He writes, “I didn’t start reading literature seriously until around the age of twenty. Up till then, books were just something that got forced on us at school, and which I used to go out of my way to avoid, substituting books about football whenever possible. When reading these, I always felt as though I were deep in the roar of the stadium, supporting my team…in other words, I was passionate. It was also around this time that a classmate and I came up with the idea of collaborating on some adventure stories, but because we each wanted our name to come first on the cover, we quickly gave up the idea. Something else I read willingly in those days—even passionately—were almanacs, and I think these have had a real influence on me; the fact that almanacs contain writing on many subjects, and combine both images and text, fascinated me, and led me to want to emulate this structure in my fiction. My own writing borrows from the almanac form, which has always seemed to me like a building with many windows, each opening onto a very different landscape. Subsequently, as a museum curator, I’ve also had the opportunity to work on oral-history projects, and to immerse myself in the stories of ‘ordinary people.’ Leafing through their diaries, I found that they’d been composing unintentionally intertextual work—and rediscovered Borges in them. To Borges I soon added Nabokov, Beckett, Claude Simon, W. G. Sebald, Calvino, Esterházy, Leonid Tsypkin, Vladimir Sorokin, and the two Erofeyevs, Victor and Venedikt—but these are just a few of the ingredients that have made up my reading for the last fifteen years. I like authors with an overwhelming, extravagantly aestheticized style (Nabokov, Esterházy), but also those who double their texts with rigorous documentation (Tsypkin, Sebald)—not forgetting the American experimentalists, particularly Donald Barthelme. The writers closest to my heart, however, are Raymond Carver and Julio Cortázar, whom I can still read without the least interference from my own critical pretensions, as someone who has, in turn, devoted himself to writing. My literary influences and preferences do not relate to ideologies or movements, but rather to individual people and their stories.”
CHRISTINE MONTALBETTI is a novelist, critic, and playwright. She was born in Le Havre, France, in 1965 and lives in Paris. She has published three novels—Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine (His tale concluded, Simon walks into the drizzle, 2001), L’Origine de l’homme (The Origin of Man, 2002), and Western(2005)—a short narrative entitled Expérience de la campagne (Experience of the Country, 2005), and two books of short stories, one fictional—Nouvelles sur le sentiment amoureux (Novellas on Love, 2007)—and the other (mostly) nonfiction: Petits déjeuners avec quelques écrivains célèbres (Breakfasts with a Few Famous Writers, 2008), from which the story in this anthology was excerpted. Another novel, a road novel that takes place in Oklahoma and Colorado, will be published in October by POL Editeur.
She is also a professor of French Literature and creative writing at the University of Paris VIII.
She writes, “I’m concerned with the moment, with the swarm of emotions passing through it, with the contradictory sensations that innervate it and lead to all sorts of miniature battles, of which a narrative work can take advantage.
I am concerned with all the possible microscopic sagas residing in the perception of a moment, and which themselves concern everything surrounding us: the insects passing by, to whom I readily attribute monologues, or the various objects, which I like to bring to life…each of these has a story. Its own method, let’s say, of spinning out new details.
Hence my taste for digression. Digression—for its inherent dynamism, for the extent to which it constitutes the driving force behind all writing, but especially because it is, in effect, right at the heart of our experience, whose structure is itself dreamy and digressive.
It’s also a way of using humor to keep melancholy at bay, a way that also involves continuously calling upon the reader to confirm his presence, to remind him that it’s really for his sake that all this is being done. A reader with whom I try to form a connection based on the commonality of our experience—on whatever he, and then the main character, and then I myself might have in common. Thus, in this way, the novel or short story in question, though speaking of fictional characters, and sometimes including a perhaps openly autobiographical reflection on an event from my own existence, describes nothing, in fact, if not your own particular story.”
GIULIO MOZZI has published twenty-one books—as editor, fiction writer, and poet—with such prestigious Italian publishers as Theoria, Einaudi, and Mondadori. His first collection, Questo è il giardino (This is the Garden, 1993) won the Premio Mondello; the story “L’apprendista” (The Apprentice), from that collection, appears in Mondadori’s anthology of the top Italian stories of the twentieth century, I racconti italiani del novecento (2001). The story “Carlo Doesn’t Know How to Read,” included in this anthology, was originally attributed to CARLO DALCIELO, a fictional artist and author created by Giulio Mozzi and artist Bruno Lorini; the piece is a part of a Mozzi/Lorini project entitled, Il pittore e il pesce: una poesia di Raymond Carver, un opera di Carlo Dalcielo (The Painter and the Fish: a poem by Raymond Carver, a work by Carlo Dalcielo), which reflects on the notion of authorship. In this art exhibit and book (2008), Carlo has responded to the translated Raymond Carver poem “The Painter and the Fish” with a storyboard; the various frames of the storyboard were then interpreted by a number of Italian artists whose pieces, taken together, make up Carlo’s exhibit (ilpittoreeilpesce.wordpress.com). Dalcielo’s published work includes Diario dei sogni (Dream Diary, 2003), and he also makes an appearance in Mozzi’s book Fiction(2001).
