Best European Fiction 2011 Read online

  PRAISE FOR Best European Fiction

  “Best European Fiction 2010…offers an appealingly diverse look at the Continent’s fiction scene.”

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “The work is vibrant, varied, sometimes downright odd. As [Zadie] Smith says [in her preface]: ‘I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day.’ Here’s the antidote.”

  THE FINANCIAL TIMES

  “With the new anthology Best European Fiction 2010 our literary world just got wider.”

  TIME MAGAZINE

  “The collection’s diverse range of styles includes more experimental works than a typical American anthology might…[Mr. Hemon’s] only criteria were to include the best works from as many countries as possible.”

  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  “This is a precious opportunity to understand more deeply the obsessions, hopes and fears of each nation’s literary psyche—a sort of international show-and-tell of the soul.”

  THE GUARDIAN

  “Dalkey has published an anthology of short fiction by European writers, and the result, Best European Fiction 2010, is one of the most remarkable collections I’ve read—vital, fascinating, and even more comprehensive than I would have thought possible.”

  BOOKSLUT

  “Here’s hoping to many more years of impossibly ambitious Best European Fiction anthologies.”

  POPMATTERS

  “Readers for whom the expression ‘foreign literature’ means the work of Canada’s Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia).”

  BOOKLIST STARRED REVIEW

  “[W]e can be thankful to have so many talented new voices to discover.”

  LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “If Dalkey can keep it up, this could easily become the most important annual literary anthology in America. Which is ironic.”

  CHICAGO NEW CITY

  “[W]hat the reader takes from them are not only the usual pleasures of fiction—the twists and turns of plot, chance to inhabit other lives, other ways of being—but new ways of thinking about how to tell a story.”

  CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, PRI’S “THE WORLD” HOLIDAY PICK

  “The book tilts toward unconventional storytelling techniques. And while we’ve heard complaints about this before—why only translate the most difficult work coming out of Europe?—it makes sense here. The book isn’t testing the boundaries, it’s opening them up.”

  TIME OUT CHICAGO

  “Editor Aleksandar Hemon declares in his preface that at the heart of this compilation is the ‘non-negotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be,’ and asserts that ongoing translation is crucial to this process. The English-language reading world, ‘wherever it may be,’ is grateful.”

  BELIEVER

  “Translations account for less than five percent of the literature published in the United States. This is the first anthology of its kind, and after reading it you may be so furious that such quality work has been kept from you that you’ll repeat that stat to anyone who’ll listen.”

  PASTE

  BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2011

  BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2011

  EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEKSANDAR HEMON

  PREFACE BY COLUM MCCANN

  DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

  CHAMPAIGN AND LONDON

  Copyright © 2010 by Dalkey Archive Press

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Aleksandar Hemon

  Preface copyright © 2010 by Colum McCann

  All rights reserved

  Please see Rights and Permissions on Rights and Permissions for individual credits

  ISBN: 978-1-56478-667-8

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Funded in part by grants from Arts

  Council England; the Arts Council (Ireland); the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; and with support from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  Please see Acknowledgments on Acknowledgments for additional information on the support received for this volume

  Dalkey Archive Press would like to thank “roving editor”

  Roman Simi for his invaluable assistance in assembling

  this second volume of Best European Fiction

  Contents

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  [UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]

  WILIAM OWEN ROBERTS

  The Professionals

  [UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND]

  HILARY MANTEL

  The Heart Fails without Warning

  [TURKEY]

  ERSAN ÜLDES

  Professional Behavior

  [SWITZERLAND]

  VERENA STEFAN

  Doe a Deer

  [SPAIN: CATALAN]

  MERCÈ IBARZ

  Nela and the Virgins

  [SPAIN: CASTILIAN]

  ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS

  Far from Here

  [SLOVENIA]

  DRAGO JANAR

  The Prophecy

  [SERBIA]

  VLADIMIR ARSENIJEVI

  One Minute: Dumbo’s Death

  [RUSSIA]

  ANDREI GELASIMOV

  The Evil Eye

  [ROMANIA]

  LUCIAN DAN TEODOROVICI

  Goose Chase

  [PORTUGAL]

  GONÇALO M. TAVARES

  Six Tales

  [POLAND]

  OLGA TOKARCZUK

  The Ugliest Woman in the World

  [NORWAY]

  FRODE GRYTTEN

  Hotel by a Railroad

  [NETHERLANDS]

  MANON UPHOFF

  Desire

  [MONTENEGRO]

  OGNJEN SPAHI

  Raymond is No Longer with Us—Carver is Dead

  [MOLDOVA]

  IULIAN CIOCAN

  Auntie Frosea

  [MACEDONIA]

  BLAŽE MINEVSKI

  Academician Sisoye’s Inaugural Speech

  [LITHUANIA]

