‘We Too Have Wind-blown Plazas’ by Adrian Duncan

I knew I had to buy Midfield Dynamo when I saw the contents page was laid out in the formation of a football team, with each story occupying its own position on the field. ‘We Too Have Wind-Blown Plazas’ is the No 9, one of two strikers, the target man. Foster is an engineer working in Abu Dhabi, who has left Ireland as much to escape the scorn of his father as the country to which he promised himself he would never return. He wants to “perish in the desert”, isolating himself in his work, but he comes under the influence of his employer, another father figure, who introduces him to class A drugs and seems determined to lead him into complete dissolution. His sense of reality becomes increasingly disordered and when he witnesses the grotesque death of a migrant worker it’s never clear if it’s an actual event, a drug-induced hallucination, or purely a metaphor. This is a short and shocking story of alienation and loss of self, flatly and precisely told. It starts with Foster’s rage at his father and ends in his deportation back to Ireland and its “people and their rage, or something that sounds like rage, but rage that has been continuously doused and beaten and broken, until it is barely rage at all.” There’s not much in the way of hope here, even less than in Ó Ceallaigh’s ‘Dead Dog’, but it’s a fascinating and compelling piece of writing.

Collected in Midfield Dynamo, The Lilliput Press, 2021

‘The Conductor’ by Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon was the first writer from Bosnia I came across a few years ago, and he helped me find my way to other excellent writers from the Balkans. Everything he has published is worth reading but I think his short stories are where his quality really shines. They have a style, poise and elegance that are a pure pleasure to read. ‘The Conductor’ is in some ways a characteristic Hemon story in that it contains autobiographical elements (the young Bosnian writer who is stuck in the USA throughout the siege of his home city of Sarajevo), but also fantastical characters and events, and a large space between where you just don’t know where the real and the fictional collide. Along with the narrator, the other main character is Muhamed D., a older poet also known as Dedo:

“My story is boring: I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on tv; I lived in America. Dedo, of course, stayed for the siege – if you are the greatest living Bosnian poet, if you wrote a poem called “Sarajevo”, then it is your duty to stay.”

The narrator dislikes Dedo from the time they first meet in Sarajevo before the war. He resents the obvious disdain the older man has for him. He resents his poetry and his fame, and the way he uses them to attract young women. Then, when he pretends that Dedo’s poetry is his own in order to seduce an American woman at an MLA conference, he resents him even more. His feelings about the old man become inseparable from his own self-loathing. Eventually they meet again when Dedo moves to the USA and the younger man becomes reconciled to him during a night of horribly comic mishaps as they get drunk together and suffer a series of degradations and humiliations. In the end he learns to love the old man and to embrace him in his decrepitude, and perhaps he learns to accept the lost and guilty part of himself as well.

First published in The New Yorker, Feb 28, 2005, and available to read here. Collected in Love and Obstacles, Picador, 2009. Also included in The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, Penguin, 2021

‘First Day of Night’ by Adnan Mahmutović

Adnan Mahmutović left Bosnia as a refugee in 1993 and now lives and works in Stockholm. ‘First Day of Night’ is the story of Almasa, another refugee from his country, a young Muslim woman who arrives in Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden, on Christmas Eve. It’s a place she has chosen to settle, “as far as she could go without losing contact with the world. The safest place on earth”. In the course of the story we learn that she has suffered terribly in the past, having lost her family and been raped by Serb soldiers, but it’s her courage and resilience which shine through. There’s a wildness in her behaviour, and bitter humour too, as she imitates Robert de Niro in his “You talking to me?” routine, takes up with three old drunks in the street (a bizarre parody of three wise men), and gets a carful of young Swedes to give her beer when she “flips open her coat, and flashes her flat tits” at them. At times the story has a surreal quality, but it is grounded in the harsh reality of the cold and discomfort that Alamsa experiences in this alien place. But in the end it’s an optimistic tale. Despite everything she has experienced she is a survivor. You want her to carry on surviving and you’re reassured that she will in the final lines as she “smiles, laughs, guffaws and goes back to her room thinking, I’m in the right place”.

