The death of the model

Leafing long ago through an anthology of science-fantasy stories, in which authors from many countries were represented, I stumbled across an unusual sentence; “I stayed at a girlfriend’s house till the small hours drinking ‘the best quality whisky.’” The sentence was inappropriate for the genre of SF, which does not as a rule go in for comparisons of this kind. Apart from that, I wondered, what kind of a hero stays at a girlfriend’s house until the small hours drinking, and in fact what is “the best quality whisky”? The author’s name seemed to confirm the “justification” of the sentence. The author was a Czech.

I taught contemporary Russian prose at an American university. In one lecture I talked about the Russian writer Yury Trifonov and his short story “The Exchange.” The Moscow intellectual in Trifonov’s story is in a dilemma: his wife persuades him to exchange his flat with his own dying mother so as to increase their living space. My American students could not begin to understand why the Russian writer should have wasted paper in describing an ordinary housing transaction. Secondly, my students could not grasp the essence of that housing transaction. Why didn’t that man from Moscow and his wife simply rent a larger apartment? Why did the old lady have to move in with them, if neither she nor they wanted it? And why use up so many pages soaked in moral suffering over such a trivial matter as . . . an apartment? And I found myself in an uncomfortable position: in contact with another culture, the text of a Russian writer who was at the time popular suddenly lost its literary value, and instead of a lecturer in literature I became an interpreter of Soviet daily life.

My American friends very much enjoyed the film by the Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica, When Father Was Away on Business. As there was a scene at the beginning of the film in which the father was reading a newspaper with a photograph of Stalin on which the father commented aloud, my friends quite correctly concluded that after that the father went “away on business, i.e., to prison.” It took a long time before I succeeded in explaining that the father, “a victim of the Stalinist regime,” had spent a few years in prison because of his warm commentary and apparent sympathy for Stalin, and not the opposite. And our discussion of the film turned into a lecture on post-war Yugoslav history.

Although it has been destroyed, the Berlin wall still exists. Westerners are still “Wessies,” Easterners are “Ossies,” and the term “Eastern Europe” is still in wide usage. The term is reinforced by books with Eastern Europe on the cover; it is used, as are all other concepts from the East-European dictionary, for the most part, by “Westerners.” “Eastern Europe”—a concept which is today completely emptied of its original geopolitical meaning—has not disappeared. The concept insists on a border and on difference, it suggests a world that is different from the Western one, a culture that is different from the Western one, an identity that is different from the Western one.

“Easterners,” of course, do not agree with a common appellation which so crudely eliminates cultural distinguishing features. Central Europeans will quite rightly insist on the fact that they are different from the so very “Eastern” Russians, and hesitate to accept into their midst the equally “Eastern” Bulgarians, Romanians, and Serbs. For their part, the Russians will regularly point to the example of Peter the Great and rightly demand their place in Europe. Western Europe, of course.

Why do “Westerners” keep assiduously shoving “Easterners” into “Eastern” Europe? And why, when “Easterners” pronounce the word “Europe,” do they usually imply its “Western” half, passing over their own as though it did not exist? Let us remember, the Berlin wall was pulled down exactly five years ago.

Different cultural traditions, different cultural centers and different creative individualities cannot, of course, be simply placed under the heading “Eastern Europe.” Let us try for a moment to accept the justly or unjustly established term without resistance and start from the assumption that the point at which the different cultures of Eastern Europe come together is the point at which they differ from Western Europe.

That point of difference is above all the ideological-political system (communism or socialism, according to taste), which prevailed for some decades in countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia (yes, Yugoslavia too), as well as in the former empire of the Soviet Union. That system stamped its mark on everyone and everything, including culture, whether it developed in time with ideological-political demands or in opposition to them. But no one denies that there were variations: for example, socialism of the Yugoslav type differed from the Soviet brand, and thanks, among other things, to that difference, Yugoslav culture and its mechanisms were different from Soviet culture. Within that common framework, Poland had its own story, as did Czechoslovakia, as did Hungary . . .

What is the distinguishing feature of “East European” literature, on which cultural texts can East Europeans justifiably stick the label “Made in Eastern Europe,” what is it that constitutes the East European copyright? For instance, if the English writer Julian Barnes can publish an “East European” novel (Porcupine, 1992), which could just as well have been an article of Bulgarian literary manufacture, does that mean that there is a model that can be copied? If there is such a model, what constitutes the unique nature of the original production? And, as we seek for the “Easternness” of East European culture, will we be unconsciously dealing in assumptions from an East European mindset constructed by “Westerners,” or the cultural reality which was, after all, built up by “Easterners” in the course of their socialist years?

