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Best European Fiction 2014

By Jonathan Gibbs.

This is the fifth year of Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction and already it’s possible to see how the cultural ground has shifted under it even in that short time. In his introduction to the original, 2010, collection, editor Aleksandar Hemon felt the need to deny that a book of (mostly) translated (mostly) short stories was a “doubly lost cause”. You can’t imagine him saying that today – not with regards to the short story, at any rate: not with the increasingly high-profile prizes, the prestigious wins for Munro (the Nobel) and Davis (Man Booker International), and the beginnings of a real digital presence for the form.

The relationship of the English-reading world to the European scene, however, is more uncertain. Indeed, Salt’s yearly anthologies of British, and Faber’s regular ones of Irish short stories might be helping to shore the form up on these islands, but they are necessarily inward- rather than outward-looking. And the globalisation – or, more realistically, transatlantic shift – of the Man Booker, and the appearance of the Folio Prize, run the risk of turning us further from our continental neighbours, and the culture we share across our different languages.

Language tricks

Adam Thirlwell on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction is based on the fact that language makes things possible that are not possible in reality. If there is a word for “role” and a word for “character,” then naturally, it follows, according to this method, that the two could possess separate existences. Or, to put this maybe more precisely, he investigated whether the distinction between what is possible in language and reality is even tenable at all. And so the central mechanism of this writing is metaphor (“a three-by-four-inch slip of paper torn out of the notebook had miraculously turned into lodgings measuring one hundred square feet”) — the hinge between animate and inanimate objects, which allows figures of speech to acquire a strange kind of life.

While this attention to the act of writing could, I suppose, be defined as metafiction, Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself. The metafiction is really metaphysical. So that it should be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded — with its orbits, stars and yawning parabolas — to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.

The anti-canon

Influx Press have a nice feature on their blog, The Anti-Canon, a “collection of short essays focusing on writers less well known, positioned outside of the literary mainstream or simply deserving of more attention”. A little like Writers No One Reads, another series after our own hearts. The brilliant Daniil Kharms makes Influx’s list.

A few months before 36 year old outlaw writer Daniil Kharms starves to death in a psychiatric prison in 1942, a German bomb hits a block of flats during the siege of Leningrad. One side of the block is destroyed. On the other side, windows implode. Inside one of those shattered apartments. Kharms’ second wife, Marina Malich and philosopher Yakuc Drukin frantically gather up his papers and notebooks. These fragments floating through the bomb blasted air are his collected works. They’re what’s left of him.

Wanted: reviewer for Iosi Havilio

We’re looking someone to review Paradises by Iosi Havilio (published by And Other Stories), for gorse online. We can’t pay a fortune, but there is a small fee for reviews. If interested, please get in touch: info[at]gorse[dot]ie. We have a reviewer.

From an interview with Iosi Havilio:

Do you believe in Ricardo’s Piglia’s assertion that “All great literature is political”?

Of course, either by action or by omission. In fact I believe that the best political literature is the one that doesn’t speak of politics. Just as the best love stories don’t need to speak about sentiments.

Three Novels, César Aira

By Rob Doyle.

The Argentine César Aira, who has published a couple of dozen more volumes than his sixty-four years, acknowledges that he writes not for the casual, but for the boutique reader. Churning out up to four novellas a year (the mid-length form is where he has always felt most comfortable), Aira is published by a host of small, independent publishers in Buenos Aires, the city where he has lived since 1967.