MATHIAS OSPELT lives in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, where he was born in 1963. He writes short stories and plays (mainly Liechtenstein related). As well as creating his own texts he has run his own (one-man) business over the last twelve years, writing on commission (ghostwriting, books of general interest, translations, columns, musical libretti, etc.). He also performs as a comedian (Kabarett), mainly in the venue he founded with a group of friends in 2003. He is the Secretary of PEN Club Liechtenstein and head of the Writers in Prison Committee Liechtenstein.
VICTOR PELEVIN was born in Moscow in 1962. Before studying at Moscow’s Gorky Institute of Literature, he worked in a number of jobs, including as an engineer on a project to protect MiG fighter planes from insect interference in tropical conditions. He is one of the few writers today who writes seriously about what is happening in contemporary Russia, but with a style of ironic detachment characteristic of his generation—one which never had time to absorb the ideologies accepted, or rejected, by its predecessors.
He is the author of (in English translation) Omon Ra (1996), The Yellow Arrow (1996), The Blue Lantern (1997), a collection of short stories that won the Russian “Little Booker” Prize, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories (1998), and The Life of Insects (1998). The translation of his novel Buddha’s Little Finger (2000) was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was named by The New Yorker as one of the best European writers under thirty-five, and by The Observer as one of “twenty-one writers to watch for the 21st century.” His most recent novel is The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2008). Pelevin’s work has been translated into fifteen languages.
When asked to contribute a personal statement for this anthology, Pelevin replied, “Can I offer a piece of my inner silence? That’s my only true statement, the rest will not be quite as sincere.”
GIEDRA RADVILAVIIT was born in 1960. She graduated from Vilnius University with a degree in Lithuanian philology in 1983, working as a teacher in the provinces for the next three years. At present she lives in Vilnius and is involved in organizing the international literature festival Šiaurs vasara (Summer of the North).
Radvilaviit made her debut in 1985 with a book of short stories, but it was in 1999 that she became truly involved in Lithuanian literature by publishing her essays in the cultural press. In 2004 Radvilaviit published her essay collection, Suplanuotos akimirkos (Planned Moments).
&
nbsp; She writes, “Ending up in an anthology of European short fiction is just as strange as living in a virtual house.
I believe that European literature—insofar as being a category with unique, identifying traits (and I don’t mean such superficial indicators as place names, surnames, historical events, social realities, etc.)—doesn’t exist.
Basically, there aren’t any geographically specific literatures: not from North America or South America, not from Africa, not from Australia.
Nor does literature fall into categories: postcolonial literature, Soviet literature, queer literature, fireman’s literature, text-message literature.
Literature is good or bad.
Its only country of origin—its only identity—is in what it evokes.
Someone like the South African-born John Maxwell Coetzee is considerably closer to me, as far as “bloodtype,” than any Lithuanian author I might bump into on the street, not least because his biography is almost identical to my own.
I don’t know why.
Perhaps he’s my kind of writer because, as one of his former colleagues said—someone who worked with him for many years—Coetzee, a Nobel laureate, laughs maybe once every decade.
My writing has been described as resembling short fiction. But there’s no such thing as a pure genre, these days.
There’s almost nothing left in the world that is natural, ecologically speaking.
The only genre my narratives really belong to is that of the mongrel, the centaur.
They differ from pure essays primarily in my use of a protagonist, a narrator—a conscious creation.
She is single, shy, and not particularly attractive. She suffers from insomnia and various phobias, and she exhibits a tentative kind of impertinence. She tries to use humor to cover up her sensitive nature and her complexes. And she lives with a beautiful cat.
My narratives also differ from authentic essays because they contain a large dollop of imagination; because there is a distance, in them, from the events depicted; and because they try to make readers wonder about the above elements, not just become submerged, emotionally, in the story (though that too is important).
One of the best Czech (European? World?) writers of all time, Bohumil Hrabal, said: ‘If I could write, I’d write a book about man’s greatest joys and greatest misfortunes.’
So, even this genial Czech, who—more often than not—looked at the world through a mug of amber-colored beer, believed that books were, sadly, beyond his reach.
So what could a woman like me—a single, not particularly attractive woman who lives with a beautiful cat, a woman who suffers from insomnia and various phobias, covering up her complexes and her sensitive nature with humor, who exhibits a tentative kind of impertinence, and who’s taken a liking (for instance, in this text) to pretending to be her own narrator—have to say?”
JULIÁN RÍOS is Spain’s foremost postmodernist writer. His first two books were coauthored with Octavio Paz. Since that time he has written a number of novels, including Larva: Babel de una Noche de San Juan (1983; Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel, 1990), Poundemónium: Homenaje a Ezra Pound (1986; Poundemonium, 1997), Amores que atan (1995; Loves That Bind, 1998), Monstruario (1999; Monstruary, 2002). He divides his time between Paris and Madrid.
