To mark the release of Dubravka Ugresic’s final book,ĚýĚý(translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać)—order it now from , or your local indie bookstore!—we thought we’d share an excerpt, which you’ll find below.

As a bit of context, this book is a conversation between Dubravka and Mermima Omeragić, although to be honest, it reads a bit more like a guided monologue. A lot of Dubravka’s typical themes are presented here—exile, writing in a “small language,” the evils of nationalism, the workings of the literary world—but this isn’t some sort of rehash or greatest hits. Knowing that this was likely going to be her final work, there’s a sense of Dubravka looking toward the future, which makes this book all the more compelling.

The bit below is from a section entitled, “The Melancholy of Vanishing,” and before we get to it, grant me one selfish aside. As you’ll see below, Dubravka alludes to an event at Powells bookstore (arranged by the amazing Jeremy Garber), and where Pilar AdĂłn gave a reading last week. I mention that, because on several occasions, Dubravka told me she wanted me to meet her “Spanish publishers.” She never named them, and it took me far too long to realize that are Pilar and her husband Enrique! Literature is a small world.

Well, let’s get on with it:

Through many of your books runs the melancholy of vanishing. Is a happy literary outcome even possible?

I just read a report in the news about online auctions of the late Sylvia Plath’s belongings. At one auction (Your Own Sylvia) a deck of tarot cards that Ted Hughes had given to Plath was sold for $200,000. The fifty-odd items sold at auction broughtPlath’s heir, Frieda Hughes, over $1,000,000. Among them was a particularly impressive rolling pin. Quite recently a Scottish miniskirt of Sylvia Plath’s was sold at auction. The description of the skirt was much semantically richer than the reviews of the poet’s poems had ever been: “The skirt represents Plath and her personality in every way—the conflict inside, her inner art monster, cloaked by the most precise, nearly persnickety, clothes. (. . .) Plath was miserable, but she created art, and the skirt is a representation of that struggle.” I read these and other news items as if they are symbolic eulogies. Who actually died here? Literature died. At a moment when those who are nameless, the amateurs, the influencers, male and female, the politicians and porn stars, the writers and artists, the media gurus all become stars, when the genres of tell-all books, autobiography, and media-profiling have overshadowed the literary work, when The Life and Work of X is reduced to The Life of X, when what the author, male or female, wrote becomes irrelevant as long as their “product,” their “work,” refreshes the world and makes a difference, this is the moment when the death throes begin for the traditional concept of literature. If literature is to survive it must move into a zone of invisibility and go underground.

This moment seems the most narcissistic in the history of civilization. Today writers are writing their own hagiographies, or kickstarting their career by writing their own hagiography. In so doing they radically change the very essence of literature, even while being unaware of this, and mostly they are unaware. Consequently, they spur readers to write their own. And their readers have no need to tear their hair out over this—there are professional companies where nameless professionals are ready to tackle the job for them. Therefore, things are far deeper and more complex than they might seem at first glance. I won’t be far off the mark, or so I hope, if I say that the key word in our contemporary vocabulary is—archive. More than a mere word, archive is diagnosis. Diagnosis is—to use an old term expunged from our current usage—weltschmertz, world pain, with unusual symptoms. We are all of us affected by a hysterical drive to leave traces of our personal existence on the planet Earth. This narcissistic hysteria is evaluated as a positive, as success, and, in the realm of literature, as artistic success. However, the Booker Prize has not appeased the anxiety of the successee, because in success the Booker has been far outstripped by the producer of little bottles filled with one’s individual farts. Everyone has the right to leave their trace. Everyone is able to leave their trace. Traces draw attention to the fact that we exist, that we will not be erased. Therefore all evaluation is pointless, because the producer of fart jars and the author of a novel that has been awarded the Booker Prize end up equally forgotten. They will be pushed aside by a flood of new creative people, influencers, visual artists, writers, actresses selling candles perfumed with the scent of their own vaginas. They are all seeking, in a frenzy, the best possible way to leave a trace of their existence. Whence this fear of erasure, the possible disappearance of civilization? As far as literature is concerned, this fear has found its home in the genre that will be their salvation. Hagiography. Thanks to the indestructible wedding of democracy and digitalization, people can depart this world as saints. So it is that literature itself, in its mainstream, is being whittled down to a single genre, the hagiography (autobiography, autofiction), and so it is that the author, fraught by fear of disappearance, nullity, the loss of the importance of their work, the reduction of their efforts to laboring on an assembly line, step back from their text and become their own text. Their name matters more than the title of their work. Here I recall the statement of a serial killer who snorted in frustration: “Hey, how many times do I have to kill before I make it to the front page?!” Yet, who can guarantee that our lives are authentic? Who can guarantee that the saints really were saints? There is a weird company in Japan. Ingenious documentary-filmmaker Werner Herzog made the film Family Romance about it in 2019. The company provides an array of services. The client can hire people who will attend the funeral of a deceased who had no family. People can be hired to act as marital partners for those who need this kind of support (pornography, prostitution, sex are strictly prohibited). Werner Herzog zeroes in on the case of a little girl who has no father. Her mother contacts the Family Romance company. The owner spends time with the little girl, ultimately the girl opens up to him, begins to think of him as her real father. Her mother asks their rental dad to move in with them. The business owner refuses because this is not part of the deal. The end of the movie discloses a sad truth, the business owner is not part of the life of his own family. If his own family needs a father, they can only hire one.

