Category: EU Fiction Special

These contributions to A Personal Anthology are part of a special series of letters celebrating the short fiction of the 27 EU member states that the UK has tragically and stupidly decided to cut itself off from. So far we have letters for:
Italy (picked by Marco Mancassola, Marco Magini and Giorgia Tolfo)
Malta (picked by Jan Calleja and Kat Storace)
The Netherlands (curated by Richard de Nooy)
Poland (picked by Boyd Tonkin)
Portugal (picked by Gary Michael Perry)
Spain (picked by Miranda France)

‘Un marziano a Roma’ (‘A Martian in Rome’) by Ennio Flaiano, translated by Philip Balma and Fabio Benincasa

Ennio Flaiano was a journalist, writer, and screenwriter who chronicled like no one else the restlessness of Italian society in the 20th century. As a screenwriter he is famous for being among the authors of La dolce vita by Federico Fellini; Fellini considered directing a film adaptation of ‘A Martian in Rome’ too, but the project fell through. Meanwhile, Flaiano’s short story became a popular stage play, and later a TV adaptation filmed in the 1980s by another director.

The story centres on Kunt, an alien from Mars, who lands with his spaceship in Rome near Villa Borghese. Initially, his arrival creates a sensation among citizens and the media: everyone wants to see him, greet him, talk to him, interview him. The event is so significant that Kunt is even received by the Pope. However, after some time the Romans get used to seeing the alien around, and begin to ignore him. No one cares about Kurt anymore, the novelty of his arrival is soon forgotten, and the Martian wanders sad and alone through the streets of the city. By the end of the story, people are openly mocking him, to the point that he decides to leave.

First published in Diario notturno, Rizzoli, 1956. Collected in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, 2019

‘Trattamento di quiescenza’ (‘Retirement Fund’) by Primo Levi, translated by Jenny McPhee

This year is the 100th anniversary of Primo Levi’s birth, and we never tire of reading and re-reading his work. Everyone rightly knows him as an immensely important writer of the Holocaust, but Levi had a wide range of interests and was also a superb science fiction writer. His collection Natural Histories, published in the 1960s,is a book full of pioneering sci-fi stories, where Levi’s scientific background meets a vivid and prophetic imagination. The last story of the book, ‘Retirement Fund’, centres around a character presenting to a potential buyer the Torec, a helmet that works as a virtual reality recorder by connecting directly to the brain: back in the 1960s, Primo Levi was imagining an early version of the devices later popularised by films like Strange Daysor by several episodes of Black Mirror.

First published in Storie naturali, Einaudi, 1966. Collected in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, edited by Ann Goldstein, introduced by Toni Morrison, Liveright 2015

‘Eleganza’ (‘Elegance’) by Goffredo Parise, translated by James Marcus

In the early 1970s, Goffredo Parise wrote a series of brief stories/vignettes for Il Corriere della Sera, later collected in two books titled ‘Sillabari’. Each of the stories depicts a human feeling and has a one-word title; the stories are in alphabetical order: ‘Affetto’ (‘Affection’), ‘Amore’ (‘Love’), and so on. The atmosphere is highly enigmatic. The dialogues are reduced to a minimum, the characters tend to aphasia, while their gaze takes on a central importance. Parise’s prose reads as if it came from another world, and this otherworldly, meditative touch is even more surprising considering that he was a war correspondent.

‘Eleganza’ (‘Elegance’) is a masterpiece of subtle intimate perceptions. The main character meets an old friend for dinner in an elegant palace. The two have grown apart over the years, they don’t share much anymore, and their conversation is stiff. But the old friend is with his new girlfriend; the main character is fascinated with the elegance of the couple, and with the sophisticated atmosphere of the place where they are. This seems just enough for him to ignore the feeling of awkwardness for the situation. But then two other strangers enter the room, breaking the fragile atmosphere, and “elegance flew away in the Roman sky.”

First published in Sillabario No.1, Einaudi, 1972 / Abecedary, Northwestern University Press, 1999

‘Lui e io’ (‘He and I’) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis

These days, many Italian (female) authors seem to be discovered or re-discovered thanks to the “Elena Ferrante effect”. We couldn’t imagine two authors more different than Ferrante and Natalia Ginzburg, but, regardless of the reasons, we are happy for the recent rediscovery of Ginzburg’s seminal work in the English-speaking world, where her books are having a period of new popularity.

