He writes, “The first texts that I read as literature and not merely as a diversion or for school were the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the plays of Henrik Ibsen. I was maybe sixteen at the time. Later I distanced myself from both authors and discovered the French—Flaubert, Camus, Henry de Montherlant—and the Americans—Hemingway, Fitzgerald—and above all the English and Irish—Joseph Conrad, James Joyce. National literatures have never interested me. Europe is so varied and Switzerland is so small that the foreign author is more banal than the domestic. That I read most of this foreign literature in its original language and not in my own, and that we Swiss don’t speak the same language that we write, may have led to my never finding wordplay that important. Literature for me was always what came to be in the mind of the reader, the effect of the words, not the words themselves. And so, besides writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and even architects also appear among my important influences. Art, and literature especially, still has a high value in Europe. It is not a product, its quality is not measured by success on the market, but rather by the power of innovation. Creative writing as a college subject is not very common. Being an author is a profession unlike any other. Literary writing cannot be learned in the conventional sense. In the culture section of the newspaper a clear distinction is made as well between serious literature and literature for entertainment. Writing has remained—in the best sense of the word—elite. German and Swiss literatures are not particularly difficult, but they see their assignment not so much in the reassurance as in the unsettling of a reader, in the firm belief that beauty and truth are not consumable but instead must be—in the sense of a catharsis—cultivated and experienced.”
IGOR ŠTIKS was born in 1977 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His fiction, literary criticism, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in journals and reviews of the former Yugoslavia. His novel A Castle in Romagna received the Slavic Award for Best First Book in 2000. To date it has been translated into German, English, and Spanish. The American edition of this novel was nominated for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2006). His second novel, Elijahova stolica (Elijah’s Chair), published in 2006, received both the Gjalski and Kiklop Awards for Best Fiction Book of the Year. This novel has been translated into a dozen European languages. Igor Štiks holds a PhD from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and Northwestern University (Chicago). He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
Štiks writes, “I’ve tended to see my childhood in Sarajevo as a ‘golden age’ in my life; but, as with every golden age, it needed to end—and mine ended in catastrophe, when the war in what used to be Yugoslavia culminated in the brutal siege of my hometown. This catastrophe—as it is often the case in mythological narratives—was followed by exile. My personal exile took me first to Zagreb (Croatia) where I started my literary career, and then to Paris, Chicago, and, lately, Edinburgh. My fiction is influenced both by the fact that I come from the Balkans—a tumultuous history (and present day), to say the least—but also by the fact that I have spent a considerable—and intellectually formative—time abroad, in France and the U.S. In my first novel, A Castle in Romagna, written in my early twenties, I tried to avoid dealing directly with the war…My idea at the time was that absence of recent events in my narrative would be more ‘eloquent’ than their explicit description. I wanted to ‘write’ about the war in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia through historically and geographically separated (but inter-connected) stories. However, in my second novel Elijah’s Chair—“At the Sarajevo Market” is an excerpt from this novel, which I mostly wrote in Paris, sick of Balkan nationalisms—I couldn’t escape it anymore. As If somebody had whispered in my ear, there on the streets of Paris, that I wouldn’t be able to move on until I’d dealt with the war, creatively, in fiction. But I was immediately faced with certain dilemmas: what right did I have to write about the war and Sarajevo since I hadn’t lived through the siege (being lucky enough to escape)? And: If I was finally going to write about it, what voice should I use? I found the answer in my main character, an Austrian novelist named Richard Richter, whose life brings together the Second World War, the Holocaust, leftist engagement in the 1960s and the 1970s, and the siege of Sarajevo…At the beginning of Elijah’s Chair readers only know that he is writing a ‘report’ about what’s happened to him since coming to Sarajevo to reconstruct his own family history. They are also aware that he has a loaded gun. They suspect that he might use it once he finishes the manuscript. It is writing that keeps him alive. But, as we should know by now, writing is a losing game…”
PETER TERRIN was born in 1960. In 1996, he won a short story competition. He collected the prize-winning story and others in De code (The Code, 1998). His first novel Kras (Crass) appeared in 2001, followed in 2003 by Blanco, and in 2004 by Vrouwen en kinderen eerst (Women and Children First), which was shortlisted for the BNG Literary Prize in 2005. His most recent book is De bijeneters (The Bee Eaters), published in 2006. This collection of seven shorter pieces—from which “The Murderer” was excerpted—was longlisted for the AKO Literature Prize, and won the Provincial Prize of West Flanders. His latest novel, De bewaker (The Guard), will appear in 2009.