Literature is not a toy in the hands of male or female writing egos. Literature must not (nor can it!) be placed under the control of national literatures, various ministries of culture, academies, publishers and all those bureaucratic institutions that have latched onto literature with the excuse of giving it room to breathe, yet in fact seeing to its “esteemed” demise. Literature is communication between me and those of my readers who cannot be bought, no matter who and where they are. Recently a reader from somewhere in Chile messaged me to say he had COVID and was reading my novel, Fox. He is my authentic reader. How do I know? I simply do.

Literature is what happens between me and a reader I have never met somewhere in India who discovered something in my text that I wasn’t myself aware of. Literature is what happens between me and a reader who showed up at a sparsely attended reading in Portland, bringing copies of all of my books that have

appeared in English translations, and showed that he knew by heart the most minute details which I, myself, no longer remembered. We all of us depend on the “kindness of strangers” (Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers)Ěýlike tragic Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire. Literature is a non-utilitarian activity. But one real reader is enough to persuade me of the meaningfulness of my work. Mystical are the paths of literature.

And while we’re on the subject of literary anticipation, Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 and the unforgettable movie version, directed by François Truffaut, have been permanently etched in my memory. In the final scenes we discover the existence of a literary underground, hiding in a forest. Since possession of books is strictly banned in Bradbury’s dystopian world, the book-people have chosen to live in a parallel world. This sort of scenography does not invoke vanishing but the inkling of a new life, of revolution. The book-people are members of an underground intellectual resistance movement, where each of them commits an entire book to memory. The book-people are living libraries. The only library that exists. Who knows, perhaps a reader will appear who will choose one of my books, thereby postponing my inevitable demise. Perhaps near the end of their life, this imagined woman-book or man-book will exhale my book into the mouth of someone else, and this person will, having lived their life, pass it on to yet another. Do I believe that in the very rhythm of inhaling and exhaling lies the meaning of literature? Is any other meaning necessary? Inhalation and exhalation—life itself. With the first breath it begins, with the last it ends.

A Muzzle for WitchesĚýis available from , , and better bookstores everywhere!

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 ĂŠmigrĂŠs 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.

Part I, “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written,” opens with a historical and philosophical dive into a series of stories interrelated through real and fictional figures and events regarding the creation a particular story and stories that sprout off from it. Ultimately, this opening creates a formal model for the rest of the chapter, as Ugresic complicates the stories from the opening through the narrator’s doctorate research, the stories of her mother aligned against the wife, and the stories of the children and partners of all the authors involved. As the section closed each addition that Ugresic made built upon that initial weaving of stories in both content and form. Into the second section of Dubravka Ugresic’s Fox a rhythm of formality coalesces.