Beside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, there are souvenirs for sale: a little piece of the Berlin wall in a transparent plastic box, Russian fur hats with a red star, sickles and hammers, flags, medals. The souvenirs are not sold by Russian émigrés anymore, as we might at first have thought. I saw a Pakistani. The Pakistani standing in the place where the wall stood a short time ago selling cheap souvenirs of a vanished epoch is perhaps the most precise and condensed metaphor of the times in which we are living.

Any serious literary theoretician or historian of literature is reluctant to get involved in constructions on shaky ground. But nevertheless, perhaps one day someone will take on the cultural-commemorative task of building a more acceptable construct, an “anti-formative” model which will articulate the common features of the different cultures which functioned under the cupola of a more or less common ideological system.

“The character X is one of those typical East European characters . . .” I read these words recently in a literary review written by an American. I would not myself be able to say what constitutes a “typical East European character,” and nor, I assume, would the author of the review. But as an inhabitant of a former Central European (or East European or even South-East European, whatever) country, I do know something about disappearance: the disappearance of colors, smells, contact with objects and signs which surrounded us for years. What has disappeared, without doubt existed. But what it is that makes that special substance, that specific color, that particular smell, is as hard to explain as the substance, color and smell themselves. And all I can do is for a moment try to consider the matter from the point of view of the seller of literary souvenirs.

*

The first point which makes East European literary texts different from West European ones is the system of everyday life, “byt” (an untranslatable Russian word, which means a great deal more than its translation into any foreign language), everyday life imbued with an ideological system, with established habits, rituals, mechanisms, signs. Without an understanding of the system of everyday life, without recognition of its rules (and absurdity), but also its smells, tastes, and colors, many East European texts would be incomprehensible, as Trifonov’s short story was to my American students. In that sense, by changing their readers and cultural context, many texts will disappear like frescoes suddenly exposed to the air. The Russian writer Venyamin Yerofeyev’s short novel Moskva-Petushki is not a novel about a Russian alcoholic, it is far more than that, a novel of “byt” and about “byt,” a novel of untranslatable substance. But translated into the language of a different cultural climate, it is simply a novel about a Russian alcoholic.

In conjunction with the political system, literary everyday reality (the “byt” of literature) set up rituals which Western culture did not know. East European culture (in some places more, in some less, in some cases for a shorter time, in others longer) was characterized by a system of aesthetic and ideological rules. East European culture developed the phenomena of censorship, repression, self-censorship, special functions of literature and of the author; the phenomena of “samizdat” and “tamizdat,” alternative institutions (“drawing-room theatre,” “drawing-room exhibitions,” “drawing-room books”); the whole phenomenon of “alternative culture” altogether, that is the division into “official” and “parallel” (“alternative,” “other,” “underground”) culture, with the accompanying concept of “dissidence,” and connected with that . . . a long and rich “culture of exile.”

Literary life, therefore, was one of the fundamental specific features of East European culture; without knowing and understanding it, a reading of the texts which came into being in that cultural habitat will be at the very least impoverished. Because that kind of literary life determined far more than the destiny of writers. It determined also the thematic corpus (that whole specific thematic menu which characterizes East European texts!), literary forms and genres, language and style. The whole of East European culture is marked by a lengthy history of accepting the political regime, but also opposing it. In that sense it is a culture of hidden or open polemic, a culture of questioning the imposed models of thought, aesthetic and political, of cultural subversion, escapism, inner and outer exile.

*

The culture of socialist realism (which, if it were alive, would this year be celebrating its seventieth anniversary!), or the alternative culture which questions the official aesthetic-ideological assumptions, is at the same time what most clearly articulates the specific nature of the East European cultural model. Such texts are the core of the hypothetical model and they came into being precisely where the assumptions were most tenacious, in Russian literature and art. Artistic exploration of Soviet mythology which fashioned the consciousness of generations, the exploration of “byt,” the ideological-aesthetic habitat, is the field of the autonomous artistic phenomenon of “soc-art,” which came into being on the border between sociology, “archaeology,” and art, and was realized in texts which themselves eliminate the borders between art, literature, painting, theatre. In that sense, the entire ideological-aesthetic habitat is the artistic material of the “soc-art” artist: textbooks, readers, pioneer songs, posters, products of Soviet mass culture, language, political slogans, design (for instance, to confirm his idea that “the Soviet Union did not sell biscuits but ideas,” even the semiotician A. Zholkovsky took the wrapping of “October” biscuits as the object of his analysis). The most varied representatives, painters (Kabakov, Komar and Melamid, Bulatov and others), prose writers and poets (Sorokin, Prigov, and others) created an autonomous and unique artistic movement. The same type of “polit-art,” whose fundamental assumption is alienation from the ideological habitat and articulation of the socialist/communist collective unconscious, sprang up in other East European cultural centers as well (the films of Dušan Makavejev, the Slovene “Neue Slovenische Kunst” and the like).

