavor of a report from the front lines of history and existence.
This anthology is, then, not putting up a fight in the battles that to many seem lost, it is indeed declaring a victory. As far as we are concerned, translation and the short story—essential means of communicating with and understanding this world of ours—have been restored to th
eir rightful place. Now, start reading.
ALEKSANDAR HEMON
BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2010
[ALBANIA]
ORNELA VORPSI
FROM The Country Where No One Ever Dies
I would like to dedicate this book to the word “humility,” which does not exist in the Albanian lexicon. Its absence can give rise to some rather curious phenomena in the destiny of a nation.
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THE ALBANIANS LIVE ON AND ON, AND NEVER DIE
Albania is a country where no one ever dies. Fortified by long hours at the dinner table, irrigated by raki and disinfected by the hot peppers in our plump, ever-present olives, our bodies are so strong that nothing can destroy them.
Our spines are made of iron. You can do whatever you want with them. Even if one gets broken, it can be repaired. As for our hearts: they can be saturated with fat, suffer necrosis, an infarct, thrombosis, or whatever, but they’ll still beat on heroically. We’re in Albania—there can be no doubt about it.
This country where no one ever dies is made of clay and dust. The sun scorches it until even the leaves on the grapevines look rusty, until our minds begin to melt. Living in this environment has one inevitable side effect: megalomania—a condition that sprouts everywhere, like a weed. Another consequence is fearlessness, although this might be caused by our people’s flattened, malformed craniums—the seat of indifference—or a simple lack of conscience.
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