First published in Stand Magazine in 2010, and collected in How to Fair Well and Stay Fair, Salt Publishing, 2012

‘Lily’ by Rumena Bužarovska, translated by Paul Filev

Last year I put a note on Twitter asking people to recommend writers from the Balkans I should look out for, and the Macedonian writer Rumena Bužarovska’s name was mentioned more than once. Her collection My Husband contains a series of stories about the bullying, hypocrisy, and other abuses that take place in families in a male-dominated society. Some of them are brutal, some funny, but ‘Lily’ is probably the most painful of them all. The narrator’s husband, Jovan, won’t let her visit her sick mother in her rural home “because she reminded him of poverty and illness” and a past that he both fears and resents. Even when their daughter Lily is born, he refuses to let her take the young child to see her grandmother. So she waits and frets and lies, and eventually makes the journey without him knowing. The tragedy that follows is mundane and awful, and this is reflected in the way the story is told, without irony or elaboration. In the aftermath, the lives of all the characters are hollowed out, relationships fragment, and old friendships are lost. In the end there’s no solace to be found here or lessons learned, but there is, perhaps, the terrible truth that grief can make people selfish and cruel.

Collected in My Husband, Dalkey Archive Press, 2019; also included in Contemporary Macedonian Fiction, Dalkey Archive Press, 2019

‘Snowflake’ by Semezdin Mehmedinović, translated by Celia Hawkesworth

‘Snowflake’ is the third and final part of a book which describes itself as a novel, but consists of three distinct stories about the author’s and his family’s life in the USA after they have left Bosnia. Each story is one of exile, a state of being in which memory helps to preserve identity and gives solace to their painful experiences. When Mehmedinović’s wife, Sanja, suffers a stroke she loses both her short term memory and long periods of her past. He nurses her and reminds her daily of where they are, how long they have lived there, and all that has happened between now and their previous life in Sarajevo. The storytelling becomes an aid to her recovery, and is in itself an act of love:

“She’s well aware that she doesn’t remember, and asks questions that are crucial to her, she turns to me out of her forgetfulness with full emotional participation. This is one question that she repeats every day:

“How’s your mother?”

“She died in December, four months ago,” I say.

She starts to cry. “I didn’t know … I’m sorry.”

She repeats the question “How’s your mother?” every day. And every day she

receives the news with the same intensity, always hearing it for the first time. My Heartisn’t a sentimental book, and even the story ‘Snowflake’ seems appropriately cold at times. But there is no bitterness, only genuine compassion. On the final page Mehmedinović describes himself and his wife walking along a street in Alexandria, Virginia, when they are passed by a Google car photographing the area for Street View. You expect at least a trace of them to be preserved, but I’ve walked up and down that street online several times and I can’t see them. It feels like their experience of life as exiles is always in danger of disappearing into nothing.

Part Three of My Heart: a novel, Catapult, 2021

‘If Anyone had Told Me Where We Were Going’ by Elvis Bego

Elvis Bego’s story is a recollection of his experience as a twelve-year-old from Bosnia in a refugee camp in the Czech Republic. He’s there with his father and an “entertaining” assortment of other refugees, having been separated from his mother and sister when they left their home country. Neither part of the family knows if the other is alive. In this strange new place he shows all the bravado of a young adolescent, acting cool with his friends and eager to impress an older girl, Ema:

“My hair was a little longer, my tongue looser, worldlier, and more daring than the other guys had to offer. I was as wise as Socrates and cool as Johnny Depp. One of the first things Ema said to me was that I looked like the actor. I wasn’t impressed, or I didn’t show it.”