*

Central Europe is an artificial construct (and at the same time the third point of difference) on which East European writers (Kundera, Konrad, Kiš, and others) articulate the essence of “Central Europeanness” in a rich corpus of works, in essays, novels, and stories. The creation of a cultural construct is conditioned above all by the cultural sovietization of the majority of the Eastern Bloc countries, and it came into being not only as the result of a search for the specific nature of their own cultural identity, but in part also out of a need to escape the narrow framework of small xenophobic national cultures, to discover the general, unifying cultural components of the small languages and small literatures of Central Europe, of all of those, that is, which shared “The same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition” (Kundera).

The East European cultural model no longer exists, and it has still not been either constructed or articulated, because that may not be possible. The imagology of “Eastern Europe” is still kept alive by texts (films, painting, literature) which are more present than ever before on the “Western” market. The majority of those texts, however, came into being in a former age and give the impression of extinguished stars shining with their full brightness as they fall on a different cultural soil. East European artists and writers today are in fact selling souvenirs of a vanished culture. What kind of culture comes into being on the ruins of a system—and, in an age which likes cultural labels, will it be called “post-communist” or “post-totalitarian”? It is hard to say. The East European cultural dossier is in any case closed, whatever its contents mean and however it might be re-evaluated one day.

*

In a short note written in 1979, Danilo Kiš, the last “Yugoslav” writer, clearly stresses: “Because for the intellectual of this century, of this age of ours, there is only one test of the conscience, and there are only two subjects which if one fails them mean not only the loss of one year, but to lose the right to a (moral) voice once and for all: fascism and Stalinism.” Today I read this sentence, which sounded moralistic and severe some fifteen years ago, whose simple pamphletism did not fit with Kiš’s literary elegance; now I read it from a quite different perspective and with due respect. Danilo Kiš, who in his essays favors a Yugoslav cultural identity, a Central European cultural identity—who seems to have done so, conscious of the nationalistic, self-satisfied, provincial mentality of his own country, virtually as a program—would be astonished by the alarming speed with which cultural and moral regression has overwhelmed many former Yugoslav centers. The common cultural heritage—the works of Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Meša Selimović, Danilo Kiš, which long ago articulated the assumptions of the reality confronting us today—this heritage is now dead, just as its authors are. The former Yugoslav cultural centers have sunk into a torpor of cultural autism, the air there is heavy not only with aggressive misery but with stupidity and banality “indestructible as a plastic bottle” (Kiš).

In Croatia, for example, fragments of the totalitarian cultural past suddenly spring up as in a nightmare. Dusty quotations from the museum of totalitarianism appear on the cultural scene: state exhibitions which send us straight back to the time of socialist realism with the zeal of a new discovery;1 monuments, made long ago, then destroyed, to be immediately replaced by stylistically identical ones; projects emerge, the grotesque quality of which was confirmed long ago in the already forgotten days of totalitarianism; black and white texts of literary propaganda appear, although similar ones would have been considered a short time ago as a literary-museum rarity and mocked by critics; the occasional “state” writer springs up, a role which writers used to take on in the distant days of state culture;2 cultural phenomena are being revitalized which we believed belonged to the early childhood of communism and would remain there, in the museum; once again, like a persistent virus, the mechanisms of censorship, self-censorship, collective censorship, begin to function, familiar to us from the dusty “handbooks” of the culture of totalitarianism; projects of “national” culture and “spiritual renewal,” which we know from the yellowing pages of the “handbooks” of Nazism, reappear. A kind of amnesia prevails in the cultural scene, the participants themselves seem no longer to recognize either the scene or the meaning of the cultural symbols.

At this moment, the Croatian cultural scene is characterized by a kind of retrospective, fragmentary, referential totalitarianism. The Serbian cultural scene is dominated by a tendency which swings like a pendulum between two poles of the same thing: nationalistic populism and elitist intellectualistic neo-fascism.3 Nationalistic populism followed the growth of the concept of Greater Serbia and was a kind of introduction to the war. This second tendency has grown up in the course of the war, and its newly manufactured cultural concept serves to confirm and affirm the evil which has already been done.

Thinking that they are closing their doors only to their immediate neighbors, both cultural milieus are paying a heavy price—or so it seems from outside: today they receive visitors from their own provinces, from the ethno-museums and political museums of past epochs. At the same time both milieus warmly welcome cultural ghosts as a long awaited encounter with their own identity.

1 An amusing example is the exhibition of works by the Croatian sculptor Kruno Bošnjak “People for all Croatian times” (Zagreb, 1992). The sculptor cast seven bronze figures of people “to whom it was given,” as it said in the catalogue, “to help the thousand-year dream become reality.” The dream of creating the Croatian state was helped by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Alois Mock, Pope John Paul II, Franjo Tudjman, and an unknown Croatian soldier with a child in his arms.