In “Literature and Geography,” the opening section of Part II, the narrator sits and talks with a man on a train about his favorite books which all happen to be thriller novels that take place in what he describes as ‘exotic locations’ comprised of South Asian and East Asian locations. He argues that good thrillers can’t take place in nature, for a reason I haven’t been able to construct yet (help me out here folks). The narrator then begins a meta discussion with the reader on the relationship between location, topography, geography and plot:

But I was skeptical as to how meaningful topography (and geography) could be for a plot as it unfolds; how essential is it to the story? How much do the two elements—plot and topography—work in tandem and how much are they at odds? Will any link between them occur to the readers only later, in their interpretation? I wondered then what role chance plays in all this, and whether an “urban scenography” helps the story or hurts it. Because if the plot locality is a “strong place” (one that is, at the same time, a cultural text) while the event is “weak,” our entire literary effort could end up as some sort of fictionalized travel guide. If, on the other hand, the event is “strong” and the place “weak,” the reader might rightfully wonder what point there was to insisting on the topography. I hadn’t given this much thought before. Now, when these two things, the event and the place where the event occurs, are bouncing and colliding in front of my nose like balls in the hands of a slipshod juggler, I am thinking about it. I feel sure they are essentially irreconcilable, that between them—between my place and my events—there rules a thematic and stylistic incompatibility. Linking a fictional literary text and its geography is most often “artistically” risky. One is tempted to do so by the hope—supported by nothing—that these “partners” will conform to one another and join in a harmonious marriage, like orange juice and the ice cube.

But as this section ends and “The Hotel” begins Ugresic changes her style to mirror the thematic model established in the opening of “Literature and Geography.” While she previously focused on weaving stories within stories and establishing a tight relationship between the creation of literature and personal experience–which she still does through borrowing the Widow’s stories–this new approach highlights an obsession with the layouts and histories of the places she visits and her narrator’s relationship to it as established through the conversation with the man on the train and the series of thoughts afterwards. Her narrator is obsessed with architecture and physical history of space as she traverses the Grand Hotel Santa Lucia, or Pompeii, or the Gran Caffe Gambrinus. Further building this momentum from the opening section, the conference that she attends addresses the intersection of place, politics, and individual narratives in regards to the immigrant populations that are being expelled from one place and being rejected by another and through the frequency by which sections in this chapter are named after places.

In many ways, Ugresic answered the rhetorical questions posed by the narrator following the conversation on the train. The topography (and geography) became essential to the story through the narrator’s obsession with it. We readers respect the beauty, history, and layout because she indulged herself in it so much. At the most rudimentary, plot and topography worked in tandem at times as her decision to visit Naples–a whim at first–presented the narrator with an opportunity to meet and meld with the Widow. As highlighted by Ellen during last week’s podcast, some of the most insightful and intense moments of this section are their interactions at the conference and throughout Naples and if the narrator decided not go to Naples she would have never crossed paths with the Widow. Plot and place are (possibly) at odds because these places don’t immediately lend anything to what happens to the narrator–the plot and topography worked because Ugresic made it work. For example, Pompeii’s history never overshadowed the narrator’s wit nor Ugresic’s prose, but neither overshadowed its historical importance. The relationship between plot and topography created an opportunity for Ugresic to shift her stylistic frame and explore different ideas in different ways.

What is a Fox?

Living up to its reputation, the ‘fox’ inĚýFox spans a number of uses and interpretations, from age-old Japanese myths regarding fox spirits, to fables, to cultural attitudes, and, what Ugresic is potentially addressing, the fox-y ways of writers. As she weaves story into story we fall upon Russian writer Boris Pilnyak in Japan, who writes: “The fox is the totem of cunning and betrayal; if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then that person’s tribe is accursed.”

Barely a full page into the novel and we encounter our titular creature, mentioned in an aside of an author in an account by an author. Her introduction to what I assumed was a key thematic element surprised me for a bit as I’ve been still coming down from our reviews of Georgi Gospodinov’sĚýThe Physics of Sorrow and it’s up-front use of Minotaur imagery, and was expecting more from the titular animal’s arrival. But I quickly started to see the shape of the fox develop in a beautifully dark way.