Little Virtues is something between a collection of short stories and a collection of personal essays; one of our favourite pieces in the book is ‘He and I’, a delicately ironic recount of the author’s life with her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, who was also a writer. The piece is at times funny, at times melancholic; it is a quintessential example of Ginzburg’s distinctive voice, intimate and intelligent, graceful and deep, and able to observe everyday life and human relationships from an astonishingly original perspective.

First published in Le piccole virtù, Einaudi, 1962 / The Little Virtues, Daunt Books, 2018

‘La sirena’ (‘The siren’) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Stephen Twilley

This short story was the last work the author completed before his death. Like Tomasi di Lampedusa’s famous masterpiece, the historical novel The Leopard, ‘The Siren’ was published only after his death; and, like The Leopard, it is a meditation on the past and the passage of time. What makes this beautiful story stand apart, though, is its streak of romanticism and eroticism, and its heartbreaking mixture of realistic and fantastic.

Two men become friends in 1930s Turin; they are both Sicilian-born, and their friendship deepens to the point that the oldest one, renowned classicist Rosario La Ciura, opens up to his friend about his past. He has a story to tell. As a young man, on a wild remote Sicilian beach, he once met the experience of true love. She was sixteen. She had beautiful pale lips. And she was a siren. The memory of that impossible love will haunt Rosario for his entire life.

First published in I racconti, Feltrinelli, 1961. Collected in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, edited by Jhumpa Lahiri, 2019

‘Il visconte dimezzato’ (‘The Cloven Viscount’) by Italo Calvino, translated by Archibald Colquhoun

Did we mention that we love Italo Calvino? We couldn’t resist including in this anthology another of his stories. ‘The Cloven Viscount’ tells of Viscount Medardo, who is bisected by a Turkish cannonball during the Crusades; when his two halves come back to his homeland, walking around independently from each other, one reveals to be the kind half of the viscount, while the other terrifies everyone.

When this longish short story appeared at the start of the 1950s, Calvino was criticised for abandoning the realism of his early writing. Later he revealed that the story had developed from a visual image that he saw in his mind – the image of a man split in two halves. But more than with a moral good/evil division, this splitting had to do with a feeling of being incomplete and the impossibility of feeling whole, of being everything that one would like to be. This novella includes one of our favourite literary quotes: “Alle volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.” (“Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”)

First published by Einaudi, 1952 / collected in Our Ancestors, Vintage, 1992

‘Postoristoro’ (‘The Station Bar’) by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, translated by Emery

The 1970s were an eventful decade everywhere, but in Italy they really were a time of extremes. Student movements, counterculture, mass strikes and protests dominated especially the last part of the decade, and had their epicentre in Bologna, where in 1977 tanks where deployed to disperse student protests in the streets. Bologna was also a main centre for the Italian creative avant garde movements, and for the feminist and gay movements. It was a time of radical contradictions, full of energy but also dark sides, including political terrorism and a devastating epidemic of heroin addictions.

There, in the middle of this, was a young student named Pier Vittorio Tondelli. When he published his first collection of short stories in 1980, he didn’t know he was set to become the most iconic Italian author of his generation. His book was put on trial for “blasphemy” – one of the last cases of censorship in Italy – officially because of the too realistic dialogue, full of swearing and profanities, but more likely because of its depiction of gay sex. “Postoristoro”, the opening story of the book, culminates with a young woman injecting heroin in a friend’s erect penis: it sounds crude but in the story it comes, in fact, as a nearly-poetic act of desperation and love.

Tondelli died too soon at the age of 36, but left a mark on generations of Italian readers.

First published in Altri libertini, Feltrinelli, 1980. Collected in The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories, Serpent’s Tail, 1993, edited by Ann & Michael Caesar

‘Lettera ai cittadini sovietici nell’anniversario della rivoluzione’ (‘Letter to the Soviet Citizens on the Anniversary of the Revolution’) by Davide Orecchio

In his collection of stories published in 2017, Davide Orecchio recounts the Russian Revolution from unusual, uchronic and alternative-history perspectives. Each story is a piece of fictional history with a central real character in it, who is somehow connected with the Russian Revolution. The language is extremely poetic, baroque, quite unique in the Italian contemporary literary scene. In Letter to the Soviet Citizens on the Anniversary of the Revolution, the author imagines Rosa Luxemburg still alive in 1947, and president of a land sprawling from Berlin to Moscow; in the story she sends to her citizens, now living in peace in a sort of utopia, a letter to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Revolution. What is briefly described, with simple brushes and touches, are thirty years of alternative European history – what could have happened if peace and thought were chosen over war and rivalry. The closing remarks of the letter are so touching that the first time we read them we had to stop, look at the sky and think “what if things had indeed gone that way?”

