Best European Fiction 2012 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.” FINANCIAL TIMES

  “With the new anthology Best European Fiction . . . 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.” 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.” NEWCITY

  “[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 di~cult 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 ‘nonnegotiable 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.” THE 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

  “Does European literature exist? Of course it does, and this collection of forty-one stories proves it.” THE INDEPENDENT

  EDITED AND

  WITH AN

  INTRODUCTION

  BY

  ALEKSANDAR

  HEMON

  PREFACE BY NICOLE KRAUSS

  BEST

  EUROPEAN

  FICTION

  2012

  DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

  CHAMPAIGN·DUBLIN·LONDON

  Copyright © 2011 by Dalkey Archive Press

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Aleksandar Hemon

  Preface copyright © 2011 by Nicole Krauss

  All rights reserved

  Please see Rights and Permissions

  on page 457 for individual credits

  ISBN 978-1-56478-680-7

  ISBN 978-1-56478-695-1 (ebook)

  ISSN 2152-6672

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Funded in part by the Arts Council (Ireland) and

  the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

  Please see Acknowledgments on page 455 for additional

  information on the support received for this volume

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper

  and bound in the United States of America

  Contents

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  love

  [BELGIUM: DUTCH]

  PATRICIA DE MARTELAERE

  My Hand Is Exhausted

  [CROATIA]

  MAJA HRGOVIĆ

  Zlatka

  [SPAIN: GALICIAN]

  AGUSTÍN FERNÁNDEZ PAZ

  This Strange Lucidity

  desire

  [POLAND]

  JANUSZ RUDNICKI

  The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus

  [IRELAND: IRISH]

  GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK

  “. . . everything emptying into white”

  elsewhere

  [HUNGARY]

  ZSÓFIZ BÁN

  When There Were Only Animals

  [SWITZERLAND: RHAETO-ROMANIC · GERMAN]

  ARNO CAMENISCH

  Sez Ner

  [PORTUGAL]

  RUI ZINK

  Tourist Destination

  war

  [GEORGIA]

  DAVID DEPHY

  Before the End

  [IRELAND: ENGLISH]

  DESMOND HOGAN

  Kennedy

  [RUSSIA]

  DANILA DAVYDOV

  The Telescope

  thought

  [CZECH REPUBLIC]

  JIŘÍ KRATOCHVIL

  I, Loshad’

  [ESTONIA]

  ARMIN KÕOMÄGI

  Logisticians Anonymous

  art

  [SLOVAKIA]

  RÓBERT GÁL

  Agnomia

  [FRANCE]

  MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

  Juergen the Perfect Son-in-Law

  [NORWAY]

  BJARTE BREITEIG

  Down There They Don’t Mourn

  music

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  MUHAREM BAZDULJ

  Magic AND Sarajevo

  [ICELAND]

  GERÐUR KRISTNÝ

  The Ice People

  children

  [SWITZERLAND: FRENCH]

  NOËLLE REVAZ

  The Children

  [UNITED KINGDOM: SCOTLAND]

  DONAL MCLAUGHLIN

  enough to make your heart

  [NETHERLANDS]

  SANNEKE VAN HASSEL

  Pearl

  family

  [FINLAND]

  MARITTA LINTUNEN

  Passiontide

  [UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]

  DUNCAN BUSH

  Bigamy

  [SLOVENIA]

  BRANKO GRADIŠNIK

  Memorinth

  [SERBIA]

  MARIJA KNEŽEVIĆ

  Without Fear of Change

  home

  [LIECHTENSTEIN]

  PATRICK BOLTSHAUSER

  Tomorrow It’s Deggendorf

  [SPAIN: CATALAN]

  PEP PUIG

  Clara Bou

  crisis

  [UNITED
KINGDOM: ENGLAND]

  LEE ROURKE

  Catastrophe

  [MONTENEGRO]

  ANDREJ NIKOLAIDIS

  The Coming

  [SWITZERLAND: GERMAN]

  MICHAEL STAUFFER

  The Woman with the Stocks

  work

  [SPAIN: CASTILIAN]

  SANTIAGO PAJARES

  Today

  [UKRAINE]

  SERHIY ZHADAN

  The Owners

  evil

  [GERMANY]

  CLEMENS MEYER

  The Case of M.