Terrin writes, “In 1991, in a London hotel room, unable to sleep because worrying about what to do with my life, I read a book, the first one I’d read since being in school. It was a very special book, by a writer I now regard as the greatest in my language. A young account executive in despair, reading one of the best novels around: The Darkroom of Damocles, by W. F. Hermans. I can only blame my youth, but after that long, exhilarating night of suspense and tragedy and recognition, I found myself thinking that I myself—Peter Terrin—might one day be able to write something that other people would actually want to read. But that’s exactly what happened. The universe of Hermans had become my universe, and when morning came, I called my boss in Belgium to inform him that I would no longer be selling his marble products to London architects. Young and stupid. Thank God. My life changed, and I wrote—for many years without anyone noticing. I discovered plenty of excellent teachers. Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Malamud. But the biggest influence came from European masters, such as Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, and Albert Camus. Writers of exciting stories that reveal the complexity of truth—a mystery fascinating as a brilliant diamond.”
JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT, writer and film director, was born in 1957 in Brussels, Belgium. He is the author of nine novels, including La Salle de bain (1985; The Bathroom, 1990), Monsieur (1986; 1991), L’Appareil-photo (1989; Camera, 2008), La Réticence (1991), La Télévision (1997; Television, 2004), and Fuir (2005; Running Away, 2009).
Below is an except from an interview with the author included in the Chinese edition of Zidane’s Melancholy:
Why did you choose Zidane as a subject?
I think that an author has a responsibility to examine the contemporary world. And, in today’s world, football has acquired enormous significance…I think it’s a writer’s duty to take an interest in things that influence the contemporary world. Certain topics aren’t less interesting than others; all subjects are interesting, especially if they’re in tune with the times. Football is right at the core of our society; therefore it’s quite normal to take an interest in it. And then, in taking a topic that is not, apparently, literary, I’m turning Zidane into a sort of modern icon. To my mind it’s something akin to Andy Warhol’s approach thirty years ago, when he created pictures of Mao Zedong, Marilyn Monroe, or Jackie Kennedy: he’d take some photos, cut them, repaint them, and turn them into icons of modernity…and when you want to evoke the ’60s or ’70s, those images are the ones which perfectly represent that time. Similarly, the moment I take Zidane as a literary subject, he becomes a kind of contemporary icon.
Do you think only artists understand Zidane’s melancholy?
Artists are on familiar terms with melancholy. More, almost, than making it a writer’s book, I t
ried to make [Zidane’s Melancholy]…well…an artist’s book. I think there are many registers in this book, and simultaneously there is the desire to write a kind of novel, a very short novel, but one with Zidane as a character. There is also a psychoanalytic approach…there’s a text by Freud called Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, which interested me greatly—in it, Freud analyzes Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood. You don’t actually know if what Freud is saying has anything to do with reality or truth, but that’s not important. What’s interesting is how Freud himself appropriates, or invents, Leonardo da Vinci. And, in my case, I invented Zidane, I appropriated Zidane, and what does it matter if that’s connected to reality or not? There are many different genres in the text: in one place you’ve got a novel, in another you’ve got literary criticism—because I go back over my novel The Bathroom. There’s also psychoanalysis and, lastly, poetry, because at times there are expressions like “the black card of melancholy,” which refers to the “black sun of melancholy”—one of Nerval’s very well known poetic figures:
My sole star is dead,—and my constellated lute
Bears the black sun of Melancholia.