2 “Ivan Aralica wrote what he wrote as though he were with me every day, and I have not seen him once in these last two years,” are the words of President Franjo Tudjman. The Croatian President went on to recommend that everyone should write like Aralica, the Croatian “state” writer.

3 The journal Naše idejé (Our Ideas, June 1993) describes a conception that opposes the virtues of eternal Europe to “The new world order,” that is to say, I quote: it opposes faith to rationalism; the primacy of the spirit over matter, to materialism; the rule of order to disorder and anarchy conceived of as “freedom”; idealism to sensualism; love of power to a search for wealth; the hierarchy of authority as opposed to equality; discipline to “laissez faire”; respect of authority and the elder to parliamentarism; aristocracy, the rule of the élite and the nobility to plutocracy and the rule of the wealthy; stability to constant oscillation; the cult of duty as opposed to the search for happiness; society as an organic whole to society as a collection of individuals; the state as harmonizing social strata to class struggle; the restoration of authority to liberalism and the tyranny of human rights; the ideal of knighthood and faith to systematic hypocrisy; the cult of military virtues to the cult of bourgeois values; the open affirmation of war and conquest to pacifism; military and political expansion to economic expansion; the impulse of prosperity and strength to decadence; the absolute will to biological fertility to birth control; the absolute will to power to the voluntary rejection of European hegemony; and so on and so forth . . .

This political and cultural mish-mash becomes clearer in the context of the whole journal in which the former fascist movements in Europe (German, Romanian, and the Serbian Chetnik movement) are unambiguously affirmed; which prints texts by the classic spokesmen of fascism alongside texts by contemporary Russian and Serbian neo-fascist thinkers. The ideas quoted are endorsed through their contributions to the journal by a substantial number of public figures (film directors, painters, writers). They are all participating in the process of creating a new combination of the prevailing politics and culture, a combination in which Russo-Serbian Orthodoxy is mixed up with militaristic exhibitionism, monarchism, cheap folklorism, fascism, aesthetics, and the aestheticization of evil, something which for the time being has the narrow title of the “new Serbian right.” Let us in addition point out that the “left” does not exist, and the “ideas” referred to have their origin in the bloody reality of Bosnia.

if it opens it won’t take root and only then could you touch the facelessness, it drizzles in your ear, tapping, leaf drop at the first step, it spreads its fingers on the membrane, catches its breath to defend itself and walks on, down again, down again, because death is not here, wall-zone is air-zone is an obstacle, like a breach sunk flat, a second step

If this block of words seems like nonsense, well, you’re not wrong. But it could mean something specific. It’s the reader’s job to give it meaning. This may feel burdensome, but these poems are asking the reader to be their co-creator. It’s an obligation you accept when you continue to read them. In this duty, you are as important as the poet. There are clues, but you get to put them together. Lucky you.

Djurdjević’s poems are referred to as avant-garde, a label that seems both vague and lazy. His work does qualify as such, but to lump it in with everything else under the umbrella term doesn’t offer one much of an idea of what to expect. Then again, the term avant-garde might be enough to engage curious readers and weed out timid ones. Of course, Morse, My Deaf Friend will not likely win over new poetry fans. There are plenty of people who are comfortable ignoring poetry, and, to quote Frank O’Hara, bully for them.

Clearly Djurdjević is not concerned. Rather, he offers the adventuresome reader a chance to see what can be found in this puzzle. And who am I to say that my reading or yours or anyone’s is best? There’s a smidgen of loyalty we owe the text, otherwise it’s every man for himself. Read into these what you will. It’s part of the experience.

The chapbook itself is short—clocking in at 32 pages—and is yet another beautiful work of print done by Ugly Duckling. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review, which tries to get a grasp on what to expect, or not to expect, from poems labeled as “avant-garde”:

There’s little to say about a series of prose poems that willfully refuse to identify pronoun antecedents. Or perhaps there are a million things. The poems in _Morse, My Deaf Friend_— the chapbook by Miloš Djurdjević published by Ugly Duckling Presse as part of their Eastern European Poets Series— will be confounding to those accustomed to poetry that holds its reader’s hand. These poems do not. They are elliptical and strange and offer very few concrete signifiers.

For the rest of the review, go here.

by Miljenko Jergović, translated from the Croatian by David Williams and published by Archipelago Books

This piece is by Québec translator Peter McCambridge, who also runs a about translating literature from Québec.

When Mama Leone wins the Best Translated Book Award, it will be a triumph of storytelling and atmosphere-building, a victory for stories well told (and well translated) everywhere. The writing is on the face of it simple at times, but just enough off kilter that it still manages to suck us in and take our breath away.

Take the first few paragraphs of the first story, You’re the angel:

When I was born a dog started barking in the hall of the maternity ward. Dr. Srecko ripped the mask from his face, tore out of the delivery suite, and said to hell with the country where kids are born at the pound! I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.

