On this point, Marías and I will have to disagree. In Written Lives, in fact, Marías is indignant over how often Mann’s diaries—which, by the way, I sunk my teeth into at twenty, right after Tonio Kröger—talk about his bowels: if they’re moving, at what times, and how important he considers this to be. As if it really mattered? As if anybody cared?
My opinion on Marías as a writer is that he’s okay. But as a person—at least as he’s represented in Written Lives—I feel he’s a bit naive, even something of a populist. Is he venting a repressed middle-class sensibility? Does he want everyone to “be good”—that is, to mask their failures and demons the same way everyone else does, and to act and talk exactly the same way as everyone else? To stage their lives with Dickensian sentimentalism and humor? Does he really think that the lives of authors—especially great authors—can ever be anything less than unusual, despicable even, antihumanist, filled with arrogance, narcissistic?
I’m just asking. I’m not trying to put words in Marías’s mouth. But my own opinion on the above is this: You can’t write European literature—at least not the sort that becomes a frame of reference, a classic—without embodying the sickness of the continent in some way, its split heart: on the one hand its optimism and audacity, its flight for the stars (or down the toilets of nineteenth-century Paris), the rhetoric that pretends both to reinvent reality and describe it “as is” and, on the other hand, its skepticism, its suspicion that all of this is just a childish game, an oversimplification, its shame over its numerous unacceptable desires (homosexuality in Mann’s case), its neurotic inability to comprehend matter and the body (as defined by Europe), its concurrent failure to learn how to control matter and body—and, of course, death (as defined by Europe). That’s why, at least when it comes to literature, I can’t think of anything more important than Thomas Mann’s bowels.
And if I was fifty years younger or so, and if Mann’s diaries were still accessible by the public, I’d be waiting in front of the library—or wherever they were kept—or in an apartment close by, leafing through his novels; and though this isn’t, perhaps, an enormous issue, after the doors were finally open, I know I’d find a great deal of the spirit of his novels in the bowels of Mann, the author, or to be more specific: in the attitude that his bowels were important and worth documenting.
All their movements.
JUHANI BRANDER writes: “Juhani Brander was born May 17, 1978, in Turku, Finland, into a middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and his mother an accountant. He spent his childhood with books, their distant and captivating worlds interesting him more than silly children’s games.
The environment he grew up in was filled with story and myth. His father’s family originated deep in the Finnish archipelago: plunging rocky cliffs and the merciless sea on all sides. Growing up, he heard stories of smuggling and moonshine, unsolved murders and village brawls. His mother’s family was from Lapland, land of hill villages and the northern lights. Thence his interest in mysticism, gloomy forests, the wilderness, and nature deities.
School seemed leveling and childish to him. He won a few writing contests, his themes were read out loud to the class. Once his mother read her brother, his much-decorated war veteran uncle, a thirty-four-page piece he wrote in the fifth grade telling of the uncle’s war experiences and severe wounding. When that grown man wept and hugged him, deeply moved, he understood the power of words.
In high school he decided school was a waste of time. He wouldn’t find a mentality as leveling and narrow-minded, as destructive of personality, until he was in the army. He has since launched literary attacks on institutions, organizations, and closed communities that erode the individual’s freedom.
After high school he did menial jobs to support his writing. He started reading intensively, a book or two a day. He entered writing contests whose winners were published in anthologies, and was one of the lucky ones: his first satirical writings and poems soon saw the light of day.
Two years later, in 2000, his first poetry collection, Aninkaisten mainingit (The Heights of Aninkaisten) was published, after Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu.
In 2002, he published his collection of anti-army satires, Lepo! harmaissa tai ilman (At Ease! In and Out of Uniform). So many drunken officers made threatening calls to his landline that he gave it up and now only uses a cell phone.
In 2003, his poetry collection Valveuni (Waking Dream) was published.
In 2005, his poetry collection Palavat kirjaimet (Burning Letters) was published.