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY URSULA MEANY SCOTT
NEVEN UŠUMOVI was born in 1972 in Zagreb, Croatia, and grew up in Subotica, Serbia. He received a degree in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Hungarian Studies from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. He won critical acclaim for two collections of short stories 7 mladih (7 Youngsters, 1997) and Makovo zrno (Poppy Seed, 2009), and a “short-winded novel” Ekskurzija (Excursion, 2001). He has translated the works of Béla Hamvas, Ferenc Molnár, Péter Esterházy, and Ádám Bodor into Croatian. Together with Stjepan Luka and Jolán Mann, he edited an anthology of contemporary Hungarian short stories entitled Zastrašivanje strašila (Methods of Intimidation, 2001). Since 2002 he has worked as a librarian in Umag.
He writes, “My first literary attempts, in the late eighties, were adolescent attempts at uncovering the life and history of the town where I grew up—Subotica (Hungarian: Szabadka). Subotica is a town with a complex Austro-Hungarian history; today it is in Serbia, with a Hungarian majority as well as a significant population of Croatians; formerly there were significant contributions from Jewish as well as German culture; and it was there that four writers were born who have been my constant inspirations: Géza Csáth (1887–1919), Dezs Kosztolányi (1885–1936), Danilo Kiš (1935–1989), and Radomir Konstantinovi (1928–). The ravages of the war in Yugoslavia during the ’90s directed my creativity—in a traumatic way—towards the violent tentativeness of our national language and territory, and encouraged a postmodern sensibility (imbued with the poetics of Danilo Kiš, or, for example, David Albahari, but at the same time intoxicated with the noisy versatility of musical trailblazers such as Sonic Youth, John Zorn, or Einstürzende Neubauten), politicizing me and directing me not only towards textuality in general, but also towards a new poetics of the Pannonian area. My writing moves in starts and stops, defying the smooth rhythm of speech, just like the language of Marina Tsvetaeva, Miloš Crnjanski, or Ádám Bodor; and whatever basic poetic interest I have in the landscape is anything but romantic: I’m interested in the consequences of industrialization, in all the aspects of environmental destruction—I draw inspiration for my grotesque, symbolic scenes from the world around me, looking for the single point of stillness in this increasingly precipitous globalist carnival…a point of reversal and reflection.”
TRANSLATED FROM CROATIAN BY DINKO TELECAN
ELO VIIDING was born in 1974. Viiding comes from an impressive literary dynasty: her grandfather Paul Viiding (1904–1962) was a short-story writer. Her grandmother Linda Viiding (1906–2003) was a translator of Finnish literature. Her father was the major Estonian poet Juhan Viiding (1948–1995).
Elo Viiding’s poetry is often zany, with strange jumps of association. Nevertheless, the subject matter of her poetry is commitment to society and its changes. She is often tongue-in-cheek, introducing a healthy dose of humor into her work.
Elo Viiding’s debut under the pseudonym “Elo Vee” occurred in 1991, when she published her first collection of poetry, the chapbook Telg (The Axis). Her next two collections of poetry, Laeka lähedus (The Nearness of the Casket, 1993) and Võlavalgel (Under the Light of Debt, 1995), and the collection of short stories Ingelheim (1995) were also published under the same pseudonym. After the death of her father, she abandoned the pseudonym and she has published her recent collections of poetry under her real name: V (1998), Esimene tahe (The First Will, 2002) and Teatud erandid (Certain Exceptions, 2003).
ORNELA VORPSI was born in Tirana in 1968 and studied there at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1991 she emigrated to Milan and in 1997 moved on to Paris where she works as a photographer, painter, and video artist. Vorpsi’s first novel, The Country Where No One Ever Dies, from which her piece in this anthology was excerpted, was originally written in Italian, not in Albanian. It was initially published in French as Le pays où l’on ne meurt jamais (2004), and has since appeared in Italian, German, and Spanish. Vorpsi is also the author of Nothing Obvious(2001), Buvez du cacao Van Houten! (Drink Van Houten Cocoa!, 2005), Vetri rosa (Pink Glass, 2006), and La mano che non mordi (The Hand that Does Not Touch, 2007).