  [BELGIUM: FRENCH]

  BERNARD QUIRINY

  Rara Avis

  INDEX BY AUTHOR

  INDEX BY COUNTRY

  AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

  TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHIES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

  Preface

  Around the time these stories were being gathered from Europe, Keith Richards published his autobiography, Life, in which he tells the story of growing up on the Dartford Marshes in England among smallpox hospitals, leper colonies, and insane asylums. One day, another kid emerged out of the precipitous atmosphere, skinny with big lips, carrying under his arm some rare and coveted records by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters that otherwise Richards had no way of hearing; the rest is history. In other words, the Rolling Stones were born out of scarcity and longing, which may finally be what makes them old-fashioned. Scarcity built Greenwich Village—and forged friendships, bands, art movements, and communities of culture as far back as culture goes—but now the flocked-to village is Facebook and the condition is overabundance, and befriending has devolved into a means of staking out one’s coordinates in infinity. Anyone can listen to, look at, or access almost anything at any time now, and a search is something finished a fraction of a second after it began.

  But literature refuses the instantaneous on every level, and so while the proportions have changed radically in other mediums, in literature they’ve remained relatively unchanged: we still can’t read anything we want unless it happens to have been written in a language we’re proficient in, or a heroic and self-sacrificing effort has been made by a (usually) nonprofit publishing house and a (always) nonprofit translator. One might say that growing up in America right now with an appetite for contemporary Polish, Chinese, or Portuguese literature isn’t so unlike growing up as a blues fan on the Dartford Marshes in the 1950s: only 0.7% of the books published annually in the States are translations of literary fiction and poetry, and you’ll never hear about most of them unless you’re lucky enough to cross paths with a skinny kid with big lips clutching a well-thumbed copy of The Literary Conference by César Aira, Life on Sandpaper by Yoram Kaniuk, or Animalinside by László Krasznahorkai, to mention just a few published concurrently with Life.

  As someone who is indebted to translation for the majority of her transformative reading experiences, for me an anthology like this is a godsend. Things would have turned out differently for me if the writings of Bruno Schulz, Zbigniew Herbert, Yehuda Amichai, Joseph Brodsky, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Danilo Kiš, Thomas Bernhard, Bohumil Hrabal, Edmond Jabès, and David Grossman, to name just a few, had not come down to me at an impressionable age, first through the almost impossibly narrow chute provided for literary translations into English, and then via a series of lucky accidents. These writers demanded of me many things. But collectively, they offered a view onto a homeland I might have had a chance of belonging to, something that neither my experience growing up in America, nor any similar group of American writers, had ever given me. I am not exaggerating the case, or maybe I am exaggerating only a very little, to say that had it not been for my encounter with them I might now be a shoe salesperson in the Americana shopping center on Long Island, near where I had the small misfortune to grow up; at best, I might have become a lawyer.

  Not an insignificant number of those writers arrived to me thanks to Penguin’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series edited by Philip Roth between 1974 and 1989, which introduced America—and me—to some of the greatest twentieth-century writers we’d never heard of. At that time it was the Iron Curtain that stood between us and the literature of Central and Eastern Europe; now it’s free-market capitalism and the tyranny of the best seller: if nothing else, the irony is impeccable. And yet while those of us who live by books have become gluttons for bad news, everything is not doom and gloom.

  More than thirty years after Roth imported Milan Kundera, Primo Levi, and Bruno Schulz in his suitcase, the brilliant American writer who has taken it upon himself to smuggle us a new crop of writers from Europe hails not from Newark but Sarajevo: history and chance blew Aleksandar Hemon to America and muscled him into English, which was nothing short of a windfall for us. In fact, anyone who follows contemporary American literature—i.e. much of the world—will have noticed that a growing portion of the most talented young American writers now making their mark on our national literature weren’t born in this country or into this language; like Hemon, many of them only arrived here as adults or near adults. The American stories and novels they write are as much about China, Russia, or Nigeria as they are about here, or they are about Peru, India, and Serbia refracted through the prism of here, or about here reflected through the mirror of there. What seems clear is that these writers’ flexible sense of identity doesn’t hang on any one hook. The intertwining of nations and cultures, in the best of their work, encourages surprising reinventions of the form. If we didn’t know better—if translation statistics weren’t what they are, and we hadn’t recently witnessed just how enormous a store some still set in the ambition for a Great American Novel that captures the essence of our national experience at the very moment it is being lived—we might even have been fooled into thinking that, two centuries after Goethe imagined it, the era of Weltliteratur had arrived on these shores at last.