And breathe. Wow. There we are, sucked right into the story, right into this terrifying new world, bound tightly to it from the get-go, and somehow forced to breathe and accept it, swept along by the narrative. It’s so simple, and yet somehow magnificent.

Mama Leone is a collection of stories in two parts. The first half is about childhood and told in a voice so original and so authentic that it’s hard to resist. Don’t stare, Miljenko is told. Quit eavesdropping. Life’s not a circus. And yet we explore his world with our eyes wide open, with our ears pricked. Everything is huge, larger than life. Sarajevo is “a gigantic city, the most gigantic in the world,” his loneliness is “the biggest in the world,” a character laughs “like a giant out of a fairy tale.” Bedtime, trips to the potty, plans to run away from home, eating sardines, all become dramas of epic proportions (“cities silently crumbled in my pounding heart”).

The effect is grandiose. Scenes from a childhood, more realistic than abstract, but high on poetry all the same, add up to a beautiful tableau that somehow seems all the more real for its helter-skelter, kaleidoscopic vision of the world.

The language is exhilarating. Sentences career along between commas, the vocabulary a tremendous mix of slang, poetry, and more than the odd memorable one-liner.

The result is stunning and beautiful and real, all with an undercurrent of death and war and increasing sadness.

And then suddenly our perspective shifts to the third person. It is a grown-up’s world, the world of Deda, Boris, Marina, Nana, and the others. A world of love, longing, and loss, of darkness and war and damage. There are still angels but now they are drunken. Words that in the first section “flowed in cascades, gushing over the edges of the world being born” now “disappear into dark spaces.” People “become destroyed cities to each other,” although there are still the occasional roses in the sky in place of stars.

The words that so enchanted us in the first part are now “sometimes uglier than what they mean.” But, as with all the best stories, there is beauty in the loss and the missed opportunities. And no end of beauty in the writing.

Miljenko Jergovic’s Mama Leone is a book about loss, and about the hopeless and beautiful attempt to recover what has been lost. It begins in one child’s experience and ends so far away from it that it’s impossible not to see the shift as commentary not only on the fragility of childhood, but on the very act of loving recreation that makes the first half of the book so rich. If this sounds paradoxical, well, it is. It is also in keeping with the paradoxical criticism/embrace the narrator makes a few seconds after being born in a Sarajevo hospital:

I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.

The world called Yugoslavia (over which the memory and premonition of wars past and to-come hover continuously) is terrifying, but the narrator marries himself to it—an act of bone-headed generosity that marks him as one of those ugly ducklings that we have watched grow into a writerly swan over and over again, and yet never grow tired of. Why don’t we grow tired of him? For one, because we recognize his awkward emergence as something we ourselves have gone through. Human experience may be as varied as spots on a rug, but the patterns that our minds make out of these experiences have more in common with one another than you’d expect. Knowing this, Jergovic eschews the hammy over-exaggeration of exotic detail, instead building these stories around moments whose drama might happen just as easily in Detroit, the Urals, Mars. Despite—or maybe because of—their universality, the specific meanings of said moments seem both obvious and mysterious, so that all we can do when faced with them is wait and watch as the situation gets harrier and harrier, until suddenly an invisible line is crossed and it becomes not-hairy at all. The figures that only a moment ago seemed to be physically weighed down by their individual lonelinesses float free, hanging together in space like stars in a constellation. The effect of these breakthroughs is cathartic, sure, but also heartbreaking—for example, when the narrator’s young mother climbs fully-clothed to the top of a high dive as her son and ex-husband (who can’t swim) watch:

Nice diving board, said Mom, and then went and climbed right up to the top. Fully clothed, one step at a time, she walked slowly out along the board, which was trembling and wobbling under her weight. When she got to the end she looked down and spread her arms wide as if she was going to fly away, but then she slowly let them fall. Dad looked up at her, beads of sweat lining his forehead, he opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, and he did want to say something, but he didn’t know how, or whether to say it to me or to her.

The soft ventriloquism of this scene, in which the narrator seems for a second to be not just himself, or his mother, or father, but all three of them at once, reflects a further paradox of feeling—one so ordinary that I’d bet every kid has experienced it at one time or another. The diving board represents something different to each of the three figures around, under, and on it. And yet, it somehow represents the same thing. The distance from one person to the next is both heartbreaking and reassuring, since it is a distance the three of them experience together. And then, only a few lines later, the miracle is over, Mom steps back from the edge, life goes on.