She writes: “I never wanted to be a writer, or at least I never wanted to write a book filled with words. My greatest dream was to be a painter, to create images without words. Even now, I still have a strained relationship with stories and the written word, because what I’m primarily interested in, I think, are the thoughts that come out of silence, out of images. I didn’t choose to write, let’s just say that writing chose me, and I’ve learned to accept this, day after day, while nonetheless resenting the likelihood of giving up on the visual arts—since I can hardly dedicate myself to both mediums at once, when each demands everything of an artist. Still, there is no single activity that’s ever obsessed me as much as reading. My mother used to catch me spending all my days and nights reading; she’d ask me if I thought I was Rockefeller’s daughter. I’m made of Russian and French literature. I’m talking about the classics, of course. And even though I write in an adopted language—writing meant having to abandon my mother tongue—I am entirely an Albanian writer.”
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY AUDE JEANSON
MICHAŁ WITKOWSKI was born in 1975 in Wrocl-aw and now lives in Warsaw. He studied Polish philology at the University of Wrocl-aw and he has published five books: Copyright (2001), Lubiewo (2005; Lovetown, 2010), Fototapeta (Photomural, 2006), Barbara Radziwiłłówna z Jaworzna-Szczakowej (Barbara Radziwill of Jaworzno-Szczakowa, 2007), and Margot (2009). Lubiewo shot Witkowski to the heights of literary celebrity in Poland, winning him both the Literary Prize of the City of Gdynia and the Polish Booksellers Association Prize. He was twice a finalist for the prestigious NIKE award (in 2006 for Lubiewo, and 2007 for Barbara Radziwiłłówna), and his works have enjoyed success in adaptation for the theater as well.
Lubiewo—from which the story in this anthology was excerpted—has been translated widely and published in over a dozen countries, including England, where it appears as Lovetown. The original title refers to a seaside hamlet on the Baltic Sea that lends its name to a gay beach there; and the subtle resonance of the place name with words like lubi (“to like” in Polish; “to love” in Russian) and lubieny (lascivious) is just one indication of the poetic complexity of Witkowski’s writing. The book, which is fragmentary and many-voiced, takes place for the most part in two locales and times: at Lubiewo in the present day, and in the Silesian capital city of Wrocl-aw between the seventies and early nineties—as mediated through the recollections of a number of “old queens,” nostalgic holdovers from the Communist era.
On the subject of Lovetown, Witkowski writes, “I fear that if this book is taken up in the press or on TV, the media will have to remake it in their own fashion. That which is private and unique will be silenced, and instead the book will be mined for things t
hat aren’t even in it…They’ll link it to the ‘struggle for equality’ they’ll make a ‘manifesto’ out of it, ‘the first Polish gay novel,’ etc. Just as long as it’s the first of something, like ‘first serious attempt at…’ or ‘first queer novel in…’ But really it’s simply the first (and last) of my books to deal not just with homosexuals, but with a particular subgroup called ‘queens’ or ‘faggots,’ and with their customs, which are exotic for many readers, and were formed by their environment over the years. I’m interested, among other things, in which models of femininity were adopted, why certain ones and not others.
It’s not gays from the middle class that interest me, but precisely those ‘repulsive, filthy, and naughty’ ones, because all that’s left to them is telling stories, language, making things up—and that has to suffice for an entire world. Middle-class gays have their long-term relationships, their little houses and gardens and lawnmowers, but the other ones—they don’t have a thing. Theirs is a double disenfranchisement: it’s not enough that they’re gay, there’s that criminalized stratum of theirs as well: thieves, prostitutes, floozies. If they even have a job, then all they have to do at it is sit. They sit. And as they sit there on their night shift, as wardens in a prison or wherever, they dream and fantasize about the most extraordinary things: which is what makes them so attractive as literary figures. Reality, no matter how hideous it is, doesn’t affect them in the least, because they live in their own unreal world. Even when they gossip, all they’re doing is satisfying a need for narration unmet in others. This faggot bohème escapes madness by turning to the theater, camp, surrealism. They rebel against social hierarchies—that which is hideous to others is not so for them—and they apprehend the middle-class world in all its rose-colored futility. So they cannot but relativize ‘generally accepted’ standards of taste, ‘universally respected’ moral principles…They’re a slap in the face to whatever is totalitarian, general, universally binding, and sanctified…”
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 41
