Literature and Film B5.140

ELiT Literaturehouse Europe

Ed. by Walter Grond and Beat Mazenauer

Literature and Film Ed. by Walter Grond and Beat Mazenauer

All contributions can be read on the website www.literaturhauseuropa.eu

The Literaturehouse Europe is funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Edition Rokfor Zürich/Berlin B5.140/18-12-2018

Konzeption: Rokfor Produktion: Gina Bucher Graﬁsche Gestaltung: Rafael Koch Programmierung: Urs Hofer Gesamtherstellung: epubli, Berlin GET TO KNOW LITERATURE

The Literaturhaus Europa was established in 2015 by institutions from six European countries and its mission was to spread the word about European contemporary literature. This set-up phase was achieved from 2015 to 2018 with support from the programme

Creative Europe. A lively programme of events in Budapest, Hamburg, London, Ljubljana, Paris and in Wachau, Austria, was complemented with important publicity work under the title Observatory for European Contemporary Literature with weekly texts and blogs published about books, writers, trends or background analyses.

The current fourth edition of «Trends in European Contemporary Literature» compiles a record of the European Literature Days 2018 with keynote texts by Katharina Hacker and Rüdiger Wischenbart on the topics of «Narrative in literature and ﬁlm» and «The law of the series», plus a daily review by Ilinca Florian reﬂecting the content and atmosphere of the international festival.

The main section of the fourth yearbook, as in previous years, comprises texts published in the Observatory from January to December 2018 on the themes Europe, Trends in Contemporary Literature and Book Tips. As previously, our contributors offer their independent choice of reviewed books and their personal reading experience as a valuable contribution to the reading landscape. Literaturhaus Europa is inspired by the conviction that literature has not lost its magic, even in the age of wall-to-wall media, and that literary narratives help us to ﬁnd orientation and to develop.

I wish everyone a pleasurable reading experience.

Walter Grond Artistic Director, ELiT Literaturhaus Europa INHALT 1. Narrative in Literature and Film...... 11 A Tangled Web of Happiness. Complexity and Film...... 11 What’s Next? The Law of the Series...... 20 2. The European Literature Days 2018...... 37 A Blog...... 37 Ilija Trojanow – The Charming ‹Collector of Worlds›...... 49 Laudatio speech for Ilija Trojanow ...... 53 3. Trends in European Contemporary Literature . . 61 4. Europe ...... 75 5. Book Tips ...... 79 Thanks ...... 129

1. NARRATIVE IN LITERATURE AND FILM

ATANGLEDWEBOFHAPPINESS.COMPLEXITY ANDFILM

By Katharina Hacker

It is a great thing to tell stories, vivid, alive, stories that are surprising or would be lost, if they were not told, and there are narrators whom I admire for this. Personally, however, the desire to narrate does not motivate me to write, and I ﬁnd other possibilities of literature fall behind too easily. The plot and emotions interest me much less than images, settings, sketches and thoughts. Presumably some readers ﬁnd my books complicated for this reason, even the novel, which I thought out simply, disciplined and with a clear plot, «Die Habenichtse» («The Have-Nots», translated by Helen Atkins).

The film version of the novel, condensed and clear as it is, is not composed more vividly and more easily than the novel. The film «The Have-Nots» offers no interpretation of a novel, «The Have-Nots», but takes it to extremes. It shows, unfolded, exaggerated, wide open, the potential complexity of the characters in the novel by using the artistic means of light and flesh. Light and pictured flesh. Skin, whose sight can so deeply irritate, like a successful line. The movement of a body that stops like a sentence.

In the novel, there is a minor character who is essential like the saint in a story of saints’ lives. He is the striking, exaggerated figure, with a body, which is starkly more differentiated than the intellectual souls around him, more alert, brighter, more passionate, more desperate. In the novel it is Jim, in the film his actor Guy Burnett in the light of the camera work and direction, his flesh that is trained and at the same time soft like a chubby child’s body, hesitant, irritated, ready to go. The black-and-white film lets the viewers imagine the body. He is the visualization – for in the film the body is the filmed body of an actor who wants to embody a role – of what in Augustine’s «Confessions» is called distentio

11 animi, the distention of the soul between memory, present and future, the turmoil of a painful experience, perseverance, longing, the wild regret and the gigantic hope, the vapid Now, the shining moment of peace.

Jim is the soul-traveller and spiritual guide in the novel and in the ﬁlm, all the more.

He is the one who knows and dulls the light.

He is the position, as Isabelle is its privation – that’s why they are attracted. However, he only appears to be the extreme, while she is the vague, the ambiguous one. She seeks the extreme. He seeks salvation, Sha’ath Chesed, the aspect of grace, as we say in Hebrew. In the ﬁlm, stronger than in the book, there is an index for salvation, which two don’t grant each other, yet can suggest, it’s the same for both.

Jim is the ﬁrst to enter a door. So, he opens the door for Isabelle to London life. With force.