But they’re all still kids really, playing at war in the forest, whooping like ghosts in corridors when the power fails, excited but scared by sex. The story is a headlong encounter with new experiences, but with a backdrop of grim reality that is always waiting to trip the youngsters up. As the narrator says, “Memories are minefields”. Memories like this:

“Nobody talked about what they had seen in the war. Or rather, the less you’d seen the more you talked about it. I said nothing about the man in the cherry tree, who’d been shot by a sniper and hung like a scarecrow, his body blackening in the sun.”

There is good news in the end, but it’s tempered by the writer’s knowledge of how much he and everyone else has been changed by their experiences, even in the short span of the narrative. I read this story online when Elvis Bego tweeted about it a few months ago, and I was immediately drawn in by one of the most engrossing descriptions of life in exile I’ve ever read. It’s funny and painful and real in a way that gets right under your skin.

Published in Agni No 81, 2015, and available to read here

‘I’m writing to you from Belgrade’ by Svetlana Slapšak, translated by Will Firth

I started this anthology with the first book of short stories I bought. This is the most recent. Balkan Bombshellsis a collection of contemporary women writers from Serbia and Montenegro, recently published in the UK by Istros Books. It contains a wealth of excellent writing, with some of the authors translated into English for the first time. Svetlana Slapšak’s contribution is a cleverly framed story, where the displacement of the narrator Milica (living comfortably with her husband and daughter in Toronto) provides a counterpoint to events in her former homeland. She receives an email from an old boyfriend, Slobo, who travelled back to Belgrade at the time of the death of the former leader Milošević while he was being tried for war crimes in the Hague. He describes the people who gather to honour him:

“These were his most faithful minions: not farmers or youth, but simple folk from deep, small-town Serbia – places where army coffins were sent, but not money, and no one cared or helped. They were mostly elderly, and many were cripples. A funeral audience, you might say, but they didn’t even have Sunday best to wear to a funeral. Did they come because they got a meal on the way? Most likely.”

Slobo’s long narrative takes the story in an overtly political, almost polemical, direction. But the subtle juxtaposition of perspectives reveals a painful ambiguity. After he describes in harsh terms all that he sees and despises in post-war Belgrade, we hear that Milica’s mother still lives there in her old home, drafting projects for NGOs, translating manuals and even selling her daughter’s translations. She is the one with “real staying power”, while Milica is in Toronto with her books and her cats and her “indeterminable sense of guilt”.

Collected in Balkan Bombshells, Istros Books, 2023

Introduction

I lived, in the years before my divorce, in a house with a permanent guestroom. I had furnished this room as my ideal guest accommodation and kept a bookshelf there of short story collections only. It was a move based on the premise that short stories can keep an overnight visitor well-stocked in reading material without making them want to borrow the whole book to finish it. I don’t lend books unless I don’t want them back because they go so often unreturned, even if unintentionally. The twelve stories in this personal anthology each come from a book that once sat on that shelf in a house and a marriage now long left behind. I still have the books. Welcome to my virtual guestroom.

‘Caravan’ by Anne Enright

I read this story at a time when my children were of a similar age to the two children of the woman whose internal monologue carries it. ‘Caravan’ arrested me in an almost physical way. It was a kind of shock to me that a short story could capture so absolutely the push-pull and escaped-trapped feel of a family holiday with small children on a campsite in France.

There is much about this story that rang painfully true to me then, but still even now. It made we wince at the ordinary ache of it all. I have never forgotten the image it produced in my mind of Michelle backing out the door of their flimsy, temporary accommodation, cleaning cloth in hand, on their departure at the end. ‘Caravan’ has stayed with me from the moment I first finished it, and it lives on in my head.

First published in The Guardian, October 2007, and available to read online here; collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008

‘The Piano Teacher’s Pupil’ by William Trevor

Trevor is for me one of the absolute masters of the short story form. His stories always leave me with the feeling of having entered into, or stayed a while staring at, a particular kind of realist painting: where it’s all laid out before you, but the emotions are held just barely, and very neatly in check. This story is absolutely succinct, and so much larger than itself.