As Ugresic guides us through–in no actual order–Pilnyak’s writing of “A Story Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ How Stories Come to Be Written,” Tagaki’s voyeuristic piece of his Russian wife, research into the possible actual author and work that inspired Pilnyak’s work, the narrator’s–who I presume is Urgresic–experiences conducting research on Pilnyak, the experiences of the narrator’s mother, and Japanese author Yuriko Miyamoto’s story of Pilnyak’s attempted rape these stories are all woven so tightly and effortlessly that she’s guided us into the relationship between all these layers on a quantum level to a point where it becomes difficult to find where we started, where we end, and what exactly we traversed.

In many ways, it comes back to the fox. In between the story weaving, Ugresic returns to the fox, stating, coldly, that “The fox is the writer’s totem[,]” and she goes into more detail of what this means:

In mythology and folklore the fox’s symbolic semantic field presupposes cunning, betrayal, wile, sycophancy, deceit, mendacity, hypocrisy, duplicity, selfishness, sneakiness, arrogance, avarice, corruption, carnality, vindictiveness, and reclusiveness. In myth and folktale the fox is most often associated with a “lowdown” enterprise. The fox meets frequently with affliction, and is thus consigned to loserdom, its personal attributes preventing contiguity with higher mythological beings. In any symbolic reading, the fox is situated among the lowly mythological kin [. . .] In both western and eastern imaginations the fox is invariably a trickster, a shyster, yet also appears as a demon, a witch, an “evil bride” or—as in Chinese mythology—the animal form of a deceased human soul [. . .] the fox is a master of transformation and the art of illusion, a symbol of the death-dealing female Eros, a female demon.

Beautifully, Ugresic develops this clear understanding of the fox before throwing us into the interwoven mess of writers writing about writers and stories and experiences. In the mess, especially as the narrator goes into details about her mother’s relationship, I forgot how I arrived to that point but had the lingering feeling like there was something I needed to keep an eye on–which was, inevitably, the fox and it’s place in the story. And in returning to the fox, Ugresic gave me the high of that ‘a-ha’ reading moment. “A Story Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ How Stories Come to Be,” the Pilnyak short story, is a story by a fox (about foxes). Tanizaki’sĚýNaomi–the speculated inspiration to Pilnyak’s work–is a story by a fox. Miyamoto’sĚýMileposts is a collection by a fox.

Foxes, through Ugresic’s eyes, are those deceitful, voyeuristic scavengers of the world around them and who better to be possessed by the fox spirit (and bring disaster to their tribes) than authors. While Chad’s students may have expressed doubts into the pervasiveness of the fox throughout the work, I believe that Ugresic is laying the foundation for a piece that explores the literary world through individual moments and draws on the fox to address the nature of writing–all through lush prose and insightful research. So, to answer the question: yes, Fox is fox-y enough.

This week, as we read “A Balancing Art,” I’ll be looking more into the formal qualities of Ugresic’s work as she explores Italy, conferences, and impostor syndrome.

You can watch the video recording of this episode on and while you’re there, subscribe to the and stop by at 9pm Eastern to discuss the first half of Part II ofĚýFox, “A Balancing Art,” pages 46-75.

As always, Fox (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow ĚýandĚý for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. You can also find and on Twitter. If you’re in the Chicagoland area, please visit on Milwaukee and tell them that the Two Month Review sent you. (Or order a book from them online.)

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

There are two bits of music on this episode–the first is “What Does the Fox Say?,” which was Tom’s “brilliant” suggestion. The outro music is more Michael J. Fox gold, this time fromĚýThe Secret of My Success.Ěý

You can watch the video recording of this episode on and while you’re there, subscribe to the and stop by next Monday, June 18th at 9pm Eastern to discuss Part I ofĚýFox, pages 1-45. (If you want to read “A Story Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ How Stories Come to Be Written” by Pilnyak, just email me.)

As always, Fox (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

There are two bits of music on this episode–the first is , which was recommended by long-time listener (and guest!) Caitlin Luce Baker, and the second is inspired by Brian’s comment about Michael J. Fox.

. . .

. . .

. . .

For whatever reason, I can’t get this video to embed. Either I’m an idiot (ding! ding! ding!) or the new website is fighting against embedded videos. (Probably an idiot.) Regardless, you can watch it all .