  DANUT KALINAUSKAIT

  Just Things

  [LIECHTENSTEIN]

  STEFAN SPRENGER

  Dust

  [LATVIA]

  NORA IKSTENA

  Elza Kuga’s Old-Age Dementia

  [ITALY]

  MARCO CANDIDA

  Dream Diary

  [IRELAND: IRISH]

  ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE

  Trespasses

  [IRELAND: ENGLISH]

  KEVIN BARRY

  Doctor Sot

  [ICELAND]

  KRISTÍN EIRÍKSDÓTTIR

  Holes in People

  [HUNGARY]

  LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI

  The Bill

  [GERMANY]

  INGO SCHULZE

  Oranges and Angel

  [GEORGIA]

  ZURAB LEZHAVA

  Sex for Fridge

  [FRANCE]

  ERIC LAURRENT

  American Diary

  [FINLAND]

  ANITA KONKKA

  The Clown

  [ESTONIA]

  TOOMAS VINT

  Beyond the Window a Park is Dimming

  [DENMARK]

  PETER ADOLPHSEN

  Fourteen Small Stories

  [CZECH REPUBLIC]

  MICHAL AJVAZ

  The Wire Book

  [CYPRUS]

  NORA NADJARIAN

  Exhibition

  [CROATIA]

  MIMA SIMI

  My Girlfriend

  [BULGARIA]

  ALEK POPOV

  Plumbers

  [BOSNIA
AND HERZEGOVINA]

  GORAN SAMARDŽI

  Varneesh

  [BELGIUM]

  FRANÇOIS EMMANUEL

  Lou Dancing

  [BELARUS]

  VICTOR MARTINOVICH

  Taboo

  [AUSTRIA]

  DIETER SPERL

  Random Walker

  [ALBANIA]

  ARIAN LEKA

  Brothers of the Blade

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

  A Refusal to be Bordered

  THE AMERICA OF EUROPE

  The writer’s proper destiny is to know where he or she comes from, confront his conscience, draw the borderline, then step beyond it. One of the deepest conundrums, and perhaps beauties, of our time is that so many of us do not know where we come from.

  The concept of the global writer is a relatively new one. There has always been the Sri Lankan writer, for example, or the English writer, or the Canadian, or indeed the American. It is only in recent years that a writer like Michael Ondaatje—born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, a Canadian citizen who wrote his first novel about a black American jazz musician—was able to comfortably fit the phrase “international mongrel” into the discourse. We are increasingly familiar with our hybrid sense of nationality: that wherever we are can be coupled with wherever we once were. Writers can carry the weight of a couple of extra countries: if you put the original brick in your pocket, you can still swim the river. We’re not shattered by our multiple hyphenations. We can be Irish and Argentinean, or French and Australian, or Chinese and Paraguayan, or perhaps even all of them at once.

  The problem comes if you’re European. What exactly is a European writer? Is there a contained geography or an accepted history in which she or he exists? Is there some sort of European voice that justifies an anthology? What does it mean, apart from the very nature of fracture, to have a literature of Europe?

  Everyone knows what Europe once was—the very word opens up the charnel houses of the twentieth century—but we have an imperfect idea of what Europe currently is. It operates as an umbrella word, of course, but the umbrellas are inevitably carried around even when it’s not threatening to rain. There’s Sweden, there’s Turkey, there’s Macedonia. There’s France, there’s Germany, there’s Spain. There’s Luxembourg and Andorra and Vatican City and Catalonia. Some European organisations—its football authorities for instance—include Kazakhstan and Israel. (Imagine the Israelis swapping soccer shirts with the Kazakhs at a tournament, say in Sarajevo—perhaps Kafka could deal with the strange human algebra of it all.) And then there’s Ireland and England, Serbia and Croatia, Georgia and Russia: long wars, short memories.

  Try throwing all of these countries into the single factory chute of identity. It seems impossible, yet it has happened, and it continues to happen: the word “European” has been around a while and it is most certainly here to stay. The difficulty, for the writer at least, is knowing exactly where it begins and ends.

  There’s nothing new about European identity crises, of course, fictional or otherwise. Way back in 1904, Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Hungarian Jew, sat in Barney Kiernan’s pub on Little Britain Street in Dublin, contemplating the idea that a nation is “the same people living in the same place.” He later revises his answer to those “also living in different places.” A parliamentary answer, and he gets a biscuit tin thrown at his head for his troubles. The idea is that a nation is a sort of intimate and fluctuating everywhere. It’s impossible, of course, to have a nation without literature. The corresponding corollary is that it’s impossible to have a literature without a nation. On the simplest level it has to come from somewhere.

  The question revolves around the existence of national voices. What does it mean to have a national literature? In what ways does a writer represent a country? Is writing simply a borderless act or can we ascribe a closed-circuit origin to it? To what extent is nationality just a convenient file name to stick the writer on the shelf and soothe the nerves of the perplexed librarian?