First published in The New Yorker, and available to read online here; collected in Last Stories, Viking Penguin, 2018

‘Men of Destiny, After Jack B Yeats’ by Nuala Ní Chonchúir aka Nuala O’Connor

Nuala O’Connor, who also publishes as Nuala Ní Chonchúir, is one of 56 Irish writers who wrote responses to artworks in the National Gallery of Ireland Collection for this book. Building on the intense, tense feel of the original image, she imagined a whole world for the painting she chose. Jack B Yeats painted Men of Destiny in 1946. It’s a ghostly kind of painting, but also rich with a stark contrast between the fiery red-orange-yellow of sunlight hitting the land and the shoulders of the men, and the deep, dark blue of the sea below and the sky above. Ní Chonchúir’s story begins with a line that could serve as an open-ended, one-sentence description of the painting: “July, with its pressing light, its high note of optimism, was ending.” She brings us from the outline of the men walking on the pier to the fateful sound of two unexpected gunshots, and she does it in just three pages without missing a single step.

First published in Lines of Vision, Irish Writers on Art edited by Janet McLean, Thames & Hudson, 2014

‘The Grief of Strangers’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What begins as a story about a daughter travelling with her mother to the airport for a “connection” to a potential husband, ends as a tale about not betraying yourself for the comfort of others. ‘The Grief of Strangers’ slowly reveals its heroine Chinechelum as a woman who points repeatedly to the dance of compromise family and the rest of the world can demand. She holds no truck with the Englishman who defends his friend’s reference to her as a “dusky beauty”: “’He was complimenting you.’ ‘No, he was complimenting you,” she says, “Like one would compliment somebody who had a good racehorse.’” She tells her cousin Amara, “It’s interesting how much we forgive our children because they have foreign accents,” when Amara tolerates back-chat from her nine-year-old in her small London flat. Chinechelulm is a poet and an academic. The man she loves was shot nine years ago by US police, “Three white men” at his own front door, leaving him alive but without hope of recovery. This is a story about race, class, prejudice, identity, choices, selfhood, and living with tragedy.

First published in Granta 88, Mothers, 2004, and available to read online with subscription here

‘Fear’ by Anne Frank translated by Michel Mok

The global fame of Anne Frank’s diary overshadows the fact that she wrote short stories, essays and fables too. She was fourteen when she composed ‘Fear’, a two-page story dated 25 March 1944, which takes the reader from falling bombs to the freedom of nature with such speed and clarity it’s like being pulled along by gust of wind. It sparks with an acute atmosphere of not enough time, time running out, and a future neither guaranteed nor given. Collected in a 1986 Penguin edition, which I was given as a ten-year-old, I read it back then with a child’s mindset and marvelled as I do even more now at Frank’s fearless faith, her matter-of-fact directness, and the heartfelt wisdom of her innocence.

Collected in Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex – stories, essays, fables and reminiscences written in hiding, Penguin, 1986

‘When I was a Witch’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A woman in New York finds herself wielding unexpected powers including the power to compel newspapers to print only the factual truth. She discovers of course that her real influence has its limits – because she is a woman. It’s remarkable how the ways in which this story skewers and confronts the problems of print journalism have not dated, much. The protagonist’s wish initially results in “a crazy quilt of a paper”, with “All intentional lies” printed in scarlet, “All malicious matter” in crimson, “All mere bait – to sell the paper” in bright green, “All hired hypocrisy” in purple. But soon everything turns to blue and black: “Good fun, instruction and entertainment” and “True and necessary news and honest editorials” only. This story first appeared in print 114 years ago in The Forerunner, a monthly magazine the author wrote and published herself for seven years. 21^st century readings of her work necessarily consider her feminism within the co-existing context of her racism, but this remains a fascinating example of early 1900s feminist fantasy fiction.

First published in The Forerunner in 1909. Collected in The Yellow Wallpaper, Penguin 60s Classics, 1995, and available to read online here