We got some solid feedback for this episode–people thought we were having almost too much fun–and I’ve been getting a lot of requests for the Pilnyak story. Feel free to email me if you’d like to read that before next week’s episode, which will cover Part I (pages 1-45) of Ugresic’sĚý.Ěý

And if you need a copy, your local bookstore will likely have one, or you can order from us directly and use the code 2MONTH at checkout for 20% off.

UPDATE: I figured it out!

Another tricky treasure from an internationally renowned author.

Ugresic has been in exile from her native Croatia since the region emerged as a country after the breakup of Yugoslavia. A vocal critic of nationalism, she was, she says, branded a “whore, a witch, and a traitor.” It’s that second slur that is most intriguing when it comes to reading the author’s work. InĚýBaba Yaga Laid an EggĚý(2010), she used a magical crone from Slavic folklore as a lens through which to view contemporary women’s lives. Here, she takes inspiration in the vulpine creature who gives this new book its name. As a mythic figure, the fox takes on and sheds attributes as he—or she—travels across cultures, but one characteristic seems to remain constant: The fox is an ambivalent type. By making the fox a sort of mascot to the first part of her novel, a section called “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written,” Ugresic is creating an affinity between the writer and the trickster. Even at her most straightforward, Ugresic is a sly storyteller, and here she is using every trick in the postmodernist playbook. Indeed, there are moments when it seems like she’s pulling a fast one even when she isn’t. For example, a reader who isn’t knowledgeable about early-20th-century Russian literature might be forgiven for thinkingĚýOkay! An American NovelĚýby Boris Pilnyak is an invention simply because that title is just too perfect. IfĚýOkay!Ěýis Ugresic’s creation, it’s a clever one. But the reader who bothers to Google is in for the delightful discovery that both Pilnyak and his “American novel” are real. Then we’re left to wonder what true and false mean in fiction anyway, a question Ugresic complicates by using a first-person narrator and autobiographical detail. The translators deserves special mention, too. “The fox meets frequently with affliction, and is thus consigned to loserdom, its personal attributes preventing contiguity with higher mythological beings.” The juxtaposition of “loserdom” and “contiguity” is not only funny; it also captures the high-low essence of Ugresic’s style.

Brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny.

As with the last season, we’ll be broadcasting these first live on YouTube. That way, if you’re reading along and want to get in on the conversation, you can post comments and questions, which we’ll reply to live. (One facet of this project is the idea that it’s a sort of Internet-enabled book club.) I’ll post these recordings here on Three Percent every Tuesday, and then, on Thursday, we’ll release the podcast version. So, you can watch live, watch later, or listen whenever!

Just so you have all the details, here’s the main , which you can subscribe to, here’s where will take place, and here’s the like to the .

Given the structure ofĚýFox, this should be a great season to dip in and out of. The novel is a singularĚýnovel, but each of the sections could theoretically stand alone. So if you’re not caught up, you can still tune in for our jokes and stories and observations.

Also, you can get 20% off ofĚýFoxĚýby ordering and using the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Here’s the full schedule with the YouTube dates, podcast dates, and section of the book being covered. Hope you can join it and follow along!

6/11 (6/14): Introduction

6/18 (6/21): Part I (pgs 1-45)

6/25 (6/28): Part II (46-75)

7/2 (7/5): Part II (75-109)

7/9 (7/12): Part III (110-144)

7/16 (7/19): Part III (145-183)

7/23 (7/25): Part IV (184-235)

7/30 (8/2): Part V (236-257)

8/6 (8/9): Part VI (258-308)

Plus, if you join us tonight (or listen on Thursday), you’ll find out what book we’ll be covering this fall. It’s the first non-Open Letter title, and one that’s big, intimidating, and incredibly beloved. Enjoy the podcast, and be sure and get a copy ofĚýFox!

As many of you also may know, Open Letter is gearing up to celebrate its 10th anniversary next year (WHOO! OPEN LETTER FOREVER! FOREVER AND EVER! OPEN LETTER DOT COM!)—and to mark our tenth anniversary we’ll be publishing not one, but TWO new titles in 2018 by Dubravka Ugresic—the first author Open Letter ever published. Dubravka is one of the greatest of the greats (most recently she’s the 2016 recipient of the Neustadt Prize), and we’re beyond thrilled to continue publishing and working with her. If you’ve read any of her books, you know why we love her and her work so much; if you’re a Ugresic virgin, now is as good a time as any to get started on her oeuvre.