Coming to terms with this last part is one of the aspects in which language helps the young narrator of Mama Leone do. He is aware of it painfully, curiously—the way other kids become aware of their tongues. This maladjustment brings with it certain benefits. As anyone who has tried to make himself understood in a foreign country will tell you, one of the underrated benefits of language learning is the understanding it gives of one’s native tongues. In a similar way, the developmentally bilingual voice of Mama Leone dabbles in adulthood without really being fluent in it. The particular sound of this flailing can be lyrical, funny, bizarre, naïve, and even, occasionally, wise. It can begin a story by saying that “Only words cause no pain” and then three pages later describe that most mythical of beasts, a grandparent, with casual surrealism:

“When he sweats, I can imagine a whole crowd of people building houses on his face, sitting in the dark and sweating like him; on Grandpa’s face lives another little grandpa, who also sits in the dark, lights a cigarette, rivers run down his face too, and next to them live even smaller people and even smaller grandpas, and they too sit in the dark, in blue and brown light, next to their grandsons, who on their faces see crowds of even smaller people and even smaller grandpas.”

As adults, we can call such Chagallian acrobatics beautiful; but Jergovic is careful to reminds us how pragmatic its wordplay is to the narrator himself. Grandpas are scary; so, like Perseus facing Medusa, the child makes an image, a mirror, replacing the vertiginous Grandpaface with a sort of linguistic Lego village, whose busy cuteness effaces its original’s freakish physicality while still not banishing it completely. The not banishing is especially important—for while words may be powerful tools for domestication, they are also spells, and require familiars. The house demon—that onetime staple of family life—must stay chained to the stove, or else it will wander off to make mischief elsewhere. Better, then, to create a grandpa who is still scary, strange, ugly—and all the more grandpa for it.

Compared to magic like this, the second half of Mama Leone, in which the narrative “I” is abandoned for a shifting third person that takes up a series of “unrelated” characters, is a bit of a letdown—but if anything, this is a testament to Jergovic’s honesty as a chronicler. Not just of childhood, but of memory—specifically, of the bittersweet memory of people who have left (or been thrown out of, or fled) their homes behind them. Sometimes these homes are actual countries, but more often they are states of mind: times before guilt, before heartbreak, before love, times in which everything seemed simpler because we thought it was. Losing is something that can happen to anyone, Mama Leone reminds us, which is one of the things that differentiates it from a book like Speak, Memory. For all its beauty, Nabokov’s tutor-and-truttle idyll emits a hagiographic reek, as if its ultimate meaning as experience was the exclusivity of its author’s suffering, and our necessary “we” before it. Jergovic avoids such grandiosity by breaking his hero’s childhood into shards—each of which nonetheless carries a tiny reflection of its source. We were all children once. Maybe we always will be: after all, if disappointment is all it takes to be an adult, then every one of us is born into it with our first breath.

Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from Russian. His two book-length translations are Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin and Alexander Kuprin’s The Duel, both of which are available from Melville House.

Here’s the opening of his review:

Like Scotts or High Elvish, childhood is simultaneously both a real language and a totally made-up one. We all spoke it once, but in the time since we spoke it last we’ve forgotten enough that our own memories can seem, if not incomprehensible, then at least significantly garbled. Being adults—meaning, being creatures that pride ourselves on having ostensibly figured our shit out in the world—we don’t like to admit any of this. We tour our childhoods with regal condescension; but it only takes a single misstep to start us blustering like tourists in a marketplace, until finally all we can do is stutter here! here! and retreat to the embassy. Later, we blame our confusion on the fact that when we were children we thought like children, but now we have put away childish things—like eating entire jars of marshmallow Fluff. Except that even as we say this, we know it isn’t true and that nothing has changed: that the old hurts still hurt, and the Fluff is still sitting there in the cupboard, drawing us to itself like a rubbery star. All of a sudden we jump out of our chairs—Back! We want to go back! But if the past is really another country, then even the most childish of us must admit that we can no more go back “there” than we can go back to Middle Earth, or Ancient Greece, or any of the other kingdoms of the imagination. For we are not just tourists, but exiles; travelers whose visits to the old country, city, neighborhood, block, or bedroom must inevitably be suffused with the one feeling that we do not want to admit our childhood contained: loss.

Miljenko Jergovic’s Mama Leone is a book about loss, and about the hopeless and beautiful attempt to recover what has been lost. It begins in one child’s experience and ends so far away from it that it’s impossible not to see the shift as commentary not only on the fragility of childhood, but on the very act of loving recreation that makes the first half of the book so rich. If this sounds paradoxical, well, it is. It is also in keeping with the paradoxical criticism/embrace the narrator makes a few seconds after being born in a Sarajevo hospital:

“I still didn’t understand at that point, so I filled my lungs with a deep breath and for the first time in my life confronted a paradox: though I didn’t have others to compare it to, the world where I’d appeared was terrifying, but something forced me to breathe, to bind myself to it in a way I never managed to bind myself to any woman.”