In 2007, his prose work Lajien tuho (Extinction) was published. In it he found his authentic voice, his language, his expressive power as a writer.”
TRANSLATED FROM FINNISH BY DOUG ROBINSON
ORNA NÍ CHOILEÁIN was born in West Cork, Ireland, and is a creative writer of modern Irish stories. She writes, “While the Irish language lay dormant for a couple of generations within Orna’s family, she is very proud to have had the opportunity to revive it and to grow up in a bilingual community circle. This enhanced the possibility of acquiring further linguistic skills. She now communicates in six European languages and has enjoyed working in the financial service centres of many of Europe’s beautiful historical cities.
As an avid reader, Orna found that much of the Irish-language literature that she reads is based around the authors’ own locality and often on themes such as home life or emigration.
She has won numerous prizes for creative prose, poetry, drama, and short stories in the Oireachtas, as well as other Irish festivals. Throughout 2007, her work was reviewed by award-winning bilingual dramatist and author Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, under the auspices of a writers’ scheme organised by Forás na Gaeilge. Orna also enjoys writing in English and has been awarded the An Post National Penmanship prize. She writes reviews for the magazine Feasta and the newspaper Saol, and has had her own work reviewed on national radio, in the Irish Times and the Irish-language newspaper Foinse. She presented readings at the 2009 Dublin Book Festival and Leabhar Power events organised by the Irish Book Publishers’ Association.
As well as writing, Orna has a passion for Irish music, plays the Irish harp and the fiddle, and loves traditional Irish singing in particular. She has performed solo and in the company of other artists at festival and embassy venues at a number of national and international locations, and has received numerous prizes for her singing.
As a recipient of the prestigious President’s Gold Award, Gaisce, she was selected to represent Ireland at the International Gold Encounter in Canada and later again in Hong Kong. There she met delegates from all over the world, delighting in the invitation to exchange ideas, share experiences and appreciate the diversity of so many cultures.”
Canary Wharf (2009), from which the story in this anthology was taken, is her first published collection of short stories in Irish. She is currently concentrating on works for younger readers.
STEPHAN ENTER’s debut, a collection of short stories entitled Winterhanden (Chilblained Hands), published in 1999, was received well and was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize 2000. His first novel, Lichtjaren (Light Years), published in 2004, was also nominated for the Libris Prize. Both books were nominated for the Gerard Walschap Prize. Enter’s second novel, Spel (Game), appeared in 2007. In March of this year, a German translation of this last book was published as Spiel.
He writes, “Am I a European writer? Absolutely; I feel European through and through, for instance because I have this fairly amusing view of my family history winding its erratic but clear way back through the World and Napoleonic Wars into the Dutch Golden Age (when my ancestors chose to become fervent protestants), and still further back into darker ages—right up till the short-tempered and probably illiterate crusader who gave my mother and the main character of my latest novel their family name. By using this ancestral aspect in an ironic way, and thus creating a devoted, sensitive, arrogant young snob as a hero, I think I might very well be called a typical (North) Eu
ropean writer.
However, my Europeanism—as far as literature is concerned—ends right here. Naturally, there are European writers whose work I like and admire and to whom I feel connected, such as Woolf, Proust, Mann. But I feel the same towards some Russians like Turgenev, Tolstoy, Nabokov. Or towards some great Americans such as Updike, Salinger, and Harold Brodkey.
I consider all writers, including myself, to be individuals. Certainly, we are part of the times and places into which we are born and in which we spend our lives. But I do not believe there are such things as literary ‘directions’ or ‘currents’ or ‘influences.’ Most of these seem to me artificial contraptions created by literary critics and academics, merely made up (and often frantically maintained) in an attempt to outline an order that makes it easier to write well-structured essays, but sacrificing the uniquenesses of the writer in the process. And more often than not they seem a poor excuse for not saying anything thorough and lucid about the things that really matter in a book, like style, the psychological profundity and consistency of its main characters, or the pattern and peregrinations of a plot.