We felt like the citizens of the Rosa Luxemburg’s land: we get out of our houses to go to work, for another day of our lives, and we feel moderately happy, happy enough, which is as happy as we should be.

First published in Mio Padre la Rivoluzione, Minimum Fax, 2017

‘Sirene’ (‘Sirens’) by Laura Pugno

We love Laura Pugno’s writing. We seriously love it. This is why we have invited her to the festival this year, for a panel discussion with French author Olivia Rosenthal, discussing their literary “untameable creatures”. Pushing the boundaries of realism, Pugno tells powerful stories of female characters and freedom. In her novella ‘Sirens’, first published in 2007, the female characters are – indeed – sirens, but the setting and the atmosphere are radically different from Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic story. Here, we are in a futuristic Japan. Sirens are trafficked by the yakuza, kept in “breeding tanks”, slaughtered for their meat or sold to brothels. Human-mermaid sex (or rather, rape) is common and as brutal as you can imagine. As a book blogger described it, the story is “dystopia, but with mermaids”. Then something unexpected happens – but we will not spoil it, as we hope that sooner or later this story will become available in English.

When we first read Pugno’s novella, we had that rare and yet very distinctive feeling – this story came from Italy, yes, but it seemed to come from another world. We love it when a story has that alien, beyond-genre feel to it. We can’t wait to hear Laura Pugno at the festival.

First published by Einaudi, 2007

Introduction

“To get the dollies dancing” is the Dutch equivalent of “opening up a can of worms”, which is precisely what happened after Jonathan invited me to compile my personal anthology of favourite Dutch short stories. There were worms and dancing dollies. It was a mess, but also hugely entertaining.

To begin with, I was forced to admit that – despite having a Dutch passport, writing novels in Dutch and living the life of a Dutchman in Amsterdam for more than thirty years – I am not a huge fan of Dutch literature. This brutal admission prompted a great deal of soul searching on my part, taking me all the way back to 1986, which is the year I re-emigrated to the Netherlands at the age of twenty, having spent most of my youth in South Africa, where I was transformed into a loyal speaker of the Queen’s English.

As I intended to start a new life in Amsterdam, I vowed to swiftly reacquaint myself with my mother tongue. Fortunately, I had a head start over other immigrants, because I could read and speak Dutch, which I cheekily supplemented with the Afrikaans vocabulary I had picked up at school in South Africa.

This delighted my new Dutch friends, but also became a source of embarrassment to me, so I began asking them to lend me their favourite Dutch books, hoping to improve my proficiency. These modern classics by authors like Hermans, Mulisch, Reve, Haasse and Wolkers all seemed somewhat introverted and insular, almost invariably containing some shadow of the nation’s great trauma: the occupation of the Netherlands and its colonies by German and Japanese forces. Many of the narrators also seemed to be struggling to free themselves from the religious strictures of an older generation, often resorting to some form of sexual exploration/liberation to achieve this.

When I cautiously mentioned this to a Dutch friend, he remarked that Dutch literature might indeed seem slightly boring to a newcomer, because it was more about style than about the story. “But don’t worry,” he added, “Because I also have this entire bookcase over here with works by Böll, Camus, Eco, Garcia Marques Kundera, Nabokov and all the others authors of the alphabet.”

And so I discovered that I could quite easily improve my proficiency in Dutch without reading a single word of Dutch literature. In fact, I am convinced that my knowledge of Dutch has given me greater access to foreign literature and culture than English ever could have, simply because so many great books from other cultures are available in Dutch translation.

Another thing that skewed my opinion of Dutch literature was the movie Turks Fruit (Turkish Fruit, 1973), which is based on a bestselling novel by Jan Wolkers. My Dutch friends loved this movie and invited me over to watch it on television, delighting in the weak jokes, wooden dialogue and unsubtle performances. Naturally, I refrained from sharing this opinion with them at the time, not wanting to spoil their fun and our budding friendship.