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CYCLOPS by Ranko Marinkovic, translated by Vlada Stojiljkovic, edited by Ellen Elias-Bursac

Language: Croatian
Country: Croatia
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 550

Why This Book Should Win: Nice cover; Yale has two books on the list for the first time ever, and deserves some love; interesting story behind the publication of the translation; classic of Croatian literature praised by Michael Henry Heim; apparently, the title is in ALL CAPS.

Here are a few bits from Ellen Elias-Bursac’s introduction that got me all psyched about the book:

When Marinkovic set out to write CYCLOPS in the early 1960s he was thinking big. In shaping his plot he reached for the big writers, such as Joyce (whose Ulysses had first been translated into Croatian in 1957), Homer, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. For all the influence of other literature, however, the novel is anchored firmly in a more local context. The story unfolds on the streets between the Zagreb main square and the Opera House, and the streets and cafes are inhabited by the poets, actors, and other public figures of Marinkovic’s student years in Zagreb. [. . .]

There are many comparisons that can be drawn between CYCLOPS and other works of literature, most obviously Ulysses, the Odyssey, and Hamlet. But the irreverence, irony, and satire with which Marinkovic dissects Zagreb cultural life on the eve of World War II also resonate with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Heller’s biography affords a surprisingly productive comparison with Marinkovic’s. They both were playwrights and short-story writers, as well as novelists, and they were close in age. Heller fought in active combat in World War II, unlike Marinkovic, who spend the war as an internee and refugee, but both of them were the first, for their respective readerships, to write of the World War II in a darkly humorous vein. And they were each known chiefly for their first novel, each of which became a huge best seller, never to be outshone by anything else they later wrote.

I don’t have all the details on how this publication came to be, but the sketch I heard is pretty interesting. As you may know, Marinkovic died in 2001, and the translator of this book, Vlada Stojiljkovic, died in 2002. From what I heard, Stojiljkovic had translated this book prior to his death, the manuscript was literally found in a drawer, Ellen Elias-Bursac cleaned it up a bit, and Yale became the first press to issue an English-language translation of this Croatian classic. (In the movie version: the book goes on to win the BTBA, becomes an instant best-seller in America, and spawns a new group of Marinkovic’s fans devoted to studying and promoting this great book. Oh, and someone falls in love. During an explosion. At least that’s how I believe movies work.)

Here’s an excerpt from the opening of the book itself:

“MAAR . . . MAAR . . .” cried a voice from the rooftop. Melkior was standing next to the stair railing leading down below ground; glowing above the stairway was a GENTS sign. Across the way another set of stairs angled downward, intersecting with the first, under the sign of LADIES. A staircase X, he thought, reciprocal values, the numerators GENTS and the numerators LADIES (cross multiplication), the denominators ending up downstairs in majolica and porcelain, where the denominators keep a respectful silence; and the whirr of ventilators. Like being in the bowels of an ocean liner. Smooth sailing. Passengers make their cheery and noisy way downstairs as if going to the ship’s bar for a shot of whiskey. Afterward, they return to the promenade deck, spry and well satisfied, and sip the fresh eventing potion from MAAR’s air.

MAAR conquers all. When the darkness falls, it unfurls its screen high up on the rooftop of a palace and starts yelling, “MAAR Commercials!” After it finishes tracing its mighty name across the screen using a mysterious light, MAAR’s letters go into a silly dance routine, singing a song in unison in praise of their master. The letters then trip away into the darkened sky while giving a parting shout to the dumbstruck audience, “MAAR Movietone Advertising!”

Next there appears a house, miserable and dirty, its roof askew, its door fram battered loose, wrinkled and stained shirts, spectral torsos with no heads or legs, jumping out of its windows in panic. To danse macabre music, the ailing victims of grime proceed to drag themselves toward a boiling cauldron bubbling wiht impatient thick white foam. With spinsterish mistrust, wavering on the very lip of the cauldron (fearful of being duped), the shirts leap into the foam . . . and what do you know, the mistrust was nothing but foolish superstition, for here they are, emerging from the cauldron, dazzlingly white, one after another, marching in single file and singing lustily, “Radion washes on its own.” Next, a sphinx appears on the screen and asks the viewers in a far-off, desert-dry voice: “Is this possible?” and the next instant a pretty typist shows that two typewriters cannot possibly be typed at once. “And is this possible?” the sphinx asks again. No, it is also not possible for water to flow uphill. It is equally impossible to build a house from the roof down, or for the Sun to revolve around the Earth . . . “but it is possible for Tungsram-Crypton double-spiraled filament lightbulbs to give twice as much light as the ordinary ones for the same wattage . . . “ and on goes a lightbulb, as bright as the sun in the sky, the terrible glare forcing the viewers to squint. Then a mischievous little girl in a polka-dot dirndl prances her way onto the screen and declaims, in the virginal voice of a girl living with the nuns, “Zora soa washing clean, cleaner than you ever saw . . you’ve ever seen,” she hastens to correct her mistake, too late, the viewers chuckle. The little girl withdraws in embarrassment . . .

