‘Kyra Kyralina’ by Panait Istrati, translated by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

My third choice is also more of a novella than a short story, by a working-class writer who was quite fashionable in the 1930s-40s in France and Latin America, where he was often labelled ‘the Balkan Gorky’ (does anybody read Gorky nowadays though?). He was living in France when he wrote it and first published it in French, before completely reworking it and publishing it in Romanian. It was not well received in his homeland (one critic waspishly said “It was written by a docker in the port of Brăila and it shows”) but it remained one of the stories closest to his heart. The beautiful Kyra Kyralina of the title is being raised as a courtesan by her mother, and is later kidnapped and taken to a Turkish harem. Her younger brother sets off to find and rescue her, and this becomes a picaresque novella with a naïve protagonist who has to grow up very quickly. It has a Thousand-and-One-Nights quality to it, full of languorous prose and descriptions.

“I mounted guard near the window and munched cakes while the lovers, who seemed to have fairly decent manners, sat Turkish fashion on the floor, singing and playing Oriental tunes. There was a guitar, accompanied by castanets and a tambourine. My mother and Kyra adored it all and would often do the handkerchief dance which made them dizzy with its twistings and twirlings. Then with flaming cheeks they would throw themselves upon the cushions and lie there fanning themselves, with their legs drawn up under their long silk skirts. Fragrant herbs were burned and cordials were consumed.

The men were young and beautiful and always dark. They were elegantly turned out, with pointed moustaches, carefully trimmed beards and hair that exhaled a strong scent of almond oil and musk. There were Turks, Greeks, and sometimes Romanians. Nationality was of no importance provided they were young, beautiful, refined, discreet, and not too eager. My role was a thankless one. I have never told anyone until now what agonies I suffered. My duty was to keep watch, seated on the window-ledge, and to save the party from sudden interruptions.”

Talisman House, 2010

‘Daddy Wants TV on Saturday Night’ by Bogdan Suceavă, translated by the author

Finally, a contemporary story, although it describes life in the 1980s, when power cuts were becoming the norm. The narrator’s father resorts to all sorts of tricks to be able to watch his favourite TV programme. Funny and bizarre, this kind of story reminds you how ridiculous everyday reality under Communism could be – so strange, that it feels like surrealism.

Published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Writing from Postcommunist Romania, Spring 2010

‘A Little Bit of Metaphysics and Astronomy’ by Urmuz, translated by Marina Sofia

Urmuz is the pen name of one of the most unusual yet influential writers Romania has ever had, despite his brief literary career (he committed suicide in 1923) and his meagre output (he left behind at most sixty pages of writing in total). While some compare his flash fiction type of works to the tragic absurdity of Kafka, and others emphasise his comic tour de force à la Lewis Carroll, to me he is far more clearly linked to Tristan Tzara (also a Romanian) and the Dadaists.

“It’s not true – all the table companions agreed – that ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. No – they affirmed with all their might – in the beginning, long before any word appeared, there must have been sign language, because it is highly unlikely that cosmic matter or heavenly bodies learnt to speak out from the very start. It was quite possible that they were incapable at first of even asking to go outside, or at the very least to say ‘papa’ or ‘mama’.”

Published in Firmament Vol. 3, No. 1, Sublunary Editions, 2023

The Chairs by Eugène Ionescu (Eugen Ionescu), translated by Martin Crimp

To continue in the absurdist vein, this one-act play by Eugène Ionesco from the 1950s breaks with all theatrical conventions. An elderly couple receive invisible guests and distract each other with stories, half-remembered memories and the occasional sharp dig at each other. Although theatre-goers could not quite agree about the message of the play, to me it represents the futility of all attempt to make sense of life and the perennial human longing for connection and to be understood.

First performed in French as Les Chaises in 1952. Published in translation by Faber & Faber, 1997

Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher, translated by Michael Henry Heim

This is another novella rather than a short story. The author died aged only 28 and was bedridden for the last ten years of his life. He is only now starting to be recognised for his unique modernist style in his home country, and perhaps this is thanks to the reaction of readers in the West, who have compared him to Kafka, Robert Walser or Bruno Schulz.

This novella is an indefinable genre-buster, hovering somewhere between a prose poem, a memoir and a novel. The first-person narrator who gives us a detailed account of his childhood in a small provincial town, his encounters with women, his bodily sensations, his reaction to the small objects he picks up and the people he observes. This is a devastatingly honest and detailed account of living with the spectre of death in front of you all the time: the narrator’s reactions are very physical, immediate, powerful, occasionally excessive – as though he is trying to plunge himself into life, determined to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment out of it.

“Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of the soul. Here I am, trying to give an exact description of my crises, and all I can come up with are images. The magic word that might convey their essence would have to borrow from the essences of other aspects of life, distil a new scent from a judicious combination of them. It would have to contain something of the stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following his gestures in a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my dreams and the subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal cord, or of the transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I have known… I had nothing to separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin might as well have been a sieve. The attention I paid to my surroundings, nebulous though it was, was not simply an act of will: the world, as is its nature, sank its tentacles into me…”

New Directions, 2015

‘Zerlendi[@]Shambhala[dot]com’ by Paul Doru Mugur, translated by Sanda Ionescu and Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

As an anthropologist of religion, I had somewhat mixed feelings about Mircea Eliade and his legacy both in religious studies and literature. This ambivalence was deepened after reading how he dropped his friend Mihail Sebastian in the 1930s because of his antisemitic leanings. I am therefore not including Eliade in this personal anthology (and sadly, not Sebastian either, because he didn’t write short stories). However, I do like the way that contemporary poet and short story writer Paul Doru Mugur has taken one of Eliade’s more bizarre and mystical stories, ‘The Secret of Dr Honigberger’, and given it a very contemporary sci-fi twist. This entire short story collection explores issues of identity and our fears of AI; it is disquieting but also remarkably funny.

“‘Anyway, what is reality other than a dream?’ he started telling himself. Since this idea was so precious to Mircea – the ultimate truth for an artist to aspire to – that helped me immensely. Because he considered a priori that all that was happening to him in his dreams was merely an attempt for his innermost desires to find symbolic fulfilment, he did not suspect for a long time the reason behind the extraordinary coherence of his experiences in the realm of Morpheus. But at some point, he realised that his dreams were not his own… he became worried that evil forces were possessing him, so he decided to give me up for good… The end of the story, consequently, becomes a kind of exorcism, rather against my wishes. Well, that’s as good a way to end the story as any, especially one of which not even the narrator can make any sense.”

Published in Psychonautica, New Meridian Arts, 2022

‘The Roulette Player’ by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Julian Semilian

How could I leave out our best-known contemporary writer? Although Nostalgia is usually described as a novel, each story is entirely self-contained. This first one is probably the best: the account of underground parties in Bucharest, where roulette of the Russian variety is played – and the extreme thrill-seeking or legendary status perhaps that one man is chasing.

Published as part of the novel Nostalgia, Penguin Modern Classics, 2021. Originally published by New Directions in the US in 2005. Fragment also available in Words Without Borders

Wasted Morning by Gabriela Adamesteanu, translated by Patrick Camiller

This novel became a word-of-mouth smash hit when it was published in 1983, and very soon was out of print because it was deemed a ‘revisionist’ view of history (i.e. not corresponding to Communist propaganda). It is a family saga spanning most of the 20th Century in Romania, including touchy subjects such as the nationalisation of property, ‘bourgeois’ political prisoners and family members who fled to the West. The main theme of the novel is lost illusions, which of course was inadmissible at the time – yet, in spite of that, the novel was adapted for the stage in 1986 and for four years it performed to sold-out audiences.

Published by Northwestern University Press, 2011. Extract published in Words Without Borders, Oct 2004

‘Nadirs’ by Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug

This collection of largely autobiographical stories may be more for devotees of Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, but to my mind it provides a good point of entry to her work. It is not quite as grim and dark as some of her later novels, but it’s certainly not an easy read, with plenty of tales of domestic violence, cruelty towards animals, alcoholism and so on. Yet at the same time it provides a child’s view of growing up as part of an ethnic minority in the west of Romania, with sensuous descriptions of family and village life, and of a lonely child finding some connection with nature.

First published in translation in Nadirs, University of Nebraska Press, 1999

Fem by Magda Cârneci, translated by Sean Cotter

Cârneci is better known as a poet and art critic, and this hypnotic, fevered dream of a book certainly reveals her poetic qualities. Fem is her only novel to date, although I would call it a loose collection of vignettes. The female narrator writes a letter to her lover, in the hope of making him change his mind about leaving her. She tells stories of her childhood, her dreams, the flowering of her body, of how they first met, of key moments in their relationship. It is above all a celebration – and an almost metaphysical examination – of femininity, although the author describes herself more as a ‘passive feminist’.

“What is happening, why aren’t I right with myself, what have I forgotten, what don’t I understand? Obsessively, the same thoughts passed through my mind, as my unsettled gaze rose over the transparent nylon socks wrapping my thin calves, then the gently curved thighs under the white dress I had on… I embraced myself in a single gaze, head to toe, seated politely on a green and slightly damp bench. I tried to understand my body, to love it. It seemed so strange, this body which enclosed me as though in a hermetic box, this liveried and absurd body, as though it had grown by itself, without any effort from my part; I almost couldn’t recognize it, it almost wasn’t mine. A kind of surprised pity passed through me, mixed with disgust. Who had stuck me in this pinkish-white package, from which I could never extract myself? Who had put me, without the possibility of escape, in this uniform of flesh, bone, and hair, with limbs that ended in ridiculous protuberances, with hands and feet that ended in claws?”

