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naimfrewat's review against another edition
4.0
I hesitated to buy this book because it had this ridiculous superlative "Best". But then the cover auto-remedied its own deficiency by declaring that this collection is edited by Aleksandar Hemon with a preface by Nicole Krauss, both writers I have previously read and liked in The New Yorker.
I read this book in complete web2.0 seclusion: my smartphone was on airplane mode, I had no access to wifi, no access to any library or bookstore or human being to share my reading with, and so this book proved particularly difficult for me. I wonder if one is "permitted" when reading collections to skip some stories when nothing makes sense anymore...
The idea behind this collection is that Hemon selects one story from each European country, or more precisely from each European ethnicity. This is the reason why Spain, for example has 3 stories translated from Galician, Castilian and Catalan. Surprisingly, Italy has none. The stories are grouped according to 8 themes: love, desire, family, thought, art, home, work, evil. Apparently, special effort was given to translation, as Krauss notes it in the preface: there are writers and translators' biographies and I appreciated that. When I had access to wifi again, I checked Dalkey Archive, the publishers of this collection, and it seems they specialize in publishing out of print books, writers that few publishers want to work with, and of course works in translation, precisely because American audience, publishers claim, are not too keen on translated works. Their website even has a growing page of interviews with contemporary writers, such as: David Markson, Cortazar, Kundera, etc...
Belgium
Under the category Love, I liked Patricia de Martelaere's (Belgium: Dutch) My Hand is Exhausted, a story about a pure moment of love between a painter and her model, examining along the way painting, or perhaps the creative process, as impossible to separate from the emotions of the creator. I loved the character of Esther, a woman who endures her monotonous life while being fully conscious of its monotony.
Spain
This Strange Lucidity by Augustin Fernandez Paz (Spain: Galician) tells the story of the beginning and the end of a relationship told from the perspective of the guy's dog. I had to re-read the first passage because I could not imagine that the main narrator would be a dog.
Santiago Pajares' (Spain: Castilian) Today is a story that I loved because it's one of the few that I found quite funny. It deals, as its title tells, with the protagonist's daily life, his one and a half relationship which at the start of the book has ended and the changes that happen with him at work, changes against which he has no saying. I think we all find ourselves in such a situation when we decide, today or tomorrow, that we will be changing something with out daily routine, something to keep the negative vibes away.
" It's not that I haven't gotten laid in a year and a half, of course that's not it. I've had sex with three women. I met all three in a bar - not in the same bar - and I asked all three if they wanted to get breakfast the next morning, but they all declined. They had to get to work. All three of them worked on Sunday."
"I work for a technology company, a midsize company that's been acquired by large corporation, so that even though I still work in the same office, and the majority of my colleagues are still around, our logo is different now."
Estonia
One of the stories I loved was Armin Koomagi's Logisticians Anonymous. It's funny and smart, and talks about an expert in logistics who is so efficient in his work and in reorganization of businesses that he once fired himself to improve efficiency. It's quite a different take at the current corporate world obsessed with cost-cuttings and competitiveness and its implications on our own daily lives, us who populate the corporate world.
Norway
I was completely taken by Bjarte Breiteig's Down There They Don't Mourn. In this story a student at a vocational school takes an escape from his swimming class and together with a friend goes on destroying the content of the classrooms along with the students' projects. The violence that is quite visible in his acts made me wonder why a Norwegian would write about violence and destruction until I read the author's biography bit in the book, and recalled the massacre that Anders Breivik committed.
This story is one of the reasons why I liked this collection and even ordered the 2014 one. In a quick glimpse of 10 pages at most, one gets a feeling of a distant society and the issues that people have to deal with. Strangely, this reason is also why I find foreign literature difficult to read, since I sometimes am not familiar, except vaguely, with the socio-political construct of a certain country, or with the personal background of a particular writer.
CONCLUSION
All in all, I liked this collection. The stories weren't all straightforward and easy to digest, but their advantage to me - and this was highlighted in the preface - is that they gave me a different take on the issues that are affecting Europe. By a different take, I mean different from the one I get reading newspapers and magazines and blogs. These stories present characters, they take the time to develop the characters and their surroundings, even though they are short stories, they showed me how ordinary people cope with the changing world. Packing the lives of ordinary people in short stories, offers the reader the much needed advantage of staying away from political colorings that frequently taint the news as reported by the media. Lives change independently of political strategies, partisan calculations or changes in economic orientations. The human being will find methods to cope, some are time-tested, some are unorthodox, some are criminal and some decide to just quit.
