Central European literary life
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Murder Ink
On the two weeks of crime fiction upcoming at B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction series.
Fiction from the early, most fanatical days of Czechoslovak communism in The Best of All Worlds by Irena Brežná.
“Father comes home on the weekends and shoots sparrows. He’s not allowed to live with us, he’s a bourgeois element. Once, when our life wasn’t happy yet, he helped rich people get even richer and exploited the proletariat. He was a lawyer with his own office, and wore a white shirt and tie. Now he has to wear gray overalls and build bridges with the proletariat. When a bourgeois element spends a long time with proletarians, he starts to look like them – kind of how our hens look like each other – and then he becomes a politically conscious person.”
Sunday European Fiction at B O D Y
Valery Ronshin in B O D Y
“A good day to all our passengers,” she said, smiling. “My name is Masha. Our flight today will be at an altitude of 6,000 meters. We’re flying to Malaysia. The captain of our crew is pilot first class Ivan Potapov. He is a very experienced pilot. He’s been in five air disasters and all five times he’s made it through alive, when the other passengers and crew all perished. Have a pleasant flight, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your attention.”
From “My Flight to Malaysia,” a story by Russian writer Valery Ronshin and translated by José Alaniz is part of the story collection Living a Life: Totally Absurd Tales published by Glas New Russian Writing.
Read more Sunday European Fiction:
“Fairground Magician” by Jelena Lengold
“The Green Bird” by Vlas Doroshevich
The Sixty-Year Old Woman and the Young Man by Nora Iuga
“Little Mary” by Andrei Ruse
“The Blake Precept” by Sándor Jászberényi
Jelena Lengold in B O D Y
“ … and for a moment he felt himself flagging inside her, that helped him, in fact, to wriggle out again and push her onto her back, now she was looking at him a little surprised, a little breathless, her eyes were shining like some crazed junkie’s, her pupils were enormous, she had placed her two front teeth over her lower lip as though she was going to bite herself and was looking at him, looking, without saying anything, and he thought that she had looked at others in this same way, perhaps that very day, or the day before, perhaps her husband, who knows, maybe she looked at him like this, you can never know that, we always feel we are entirely unique in someone’s life and it always turns out that that was just self-delusion …”
From “Fairground Magician” by Jelena Lengold, a story from the Serbian writer’s European Prize for Literature-winning short story collection as translated by. Istros Books will publish the collection in English translation by Celia Hawkesworth in September 2013 under the title Pockets Full of Stones.
Read more Sunday European Fiction:
“The Green Bird” by Vlas Doroshevich
The Sixty-Year Old Woman and the Young Man by Nora Iuga
“Little Mary” by Andrei Ruse
“The Blake Precept” by Sándor Jászberényi
: “Is There a Literature of Multilinguality?” (May 3rd, Deutsches Haus)
The following post was written by PEN World Voices correspondent Alta Ifland.
Participants: Barbara Frischmuth (Austrian), Claudio Magris (Italian), Norman Manea (Romanian)
The Deutsches Haus was packed. The moderator, whose German origin was audible in his accent, framed the conversation…
“The Green Bird” by Vlas Doroshevich
a short story by a rediscovered Russian writer of the early 20th century in this week’s Sunday European Fiction in B O D Y.
Read it here.
Marek Krajewski’s Dark Conjuring Act
This week’s Friday Pick at B O D Y is on Polish crime writer Marek Krejewski and his Eberhard Mock novels set in Breslau (today’s Wroclaw).
Continue Reading in B O D Y
Photos - Breslau, Death in Breslau, Breslau and Marek Krajewski
Werfel in new ‘Review of Contemporary Fiction’
The Dalkey Archive Press has just published the Review of Contemporary Fiction: The Future of British Fiction. This is the Fall 2012 issue but don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that we now have months and months of cold weather in front of us (at least I hope it doesn’t).
As usual, if you want to read most of the issue you have to buy it. What you can read online are the short reviews at the back of the magazine.
One of these is my review of Franz Werfel’s Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand. Whether or not I can persuade you to read the review is one thing (though it’s only 300 words and will take you two minutes, so don’t be lazy) but you should definitely read the novella – it’s brilliant.
I have a copy and if you’re interested in contemporary British fiction it’s an interesting blend of writing and criticism.
Nora Iuga in B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction
Read an excerpt from The Sixty-Year-Old Woman and the Young Man, a novel by Nora Iuga, pictured (right) together with Herta Müller, whose work she has translated.
Photo by Heidi Maier
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