My subsequent encounters with Dutch movies were equally disappointing and so I stopped watching them almost entirely, which wasn’t a problem because Amsterdam’s many art-house cinemas (now sadly in decline) offered almost unlimited opportunities to watch the best movies from all corners of the globe, subtitled in Dutch.
To complicate things further, I enrolled at the University of Amsterdam and discovered that all the textbooks were in English and that I was completely free to write my exams and essays in English.

It was also around this time that I realised my written proficiency in Dutch would never match my ability in English, and so I began restricting myself to books and magazines in English, which were also freely available everywhere in Amsterdam.

In short, I never really made a conscious effort to avoid Dutch literature. It’s just that the Netherlands (and Amsterdam in particular) offers access to so many other cultures that it’s quite easy to overlook Dutch literature entirely.

Having dealt with the worms, it was time to get the dollies dancing, almost literally in this instance, because I decided to compensate for my woefully inadequate knowledge of local literature by asking Dutch authors, publishers, reviewers and book lovers in general to share their favourites with me. The idea being to read these stories, write a brief review and translate an excerpt into English, so that an international audience might join me as I acquainted myself with the stories and styles of some of the Netherlands’ best-loved authors.

You may rest assured, dear reader, that you’re getting these tips straight from the mouths of Dutch literary thoroughbreds, which is why I’ll also be dropping names and brief bios for those who suggested stories.

To make things even more exciting, the Dutch Foundation for Literature has taken note of my voyage of discovery and, who knows, all this attention may even result in an actual anthology of Dutch short stories in English.
Having said all that, here’s hoping you enjoy this bloemlezing (readers’ bouquet) of excerpts from Dutch short stories.

‘Het tillenbeest’ (‘The Mammary Beast’) by Jan Wolkers

Suggested by Peter Abelsen, novelist and translator of the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith, Tennessee Williams, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen.

In just under 1,500 words, Wolkers sketches a vivid portrait of a seemingly ordinary family and its chequered past. A marble sphinx on the mantelpiece, endowed with spectacular breasts, reminds the narrator of an incident from the war. The author’s wry style shines through in this excerpt, in which a photo of his grandfather kick-starts the narrator’s memory. He has the light eyes and worried frown of an obsessive-compulsive. My mother told me, in the old days, when he’d come home, my gran would always say: Quick, set the cups straight! And the kids would turn the motif on the cups until it was lined up with the motif on the saucers. He wouldn’t greet anyone when he came in. He’d just stare at the cups. Then he’d grab his paper and, before lowering himself into the armchair, he’d check if there were any bits of fluff on the cushion. I look him in the eye. He’s looking at the photographer. You died of cancer, I think to myself. You reproduced yourself. I too will die of cancer. The tumour doesn’t fall far from the tree. When he first went to hospital, they put a tube up his bottom for his stools. But the disease filled his bowels with rampant toadstools and he soon had a whole sewerage system lying beside him in bed. There was no stopping it. Even so, he managed to get into a fight with the nurse, about an hour before he died, because she hadn’t placed the flowers I’d brought dead-centre on his bedside table.
From the collection Serpentina’s Petticoat, 1961. Available online in Dutch here

‘Poep’ (‘Poo’) by Manon Uphof

Suggested by Joost Nijsen, founder of the publishing house Podium, one of the champions of the Dutch short story, regularly publishing collections and anthologies by local and foreign authors.