It seems to me that any observation about these aspects—style, psychology, plot—can hardly be linked to a country, or a continent. They are, I guess, universal.”
ANTONIO FIAN writes: “I came into the world in 1956 in Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, Austria’s southernmost province, and the place from which a few of the most important Austrian authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries originate—for example: Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Gert Jonke, Josef Winkler. Like most of them, I left Carinthia after graduating high school and moved to the big city, to Vienna. I began studying National Economics and put out a literary magazine at the same time—Fettfleck (Grease Stain)—which continued until 1983. By 1980, however, I’d broken off my studies, and have worked as a freelance writer ever since.
But the road was still long to my first book. In 1987 it debuted on the list of Literaturverlag Droschl, in Graz (and Droschl has remained my publisher to this day): a collection of short stories, Einöde. Außen, Tag (Desert. Outside, Day). This was followed by two more short-story collections, a collection of essays, and finally, in 1992, my novel Schratt. I spent many years writing the one hundred and thirty-three pages of Schratt, with the majority of this work—and the most important—focused on editing. During this time, as a side project as well as a way to practice my editing skills, my first ‘dramolettes’ came into being, satirical mini-dramas reacting to current events, primarily printed in the local Viennese magazine Falter (Moth). These ‘dramolettes’ quickly became popular in Austria and have been making sporadic appearances in the daily newspaper Der Standard over the last few years. A selection of these texts is available in four volumes.
Dramatic satire in both short and long forms has a storied tradition in Austria. The comedy writer, actor, and theater-director Johann Nepomuk Nestroy might be singled out as the father of this tradition, and it continues in Karl Kraus and his epic The Last Days of Mankind (which you could just as easily see as a collection of mini-dramas held together by the historical arc of the First World War), in Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz’s famous portrait of an Austrian opportunist, Der Herr Karl, and on into the work of Thomas Bernhard.
However, the popularity of my ‘dramolettes’ has its disadvantages. Since my name has, over the years, come to be associated with this particular literary form to the exclusion of all else, it’s often overlooked that I’ve also been producing poems, essays, and prose every year. The poems are collected in the volumes Üble Inhalte in niedrigen Formen (Bad Content in Low Form) and Fertige Gedichte (Finished Poems). My essays have finally been collected in Hölle, verlorenes Paradies (Hell, Paradise Lost). And my latest prose work, Im Schlaf (While Sleeping), from which the texts in this anthology come, was released in the summer of 2009.”
TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY DUSTIN LOVETT
JOSEP M. FONALLERAS was born in Girona, Catalonia, in 1959. He is a novelist, short-story writer, children’s author, columnist, and translator. He has received numerous awards, including the Premi Just M. Casero (1983), Premi Ciutat d’Olot (1984), Premi Ciutat de Palma (1997), Premi Octavi Pellissa (2000), and Premi de la Crítica Serra d’Or (2006).
He is the author of two novels: La millor guerra del món (The World’s Best War, 1998), and August i Gustau (August and Gustau, 2001). His short story collections include El Rei del mambo (King of the Mambo, 1985), Botxenski i companyia (Botxenski and Company, 1988/2001), and Un any de divorciat (Year of the Divorced, 2007).
Fonalleras has translated his own work into Spanish and German, and has also translated J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye into Catalan, in collaboration with Ernest Riera. He works as a columnist for El Periódico and El Punt i Sport.
He writes, “To say what type of literary tradition defines you or that you think you are defined by is difficult. Literature, despite being the fruit of whatever tradition you might happen to be talking about, is also a cannibalistic and solitary practice, one that devours all comers and only responds to the savage power of the creative process itself.
The Catalan philosopher Eugeni d’Ors said that ‘Real originality only exists in the womb of tradition; what is not a part of that tradition is plagiarism.’ Seen as such, I would rather confess to my sources than be considered a plagiarist. We are indebted to ourselves for what we have read, what we have managed to understand and then copy and then project out again, somehow, from our own ‘new’ writing. One of the aims of a writer, according to Antoine Compagnon, is to leave language in a different state from which it was found.