More on my blog
I read this book in complete web2.0 seclusion: my smartphone was on airplane mode, I had no access to wifi, no access to any library or bookstore or human being to share my reading with, and so this book proved particularly difficult for me. I wonder if one is "permitted" when reading collections to skip some stories when nothing makes sense anymore...
The idea behind this collection is that Hemon selects one story from each European country, or more precisely from each European ethnicity. This is the reason why Spain, for example has 3 stories translated from Galician, Castilian and Catalan. Surprisingly, Italy has none. The stories are grouped according to 8 themes: love, desire, family, thought, art, home, work, evil. Apparently, special effort was given to translation, as Krauss notes it in the preface: there are writers and translators' biographies and I appreciated that. When I had access to wifi again, I checked Dalkey Archive, the publishers of this collection, and it seems they specialize in publishing out of print books, writers that few publishers want to work with, and of course works in translation, precisely because American audience, publishers claim, are not too keen on translated works. Their website even has a growing page of interviews with contemporary writers, such as: David Markson, Cortazar, Kundera, etc...
Belgium
Under the category Love, I liked Patricia de Martelaere's (Belgium: Dutch) My Hand is Exhausted, a story about a pure moment of love between a painter and her model, examining along the way painting, or perhaps the creative process, as impossible to separate from the emotions of the creator. I loved the character of Esther, a woman who endures her monotonous life while being fully conscious of its monotony.
Spain
This Strange Lucidity by Augustin Fernandez Paz (Spain: Galician) tells the story of the beginning and the end of a relationship told from the perspective of the guy's dog. I had to re-read the first passage because I could not imagine that the main narrator would be a dog.
Santiago Pajares' (Spain: Castilian) Today is a story that I loved because it's one of the few that I found quite funny. It deals, as its title tells, with the protagonist's daily life, his one and a half relationship which at the start of the book has ended and the changes that happen with him at work, changes against which he has no saying. I think we all find ourselves in such a situation when we decide, today or tomorrow, that we will be changing something with out daily routine, something to keep the negative vibes away.
" It's not that I haven't gotten laid in a year and a half, of course that's not it. I've had sex with three women. I met all three in a bar - not in the same bar - and I asked all three if they wanted to get breakfast the next morning, but they all declined. They had to get to work. All three of them worked on Sunday."
"I work for a technology company, a midsize company that's been acquired by large corporation, so that even though I still work in the same office, and the majority of my colleagues are still around, our logo is different now."
Estonia
One of the stories I loved was Armin Koomagi's Logisticians Anonymous. It's funny and smart, and talks about an expert in logistics who is so efficient in his work and in reorganization of businesses that he once fired himself to improve efficiency. It's quite a different take at the current corporate world obsessed with cost-cuttings and competitiveness and its implications on our own daily lives, us who populate the corporate world.
Norway
I was completely taken by Bjarte Breiteig's Down There They Don't Mourn. In this story a student at a vocational school takes an escape from his swimming class and together with a friend goes on destroying the content of the classrooms along with the students' projects. The violence that is quite visible in his acts made me wonder why a Norwegian would write about violence and destruction until I read the author's biography bit in the book, and recalled the massacre that Anders Breivik committed.
This story is one of the reasons why I liked this collection and even ordered the 2014 one. In a quick glimpse of 10 pages at most, one gets a feeling of a distant society and the issues that people have to deal with. Strangely, this reason is also why I find foreign literature difficult to read, since I sometimes am not familiar, except vaguely, with the socio-political construct of a certain country, or with the personal background of a particular writer.
CONCLUSION
All in all, I liked this collection. The stories weren't all straightforward and easy to digest, but their advantage to me - and this was highlighted in the preface - is that they gave me a different take on the issues that are affecting Europe. By a different take, I mean different from the one I get reading newspapers and magazines and blogs. These stories present characters, they take the time to develop the characters and their surroundings, even though they are short stories, they showed me how ordinary people cope with the changing world. Packing the lives of ordinary people in short stories, offers the reader the much needed advantage of staying away from political colorings that frequently taint the news as reported by the media. Lives change independently of political strategies, partisan calculations or changes in economic orientations. The human being will find methods to cope, some are time-tested, some are unorthodox, some are criminal and some decide to just quit.
More on my blog
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