Asked about his influences, in a 2005 interview with Mark Thwaite, Ríos replied, “Their names are legion, a multitude, but the important thing to me is to distinguish among the parade my own tribe, my ancestors and relatives: an old lineage whose founders are Rabelais (in the beginning was the word of words), Cervantes (in the beginning was the book of books), and Sterne (in the beginning was the page, for short), a trinity for eternity, because their books are endless. Joyce and his fellow countryman Flann O’Brien, and many others before, such as Flaubert and the Brazilian Machado de Assis, belong to the same tradition. I always have presented Joyce as an example of integrity, exactness and permanent creativity.”
PENNY SIMPSON studied at Brighton Art College and Essex University. A former journalist and reviewer, she was awarded the inaugural Theatre Management Associations’s Theatre Critic of the Year Award in 1991. Her debut collection of short fiction DOGdays was published in 2003. Two consecutive bursary awards from the Arts Council of Wales assisted in the research and completion of her first novel The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum (2008). Her second novel, set in Croatia just after the 1990s war, is being completed with the help of a 2009 Hawthornden Fellowship. In 2007, she won the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition with “Eagle in the Maze,” later broadcast on BBC Radio. Her short fiction has been included in anthologies from Bloomsbury, Virago and Tindal Street Press. She combines writing with her work as Head of Media for Welsh National Opera.
She writes, “I’ve always been interested in novels and short stories that project a sense of another world, maybe that of an outsider, but one that is nevertheless still rooted in a real place, possibly through a specific location, or by a strong evocation of the senses. Patrick Süskind’s Perfume and The Tin Drum by Günter Grass are two novels that have been influential in shaping the approach to my novel The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum. My central character is a seven-foot tall giantess and celebrity chef, who uses recipes as a means of recording stories about her life in 1920s Berlin.
I studied literature from the Enlightenment at university and loved the experiment and range of fiction from that period—a range that surprised me for its ambiguity, irony, wordplay, and different writing styles. To name but three that surprised, intrigued, and delighted: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Voltaire’s Candide and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.”
GOCE SMILEVSKI was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia. He was educated at University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Charles University in Prague, and Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of several novels, including Razgovori so Spinoza (2002; Conversation with Spinoza, 2006) and Sestrata na Zigmund Frojd (Sigmund Freud’s Sister, 2006), from which the story in this collection is excerpted. Conversation with Spinoza—which has been translated into several languages, including English—brought him the Macedonian Novel of the Year Award.
He writes, “The question of belonging and the attempt to situate oneself in a literary context have a rather numbing effect on a Macedonian writer. A decade or so ago, we were part of Eastern Europe, and so we were considered a part of the European context. Now, however, the concept of a Europe divided into East and West has disappeared: after the creation of the European Union, one either lives in the EU, or they’re thrown into ‘the other’ Europe—beyond the borders of the Union.
When I meet with writers and publishers from abroad and when they hear the title of one of my novels, the most common question I get is: ‘Why did you write about Spinoza?’ Behind the general politeness of this question, I can’t help but notice their strong emphasis on the words why, you, and Spinoza. It always makes me feel as though I somehow have no right to write about someone who belongs to ‘them,’ to their Western European context (and now let’s call it their ‘European Union context’), and not to mine. This discourages me to the extent that I give up explaining that I’ve dreamed of writing about Spinoza ever since I first heard of Spinoza—in grammar school, in a philosophy class (yes, unlike in the European Union, philosophy is a mandatory course in Macedonian high schools). So, in the end, I always answer by referring to a larger context—I say that I was interested in writing about someone who felt his only allegiance was to his own high ideals, not to a group of people defined by their religion, language, or geographic borders. The title of my latest novel, Sigmund Freud’s Sisters, provokes a similar question. The explanation I offer is that I wanted to mirror Sigmund Freud’s relationship to his sisters with the relationship of Gustav Klimt to his sister Klara—who was Freud’s patient—and likewise with Franz Kafka’s to his sister Ottla, who became a close friend of Freud’s sisters during the last months of their lives in the Theresienstadt concentra
tion camp. But: I feel as though my answers to the question of ‘why I write’ always sound like apologies. At the same time, regardless of the tone of the question, I must say I always feel honored when I receive questions about my writing because the authors of ‘the Other Europe’ rarely have a chance to talk about their literature—questions directed at us almost always concern our current politics. As writers, we are neither far away enough (so we can’t be ‘exotic’) nor close enough (to be ‘real Europeans’): we’re somewhere in between, in a place where we can barely be noticed and thus are easily and so often forgotten. Our place on the margin evokes two different feelings at the same time: one of inferiority, and then one of freedom. Our inferiority complex makes us feel that we are nothing but intruders in the European context, but the freedom that our ‘marginal lives’ allows us gives us the ability to choose only the best of the European tradition to help us move forward.”
PETER STAMM was born in 1963 in Weinfelden, Switzerland. After a few semesters spent studying English, Psychology, and Psychopathology, he took up a career as a freelance author and journalist, writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Weltwoche, Tages-Anzeiger and the satirical magazine Nebelspalter. His fiction includes Agnes (1998; 2000), In fremden Gärten (2003; In Strange Gardens, 2006) Ungefähre Landschaft (2001; Unformed Landscape, 2004), An einem Tag wie diesem (2006; On a Day Like This, 2008). He has lived in Paris, New York, and Scandinavia, and is now based outside of Zurich.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 40