This story sets off like an ordinary walk in the park, but you soon find yourself in the woods, where you tumble down a surreal rabbit hole, which leaves you wondering what happened, gasping with surprise and disgust.“Do you come here often?” she asked with a perfectly poised smile.
“How often is often?” the poor man shrugged. “Maybe two or three times a week. It’s beautiful here, as I said, and you live in a wonderful house. Very impressive, that white among the green”
“It was very expensive, but I think it’s worth it. It was my late husband’s. It’s ever-so-tranquil living here. Everything seems easier when you live in a house like this. Do you have a nice place?”
“I have a room in the centre of town. It’s small, but I live comfortably.”
“A house is so important for one’s wellbeing. It makes up for so much of life’s misery.”
The poor man could no longer contain himself.
“You’re absolutely right!” he cried. “So very right. I can’t tell you what I wouldn’t give to live in a house like yours!”
As he said this, the two Great Danes leapt into the canal with playful enthusiasm. Minutes later they scrabbled onto the bank, barking wildly. They sniffed around in the leaves with their wet noses. Then, as if rehearsed, they both stopped, squatted on the wet quay and, with the look of those absorbed in prayer, twisted out two giant piles of poo. There was a distance of approximately a metre and half between the two boluses, which lay steaming in the autumn morning chill.
The lady, who had been sitting ducked down deep in her priceless fur coat contemplating the man’s words, suddenly got a strange twinkling in her silver-blue-shadowed eyes. An unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, tingling made its way from her toes to her tummy.
“I’d like to make you an offer,” she began. “Did you see what my two darlings were up to a moment ago?”
“They leapt into the canal,” replied the man. “They’re such swift, athletic creatures, as anyone can see.”
“I mean on the quay,” the lady pointed. “Over there. Those mounds are impossible to ignore.”
Her mother-of-pearl polished nail directed his gaze towards the two glistening dark-brown piles of dog poo.
“If you eat those two turds, I will give you my home. The home of your dreams, along with the garden and everything in it.

From the collection Begeerte (Desire), 1995. Available in English translation in The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories, Penguin, 2016. Available online in Dutch here

‘De binocle’ (‘The Binoculars’) by Louis Couperus

Suggested by Bas Belleman, a poet, reviewer, essayist and translator of Shakespeare’s sonnets, who is currently managing Holland’s youngest and hottest funk quartet, starring his three sons and their cousin.

It’s hard to imagine that this dark tale of obsession was first published more than a century ago. The charming, florid prose may seem slightly dated, but the obsession that plagues a young operagoer is all too familiar in a world where a vast array of stimuli constantly vie for our attention.He could not clearly see who was seated there, directly below him. The theatre was very dark. But it was this darkness, in which the outlines of the audience dwindled, that he saw once more, yonder, the dove-grey lady he had noticed earlier, who had grabbed the fluttering programme. And the shave-skulled gentleman who sat beside her…
His skull gleamed. Amid the thousand, closely clustered, attentive silhouettes and coiffured feminine heads, but also bald masculine heads, the distant skull gleamed… It gleamed at approximately three-quarters of the sloping distance between the fourth rank and the stage below… It gleamed round, as a full moon of obsession, sunken between figures cloaked in darkness; pious crowns and motionless backs, enraptured; it gleamed like a goal, like a target; it gleamed white; it glistened…

From the collection Proza, (Prose), 1920. Available in English translation in The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories, Penguin, 2016 and available online in Dutch here

‘Daar is de hond’ (‘There is the dog’) by Maartje Wortel

Suggested by author Jan van Mersbergen, who is on the editorial team of De Revisor, but also a generous connector in the Dutch literary scene and an infamous defender in the Amsterdam Saturday League.

Another delightfully absurd story involving pets. A couple find an original way to cope with the death of their dog, adding a new dimension to their own lives and offering an intriguing take on the Dutch expression “niks menselijks is ons vreemd” (we are all prone to human frailty).She asked him on a Wednesday evening. He had swum his lengths at the local pool. When he returned, she said: “I miss the dog.”
“I know,” he said. His hair was still wet. Fifty lengths he’d swum. To stay fit, now that he no longer had to walk the dog and throw sticks around.
Sanderijn was in the kitchen, leaning against the fridge. She had fried potatoes, sliced iceberg lettuce, laid it out on plates.
‘Could you imitate him?’ she asked. She stroked Hans’ head, ruffling his wet hair.
Hans did not reply. He just gave her a quizzical look.
“The dog,” she said. “I really miss him.”
“His barking,” she said. “The fun we had.”
“I’m not going to imitate the dog,” said Hans. “The dog is dead.”
“Yes,” said Sanderijn. “Exactly. It’s so quiet around here.”
She kept quiet for a moment to emphasize the silence.
“Just bark once,” she said. “To hear what it was like. Try it, for me.”
Hans barked. It sounded lame. He didn’t sound like a man who knew how to imitate a barking dog.
“No,” said Sanderijn. “You can do better than that.”
Hans barked again. Much better this time. Sanderijn took a step forward.
“Down,” she said.
“That’s enough now,” said Hans. “Is there any meat?”
“Down,” Sanderijn said once more. She looked strict, raised her finger and put Hans in his place, just as she had done with the dog.

In De Revisor, Biannual Edition 2011-2. Available online in Dutch here