For our throwbacks, we’ve decided to do is fish through our archives and bring back some author-related interviews, reviews, and general crush-posts. Even though this is just skimming off one layer of our Ugresic archives, this was no clean and simple feat, as there was a lot of reformatting and unglitching to do with older posts since the server “update” a year or so ago, but what better time to spring clean than, well, summer?

Since we’ve published a total of three of Dubravka’s books, our throwback arsenal for her is pretty damn extensive. We hope you enjoy browsing our history as much as we enjoyed dusting it off!

Book One: Nobody’s Home

Dubravka in The Telegraph. Wherein we kick off our Dubravkafest almost 10 years ago with a Telegraph sneak peek of one of the pieces in Nobody’s Home.

The Guardian runs a profile on Dubravka and her work.

Bookforum reviews Nobody’s Home and gets what Ugresic is about. “The notion that a literary text must bear the burden of identification tags is, for Ugresic, an affront; it entails tacit approval of the idea that “the field of literature is nothing more than a realm of geopolitics.”

Dubravka goes on the Leonard Lopate show with Breyten Breytenbach.

Dubravka’s Nobody’s Home keeps smashing with reviews, including at Literary License and BoingBoing: “. . . this collection of essays puts her on par with Zizek or Baudrillard for observation and critique – and maybe a cut above for courage to speak the truth. There’s something decidedly female about this writing as well, which exposes a bit of the bias of the rest of post-modernism.”

One of Dubravka’s marvelous translators, Ellen Elias-Bursac, shares her thoughts on Nobody’s Home.

More reviews for Nobody’s Home in Booklit and Front Table “She is a world traveler, an exile of her homeland, but no matter what has changed politically and culturally, there is always that longing of ĂŠmigrĂŠs for the familiarity of the native.”

Book Two: Karaoke Culture

That time we got excited about our second Ugresic book, Karaoke Culture.

. (Which The Millions liked so much they posted about and linked to it!)

In one Three Percent review, a student intern calls Karaoke Culture a book “well in control of itself and in control of its reader, utterly convincing and entertaining.”

.

The New Republic runs an article in which Ruth Franklin” refers to Karaoke as one of the five books she wished she’d reviewed.

A review from By the Firelight aptly analyzes Karaoke Culture by beginning: “To even write this review is to participate in the Karaoke Culture the Dubravka Ugresic criticizes.”

Carolyn Kellogg of the L.A. Times gives a great review of Karaoke Culture, stating “Karaoke Culture is an essential investigation of our times.”

That time Karaoke Culture was a finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism!.

Book Three: Europe in Sepia

”. World Literature Today says of the collection: “. . . these acerbic, angry essays lay bare what shapes our world and ourselves: envy, greed, and the forces they unleash—anarchy and revolution.”

. “[Ugresic’s] interested, rather, in talking about the particularity of now as it scrambles out of the past and lurches towards the future—unpredictable, nonlinear, but worth observing with whatever amount of critical distance an author can access. Ugresic is interested in the committed losers, whose narratives might take on unfamiliar shapes, without so many peaks and valleys. She is invested in traveling the winding, bumpy back roads of the excluded.”

. “UgreĹĄić’s writing is unified by her sharp wit, cunning mind, absurdist sensibility, and its fragmentation. Her “patchwork” fiction is littered with references to Kafka and Isaac Babel and interspersed with patterns and recipes and articles from women’s magazines. UgreĹĄić’s essays are just as fragmented, with her mind racing the hyperkinectic speed of her travels, it seems.”

. which recognizes in her a dark humor but straight-shooting realism that’s hard to not admire: “UgreĹĄić is always the first to subvert her own glamour. Indeed, she has distinguished herself throughout her thirty-year career by refusing to accept the romance, by staring down nostalgia until it splinters apart like her former homeland.”

“She captures modern rootlessness particularly well—a rootlessness that extends beyond the mere geographic and linguistic, to other aspects of identity. . .”

“. . . an excellent collection in which Ugresic finds herself, by virtue of living long enough, in the “brighter future.”

Stay tuned for more of our Open Letter #WITMonth throwbacks!