You know, I don’t want to interpret the ﬁlm for you.

I would like to share with you what it has given me as a gift.

This large, trained man enters the door, here she can go into the ﬂat that her husband rented.

The lock is no good, he says to her then. ‹You’d better be careful.›

From the very first second, he is disturbing, from the first moment. A child is watching them both, a six-year-old, who because of Isabelle writes her name for the first time: Sara.

Freedom lies not in the fact that Jim decides for Isabelle and Isabelle against Jim, it lies in seeing the contingency of the decision, keeping what one has rejected, without playing it off against what one chose, without denying what remains as the shimmering quarter of the decision that has been made.

12 People are more possibility than actuality. They breathe with what is imaginable, they feel what might happen, they reach into the sphere of their dreams.

Our dignity lies in our power of imagination.

However, the possible is not the indeﬁnite, it is potency. And while Isabelle perhaps believes she is swimming in the possibilities of her life and for this reason longs for clarity, she still has no idea of who she could and wants to be.

Completely unlike Jim. Jim dreams. Jim dreams of the garden in which in the shade of a cherry tree he sits with his beloved Mae and drinks tea; the passage in the book has more space. Jim longs for peace, Jim imagines a love affair, and he resists whatever blocks him and deforms and hems in.

Perhaps this is why Isabelle, as Julia Jentsch plays her, appears erratic, unrequited (without clear longing), imprecise, and without the impulse that one notices in Jim.

For the novel, I borrowed a simple form from ﬁlm, namely, cut and reverse cut. First, there is a scene in London, then one in Berlin. Different locations, different people. One can easily think that they meet at the initial described location, and one can easily think that it doesn’t go well.

The ﬁlm narrates the one after the other, ﬁrst, when Isabelle arrives in London, the street in Kentish Town comes into shot, and the child Sara (not her brother) and Jim, the drug dealer.

As with every ﬁlm adaptation of literature some things are dropped, the whole thing is slimmed down and simpliﬁed and translated into the visual. Even easier, you might think, to project yourself into it.

It’s not the case with Hoffmeister’s ﬁlm, which is why I owe the ﬁlm something that I suspected and attempted while writing the novel, yet over the years I could not get to

13 the point: where namely, despite everything, the characters’ dignity is manifested.

The black-and-white film is more complex than the book because of how it uses its film techniques. It shows how the ambivalence, the depravations, the frayed character of the protagonists is physical. It shows the skin. Of course, every film shows faces and almost every film shows skin. In the shots of the cameraman Robert Binall, together with the narrative plot, the soundtrack and so on, one sees from the bodies how they have absorbed the past, feel in the present and reach into the future.

Jim’s body is exemplary. Although the shoulders and arms, the neck, the torso are those of a muscular man, the ﬂesh falters, his movements get lost in memory or hope. The ﬁrm body is not stable and straight. Nor is it a sensitive soul that shines through.

The interplay (and juxtaposition) of reﬂection, light, mirroring, manoeuvrability, gesture, facial expression, gleam of very pale skin, bodies in water, gaze is as complex as only a soul could be with its emotions.

What is the soul? Expression and sensation, memory and hope and fear.

Augustine’s description (as Ricoeur captures it) of the soul’s relationship to time is ingenious, I want to repeat it again. Distentio animi, the distention of the soul, stretched or riven between the presence of the past and the anticipation of the future, while the moment always disappeared and can neither ﬁrmly grasp itself nor past nor future. Therefore,longing is the intentio animi. Peace. The felicitous and joyous gathering of one’s own times, for Augustine in the vision of God.

Intentio animi, the attention, which neither hurries, nor loses something. The soul, too, which can afford to feel because it must not fear its own destruction in pain or in fear. The soul which is allowed to keep watch because what it will see is not so terrifying that it would destroy it.

14 That is the soul and that is what the body is too that reaches out for something ﬁlled with longing for something, recoiling full of fear. Hoping.

The ﬁlm shows that Jim’s body is the most versatile, shocked and shockable. It shows Sara’s face in its strangely trapped inﬁniteness.

But what does «Jim’s body» mean?

It is the body of the man Guy Burnet who is ﬁlmed as he goes about portraying a character in a novel that is translated into a ﬁlm script.

And you also see that, the ﬁlm makes no secret of it. It keeps its perspective and doesn’t suggest, well, you might see people yourself. It is black and white. There are a few scenes where the actors are ﬁlmed in the mirror, the camera takes the two-dimensional mirror image and relays it.

However instantaneous the impression may be, which I take with me from the ﬁlm, however moving and persistent, it never is like this because I think: here is life itself.

Therefore, I would like to vary a phrase of Adorno’s, Mimesis to the existing (Mimesis ans Bestehende), that is, in a realistic novel, if I may adopt this as a label, to the natural.

One feels close to oneself, that is the funny thing about it and fantastic. And where perhaps one’s own life is devoid of happening or much love, one eagerly absorbs what is written, so that one doesn’t forget life. Well, there are times when life hides away.