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. (Croatia/Europe, Canongate)

OK, today is much busier than expected (it started with a fairly surreal interview with the Bay City Times at 8am this morning and will end with Atwood’s presentation tonight at 7pm), but I really don’t want to fall off my summer recommendation plan, so I’m going to cheat a bit . . . Rather than try and write a whole new set of reasons as to why you should check this out (and you should—it’s one of Dubravka’s best books), I’m just going to re-run the review I wrote of this a few months back.

Promise that all future write ups will be new material . . . Most of the other books I want to recommend haven’t been reviewed on the site anyway. But regardless, here goes:

This is an admittedly biased statement (disclaimer: the first book Open Letter published was Ugresic’s Nobody’s Home, and I was responsible for Dalkey’s publishing Thank You for Not Reading a few years back), but I honestly believe that Dubravka Ugresic is one of the most interesting writers working today. Her books are consistently good, even across genres. The two aforementioned essay collections are spot-on, and her fiction — from The Museum of Unconditional Surrender to Lend Me Your Character to The Ministry of Pain — is always enjoyable, surprising, captivating, and envelope-pushing.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a perfect example of Ugresic’s fertile imagination. The latest entry in Canongate’s “Myths Series,” this novel is presumably a retelling of the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga — an old witch who lives in a house with chicken legs and kidnaps children. Which is why it’s surprising that the novel begins with the rather mundane situation of the writer returning home to visit her elderly mother and her mother’s hometown.

Actually, the novel technically opens with a preface about old women, entitled “At First You Don’t See Them . . .”:

Sweet little old ladies. At first you don’t see them. And then, there they are, on the tram, at the post office, in the shop, at the doctor’s surgery, on the street, there is one, there is another, there is a fourth over there, a fifth, a sixth, how could there be so many of them all at once?

The presence and machinations of old women is the thread that runs throughout this triptych. The second part — my personal favorite — is much more fairy-tale-like than the first, with tragic deaths and reunions with lost children. It takes place over a week at a resort hotel and centers on three women:

In a wheelchair sat an old lady with both feet tucked into a large fur boot. It would have been hard to describe the old lady as a human being; she was the remains of a human being, a piece of humanoid crackling. [. . .] The other one, the one pushing the wheelchair, was exceptionally tall, slender and of astonishingly erect bearing for her advanced years. [. . .] The third was a short breathless blonde, her hair ruined by excessive use of peroxide, with big gold rings in her ears and large breasts whose weight dragged her forward.

In its exacting descriptions and twisted plot machinations, this section is vintage Ugresic. (Of her previous work, this section is closest in tone and playfulness to the pieces in Lend Me Your Character.) It’s also the most vulgar of the three sections of Baba Yaga — which is kind of fun. Take this scene, where one of the elderly ladies is getting a massage at the hands of the marvelous Mevlo, who is the flipside of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes:

Beba didn’t know what to say. As far as she could judge, the young man was fine in every way. More than fine.

“This thing of mine stands up like a flagpole, but what’s the use, love, when I’m cold as an icicle? It’s as much use to me as a cripple’s withered leg. You can do what you like with it, tap it as much as you like, it just echoes as though it was hollow.”

“Hang on, what are you talking about?”

“My willy, love, you must have noticed.”

“No,” lied Beba.

“It happened after the explosion. A Serbian shell exploded right beside me, fuck them all, and ever since then, it’s been standing up like this. My mates all teased me, why, Mevlo, they said, you’ve profited from the war. Not only did you get away with your life, but you got a tool taut as a gun. Me, a war profiteer? A war cripple, that’s what I am!”

If the second part is where Ugresic lets her comedic charms fly, the third is where she gets her postmodern on.

This section takes the form of a letter from a Dr. Aba Bagay (who appeared in part one) to the book’s editor, who is a bit confused as to how the first two sections of the book relate to the myth of Baba Yaga. So Bagay creates a “Baba Yaga for Beginners,” exploring the myth from a number of angles in a very scholarly way:

The elusive and capricious Baba Yaga sometimes appears as a helper, a donor, sometimes as an avenger, a villain, sometimes as a sentry between two worlds, sometimes as an intermediary between worlds, but also as a mediator between the heroes in a story. Most interpreters locate Baba Yaga in the ample mythological family of old and ugly women with specific kinds of power, in a taxonomy that is common to mythologies the world over.

Bagay’s scholarly apparatus is loaded with contradictions about the Baba Yaga myth and how it’s been interpreted and told. The one constant is the “old woman” bit, which is also the thread which runs throughout Ugresic’s novel, a novel that defies most novelistic conventions, that doesn’t so much retell the story of Baba Yaga as explode it into several very enjoyable fragments.