First published in translation by Deep Vellum, 2021. You can read an excerpt from it on LitHub)

Introduction to a Turkish Personal Anthology

This is a Turkey-centric list: nearly all the stories feature Turkey and – with the exception of one – are by authors who are from there or who have ancestral ties to the country. Like my upcoming novel, a few take ‘Istanbul’ and key moments of political upheaval in Turkey as themes. Opting to select the majority of the stories from one country inevitably narrowed my list: I could only consider stories that had been written in or translated into English. This, for me, reinforced the obvious, which can easily be overlooked: the tremendous value translation brings to literature. Regrettably, since his novels have yet to be translated into English, I was unable to include a novel excerpt from one of my most favourite authors Ayhan Geçgin, on this list.

‘5th Day Told by the Student Demirtay: The Night Lights’ by Burhan Sönmez, translated from Turkish by Ümit Hussein

“The odd thing about Istanbul was the way she preferred questions to answers. She could turn happiness into nightmare, or the other way round, make a joyous morning dawn after a night devoid of all hope. She gained strength from uncertainty. They called this the city’s destiny.”

The novel Istanbul Istanbul centres on four inmates who are locked up, after a military coup, in a dark prison cell below the vibrant streets of Istanbul. When not being tortured and interrogated by guards, they share stories to pass the time. Despite the grimness of its plot, this novel is compassionate and heart-warming, underscoring the power of storytelling; how it can connect people, heal their wounds and free their minds. Every chapter is narrated by an inmate. In this chapter, Student Demirtay travels back to the days leading up to his arrest. I particularly loved his descriptions of Istanbul and the freedom of his narrative. Towards the end, when he absconds from the safehouse he’s been hiding in, under the supervision of a little girl and her blind grandmother, the boundaries between real and fantasy begin to blur. As he leaves their shanty house and enters a vegetable garden, he hears someone calling his name. When he realises it’s one of the inmates in his cell, trying to awaken him, the reader is as surprised as he is, to be roused from this hypnotic journey of a story within a story.

Published in Istanbul Istanbul: A Novel, Telegram, 2016

‘Tribades’ by Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu, translated from Turkish by Ralph Hubbell

Over a decade after breaking up, ex-lovers bump into one another in a corner shop in Istanbul. In the intervening period, one has transitioned into a man, while the other has had to fight her own battle as a queer woman. During their encounter, they review their past choices and actions, reflecting too on the huge challenges facing LGBTQ+ people in Turkey today. ‘Tribades’ renders the loneliness and the struggles of being the ‘other’. At one point Emir says to Elfiye:

“Who are you up against? And which comes first? What are we trying to defeat and who are we going to shout our victory cry at? It’s called breaking free from society, declaring yourself before they declare you the other […] This isn’t just a social challenge, it’s a revolt against the established order.”

Published online on Words Without Borders, New Fiction for the PEN Centenary, 2021 and available to read here, as a translated excerpt is from the author’s novel Elfiye

‘Transaction’ by Menekşe Toprak, translated from Turkish by İdil Aydoğan

“Her rage was fuelled even more after reading the short story the man had recommended. […] The detailed description of sex bordered on pornography, and the fact that the story was about a prostitute and her client drove her absolutely insane. She was furious at the man’s bravado, at the message he was sending, that he had intended to get her into bed that very same night, and the fact that she, knowing exactly his intentions, had almost gone all the way with the game.”

A young woman is in Istanbul on a short business trip. Influenced by the city’s reckless energy where anything goes, she accepts a dinner invitation from an older man she has met by chance that day at a conference. At dinner, one minute he’s affectionately brushing aside strands of her hair that have fallen on her forehead as if he were her older brother. The next minute, he’s openly making sexual references. Having noticed a John Updike book in her bag – a recent purchase – he recommends she reads one of the stories in it: ‘Transaction’. Going further, he invites her to his private flat, which he calls his hideout, to listen to it as an audiobook, boasting about how marvellously the story describes sexual desire. She thinks she has everything under control, yet as the evening progresses, she begins to lose her sense of boundaries and only ‘just’ manages to end the night on her own terms. Even so, after she returns to her home city, haunted by his erotic memory, she becomes obsessed with him. Toprak diligently explores the range of emotions – intimidation, fear, rage, depression, and lust – the young woman experiences in this game of seduction where eventually, switching the roles she becomes the pursuer.

Published in Istanbul in Women’s Short Stories, edited by Hande Öğüt, Milet Publishing, 2012