  But we are not talking about novels here; we’re not even talking about America. It is our luck to be talking about short stories—a form whose physical diminutiveness has saved it from the expectation of carrying nations on its back, leaving it free to do as it pleases—and about Europe, the ideal of which Milan Kundera once boiled down to “maximum diversity in minimum space.” If this anthology were looking for a subtitle, it couldn’t do better than that. Here you will find stories told from the perspective of a horse in the Second World War (“I, Loshad’,” by Jiří Kratochvil), a dog in the afterlife (“This Strange Lucidity,” by Agustín Fernández Paz), or, in one of my favorites, a group of children in an orphanage left to fend for themselves when their director is forced to leave indefinitely (“The Children,” by Noëlle Revaz). There are rambunctiously imaginative stories about girls laying giant eggs, but there are also chillingly realistic stories about rape, murder, pedophilia, war tourism, a man who survives a bus bomb, a mother who drowns her child, and one woman’s lonely and graphic battle against death on the floor of her kitchen.

  The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect of existence. Kundera, still pondering the diversity of Europe, even went so far as to argue that geographic distance is preferable when it comes to judging literature, as it obscures the smaller, local context and allows the reader to view the work in the large context of world literature, which he saw as the only true way to perceive its aesthetic value, its potentially radical newness. If so, then we, the American readers, might just be the ideal readers for these European stories. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At the very least, for those looking for an escape from the Dartford Marshes, here’s our chance.

  NICOLE KRAUSS

  Introduction

 
As I write this intro in the summer of 2011, much of the world economy is in the middle of a nosedive, on the heels of crises precipitated by unfettered greed and stupidity; unemployment is on the constant rise; the euro is on the verge of collapse; the Syrian government is massacring its citizens, while the civil war in Libya continues unchecked; on the streets of Israel hundreds of thousands of protesters are expressing their righteous anger; Great Britain is on fire, riots having spread from London to other cities—and the list of troubles does not even begin to end there, nor is there any reason to believe that the fall would be calmer than the summer. A reasonable person might hence justifiably ask: why bother with reading contemporary European fiction? Indeed, why bother with literature at all?

  Well, the short answer is: what else can we do? Literature opens our eyes to the horrors and the beauties of the relentless flow of calamities we call the world. Permit me to submit as evidence Danila Davydov’s (Russia) story “The Telescope,” in which a man survives what seems to be a terrorist attack and crawls out of the wreckage blind, only to end up opening up the entire universe to someone else. After I read “The Telescope,” I thought: “Tweet this, motherfuckers!” for Davydov’s masterpiece is ample evidence that there are vast spaces of human experience that could be covered and comprehended only by means of literature. If you need further proof of the essential value of intelligent fiction, take Bjarte Breiteig’s (Norway) “Down There They Don’t Mourn,” which addresses the malady of the heart that is not unrelated to the recent terrorist massacre in his homeland. Or take Michael Stauffer’s (Switzerland) “The Woman with the Stocks,” whose opening sentence brings into vision the human order that modern capitalism has all but torn apart: “The woman with the stocks had a mother.” And if you have started to think that love is something that can be done only on the Internet, read Maja Hrgović’s (Croatia) “Zlatka.” These are, of course, just some of the offerings from this year’s Best European Fiction, which has yielded, I’m happy to say, a rich literary harvest, even if the richness made for a tormentful selection process.

  The writers in BEF 2012 convinced me—yet again—that literature is the best way to stay truly engaged with the immensity of human experience. This year, we decided to forgo the abstract alphabetical ordering and organize the anthology around the things that matter. Hence the selections are grouped thematically, whereby the themes are recognizable as fundamental aspects of existence: love, desire, family, thought, art, home, work, evil, etc. Literature is an inherently democratic (if utopian) project, capable not only of dealing with the onrushing train of history but with the ever-demanding questions of sheer being alive as well. The intention of the thematic organization was thus not to reduce the pieces to one general issue—for great writing is irreducible—but rather to engage them with one another, to put them in the situation of dialogue and to show what we have always known: the infinite variation of human experience, which can never be spent or diminished to a tweet, is the true and only domain of literature. What you can find in this book is not only great, relevant fiction, but also—and perhaps most importantly—a sense of kinship in the belief that human lives, thoughts, and feelings always matter.