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rickmanreader's review against another edition
3.0
My three favorite stories from this collection were all at the front: Thierry Horguelin's (Belgium) "The Man in the Yellow Parka", Katya Atanasova's (Bulgaria) "Fear of Ankles", and Elvis Hadzic's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Zec" ... which keeps coming back to haunt me.
Stuff I marked in the preface by Drago Jančar because it helped me get a grip on the wild variety of stories to follow:
"... What's wrong with optimism? I didn't want to start lecturing about Marx in a creative writing class, so I tried to explain that in Central Europe literature often contains a kind of anxious laughter that's neither funny nor entertaining, but rather the expression of a sense of humor that's by turns ironic, sarcastic, or just plain hard to figure out, which writers from Kafka on have recorded in darkly comedic tones, because they know that great optimistic ideas often culminate in the crowning idea of a concentration camp filled with political minorities and sometimes entire nations. We weren't getting through to each other. I see your point, one student said, but optimism is part of the spirit of individualism itself, it's at the heart of American democracy. I see your point, I said, but it's also at the heart of the collective spirit of Soviet communism, including its literature, in which writers were referred to as 'engineers of human souls' and they all knew that their job was to write interesting, entertaining books to make people optimistic. Although our conversation was polite, and it was all very entertaining, the gulf in understanding between us remained unbridged.
and also this:
But literature carries within it the memory and experience of Europe's insane century as it was lived by fragile, frightened, and vulnerable human beings, who often had to salvage their dignity and sanity not just with the balm of melancholy, but also with laughter, skepticism, irony, and black humor.
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