In this sense, I have a particular fondness for Catalan poets such as Josep Carner, who have shown me an entire world made of my own language and have made me realize that the writer has a certain moral obligation to that world. I feel a similar fondness for some prose writers as well, such as Josep Pla. I feel very close to Italian writers like Giorgio Bassani and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and I also enjoy (and owe much to) novelists (or were they moralists?) such as Diderot and Sterne. Kafka, of course, is always there, as is, perhaps, the work of Giorgio Manganelli—from whose well they say I drank, despite the fact that, when I was at work, I hardly recall tasting a drop. That’s tradition for you: sometimes you dive into it without even knowing that you have your scuba gear on.
Bit by bit I feel more like I am engaged in a poet’s work, in the sense that I value every word so much that it makes it difficult for me to take the next step, for fear of getting everything all wrong, fear of getting tradition itself wrong, fear of not knowing how to carry that tradition (carry those traditions) safely to an island without plagiarists.”
TRANSLATED FROM CATALAN BY ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
JON FOSSE, called “the new Ibsen” in the German press, and heralded throughout Western Europe, is one of contemporary Norwegian literature’s most important writers. He was born 1959 in Haugesund, grew up by the fjord in Hardanger, and has since lived in Bergen for many years. He studied Comparative Literature at university, as well as philosophy and sociology.
Fosse is a poet, novelist, and dramatist. He has published some fifty books, and written about thirty plays. His novels include Raudt, svart (Red, Black, 1983), Stengd gitar (Closed Guitar, 1985), Naustet (The Boat-house, 1989), Melancholia I (1995; Melancholy, 2006), and Det er Ales (This is Aliss, 2004). Fosse’s work has been translated into around forty languages, and he has received many prizes, as well as a lifetime grant from the Norwegian state. Fosse is chevalier of the French Ordre national du Mérite, and he is Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav.
He writes, “Fosse is often called a minimalist, and not without reason: in his writing, a small and select number of words and phrases are often combined and recombined in various ways in order to make a complex and emotional picture of the fundamentals of the human condition. His writing is more archetypical than realistic, and more experimental than conventional. Still there is always a simpl
icity to it, and Fosse claims that he tries to write as simply as possible, but without sacrificing depth. He says that simple writing is easy, as is complex writing—the challenge is to do both at the same time.
Fosse writes in Nynorsk, or ‘New Norwegian,’ a version of the Norwegian language used by some ten percent of the population, and he feels very connected to both this language and to its literary tradition, for instance to the writing of the poet Olav H. Hauge. On the other hand, Fosse also feels like a typical European writer, who has learned much of what he knows from authors such as Georg Trakl, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and—last but not least—Samuel Beckett, who Fosse feels is the figure his own writing is most trying to connect with.
For Fosse there is no real difference between writing poetry, prose, or drama. Every form just provides different possibilities, and opportunities, for his writing. And in all his writing he has tried—as he puts it—to ‘make the silent voice speak.’ To say what cannot be said.”
GEORGI GOSPODINOV was born in the all-important year of 1968—though he insists that this year never took place in his native Bulgaria.
His first book of poetry was entitled Lapidarium (1992, National Debut Prize) followed by Chereshata na edin narod (The Cherry Tree of a People, 1996; Best Book of the Year Prize of the Bulgarian Writers’ Union), Pisma do Gaustin (Letters to Gaustin, 2003) and Baladi i razpadi (Ballads and Maladies, 2007). He is the author of a natural novel entitled Natural Novel (Estestven roman), first published in the last year of the 1990s, and then several times after that: the novel soon began to appear in other languages—fourteen so far, including English, from Dalkey Archive Press. His collection of short stories, I drugi istorii (2001), has been translated into French, German, Czech, and Italian. The English version (And Other Stories, 2007) was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award.
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