  Perhaps the term “European” is increasingly effective because of its inherent slipperiness. In eluding definition, it embraces the shifting nature of contemporary identity, this refusal to be bordered. Part of what constitutes European identity for its writers is that the literature is one of absolute variety and contention. Their identities are compound, contradictory, incomplete, even incoherent. Histories are constantly being invented and reinvented. There are forty different languages at play. There are 800 million stories to shuffle. There are as many Europes as there are words. Reality outruns definition. There is no real sense—not yet at least—of anyone wanting to draw attention to the “great European novel” in the same sense that the world anticipates, rightly or wrongly, the “great American novel,” but that might be because there is still no final lockdown on what “European” actually means.

  The word expands and contracts. It breathes in its own breathed-out breath. What results is a broad sense of being. On occasion, Europe expands its lungs to become a continent, and then, when necessary, it shrinks back down to its individual components. The small colonises the large, and the large rebounds upon the small. Thus Beckett is European but he’s also Irish. (He might also, indeed, be French.) Danilo Kiš is Jewish and Serbian and half Hungarian and once Yugoslavian—ergo, European. And Kafka might be the most European writer of them all: his fiction lives in a constant flux.

  The past is indeed all around us and this hurtling sense of ongoing identity is fabulous material for the continent’s young artists. The fall of the Berlin Wall was of course no accident, either as fact or metaphor. There is a whole generation conceiving a response to 1989—and the writers in this anthology prove the point. The universal is local, brick by stolen brick. The gap in the wall gets continually bigger and the light that has a chance to break through is reason enough to keep reading. The strength of this anthology is that it gives us an idea of what is European in the broadest possible sense. Our awareness moves out concentrically from, say, Lithuania, over Paris, over Lisbon, and keeps going, reaching the shores of that imagined elsewhere.

  What seems healthy—at least at first glance, and certainly in light of twentieth-century history—is that there is a lack of presumptive nationalism in the term “European.” It appears, at least for now, a good deal less nationalistic than being American or Australian or even African. The growing chorus of voices that Europe has access to, the fluidity of movement from one country to the other, and the stew of languages from which it serves, makes Europe into the world’s largest petri dish.

  The idea would outrage most Europeans, but it is quite possible that Europe is now a dreamhouse of America, and maybe even more “American” than the U.S. itself.

  Of course there are days when all of us can invent our nationality, or intranationality. For my own muddled palette—the carrier of two passports—I assume myself to be an Irishman first, a New Yorker second, an American third. There is a distant European in me also: I grew up on those Dublin roads that were financed by the EEC. W. B. Yeats said that of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry. True enough. And, if so, of our conflicts with others, we make countries. So, by extension, of our conflict with countries, we again make ourselves. Hence the page and the words thrown against it.

  COLUM MCCANN

  Introduction

  A year after the publication of Best European Fiction 2010, we can happily look back and safely say that our anthology has been a resounding success. The response of readers, reviewers, and translators—those unsung heroes of the project of literature—has been overwhelmingly marked by excitement and encouragement. The publication of Best European Fiction 2010 exposed, like a flash of inconvenient lightning, the gaping lack at the heart of the contemporary English-language literary domain. Within weeks of its appearance, Best European Fiction 2010 became not only necessary but inescapable—how could we have ever cal
led ourselves a literate culture without it?

  The indelibly established presence of Best European Fiction 2010 in the Anglo-American literary universe generated a host of burningly interesting questions: Is there European writing as distinct from American (or British) writing? What is this thing called “Europe”? Do we really need translations from other literary cultures if we have writers raised in those cultures successfully writing in English? Can the American literary scene still be called isolated and insular, or be accused of not participating in “the big dialogue of literature,” as was suggested by the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy a few years ago?

  All of the discussion engendered by Best European Fiction 2010 was, I believe, fundamentally about the nature and value of knowledge (as opposed to information) transmitted between—and throughout—cultures and languages by means of translation. Despite (or because of) all the different opinions, Best European Fiction 2010 seemed to have reignited a consensus that whatever its nature may be, such knowledge is invaluable and essential to the practice of literature, “the big dialogue” that takes place whenever a work of fiction is cracked open by a reader. There were readers who found some pieces lacking (though no two readers could agree on which); some reviewers questioned the criteria for the selections in the anthology and the overarching strategy presumably visible in such criteria (though I can assure you that the operative one was: pick the best piece in the available pile); and some Europeans may have been troubled by the conceptual flimsiness of “Europe,” while some Americans may not have taken to the confrontational forms this “European” writing assumed. Whatever the objections were, what was behind them was a heartfelt enthusiasm for the project—the objections themselves became part of the big dialogue of literature. It is exactly that invested excitement that is the best measure of the success of Best European Fiction 2010.