What I accredit to the film «The Have-Nots» (obviously, I cannot be a good reader of the book) is the contrary, a Mimesis to the artificial, to the artefacts. The word fits better here when I treat it as originating through art or as a fact of art and artistry.

As a spectator, I am not captivated because I forget that I am watching a ﬁlm. I remain conscious that it is a ﬁlm, I see by suffering with it, hoping, desiring that I am watching something produced carefully. That is far more than the

15 workmanship or an artistic expression that I see here. It is the subjective thoughtfulness and the creative intent of the director, screenwriter, cameraman and actors.

In their dignity, the characters seem to comprehend their own contingency, in that each one of their decisions – merely as one among many conceivable – is never ﬁnal, never lets itself be ultimately defended against others. They are actualised, everything else remains potentially possible and perhaps in the past, yet it remains visible and does not fade away to nothing.

They are never ﬁnal, they cannot be convincing in the sense of: But nothing else would have been possible! – this insipid proclamation of much art.

So one understands that it is precisely this, which constitutes human dignity, namely, how one behaves towards it, not to be essential,but contingent,accidental,putting in effort. Freedom amounts to having decided and still seeing everything else.

That is the great good fortune of this ﬁlm and a gift for me as a writer, because shooting the ﬁlm teaches me to understand what was one of the passionate motivations of writing.

In short, or as we say in Hebrew: summarized on one leg: the exuberant, shudder-inducing complexity of our lives must not be clariﬁed and reduced so that we breathe again and can be happy, on the contrary, it is the locus of our dignity and freedom and generosity.

And so, I understand what constitutes human dignity: not making decisions freely and absolutely that determine one’s own life, but living with the chance, incidental, fallible, without having to deny that it could have been different, that it can be different, that there is no certainty of right and wrong, but possibilities and rejected possibilities, things, which one is still refused, such things that one has not taken into consideration. And that it essentially belongs to being human, extended, stretched or riven between the presence of the past, the ﬂeeting present and the presence of the future.

The intentio animi, the attentive, sentient soul, which inwardly holds all three forms of time, is exempliﬁed by Augustine in

16 music, in song, that while it strikes up the melody, already knows the continuation and the end of the piece and the past, while it sings (and was sung).

A person who lives with his (or her) own life as given and inwardly encapsulates it, in attentiveness towards the world, cannot be the judge of others. He will remain compassionate, even towards himself.

One of the strongest scenes in the ﬁlm is set in the water, in the bathing pond in Hampstead Heath. Unlike in the novel it is Jim and Isabelle, who are there, and go into the water. He holds her, lying in the water, in his arms. They don’t speak, there is no music. You only see, hear the water, see its movement, the lightness of the gestures that are nonetheless solemn. It is the possibility of kindness and trust: a possibility of the bodies that are slow and yielding.

Perhaps one must say: Isabelle, who has so many opportunities in life, still doesn’t feel and understand it, neither in herself nor in others. She cannot afford to despair and be in turmoil, she is unsatisﬁed, therefore she is cold-hearted – that is what she learns through Jim and Sara.

Generally, it is assumed that what directly touches you humanly is the authentic, the simple, genuine.

I cannot do anything with the idea of the authentic and I mistrust its apologists. Therefore, in art it is not the so- called genuine, true, which moves me but the artiﬁcial, the thing which is visibly made and manufactured, which ﬁnds a creative form that could also be different, yet is beautiful and valid, without overwhelming me. I prefer what leaves me in my place, perhaps enthusiastically, yet also with a distance, with the space between feelings, impressions, amazement, allowing questions, in other words: alternative descriptions.

Of course, one can strive to find the singular correct description. However, descriptions are always flexible, multifaceted, they are extendable to the infinite, being spun together on a point. Finding a right sentence – yes. But the right, the only right sentence? What a sad object that would be.

17 There are sentences that try to encompass, to encircle a subject, perhaps to make a conclusive judgement. There are sentences that try to open the view of a matter and to elicit thoughts about it. The way in which words are then used is different because they must not be such a good ﬁt as resonate,and they are,while they are used,simultaneously the spectacles with which the thing is viewed, by connotations, similar sounding words, related words and preceding uses humming along and perhaps having something to contribute.

A word, which wants to ﬁt its subjects, must be conclusive, sometimes it is fatal.

A word, which wants to skirt around or trace its subject, can open itself.

So it is too for books and ﬁlms.

From this perspective things and relationships and people become much more complex.

Complexity is usually regarded as not so desirable. People ask me why I don’t write more simply –. Would the books not then be clearer, going more to the heart?

But I am moved by what is complex and what unfolds, repro- duced under my description and becomes unmistakeable. It moves me and comforts me. I can trust what is complicated, contradictory and fuzzy. It does not want to lecture me about where my own life is unformed and confused, but rather highlight what would still be possible and conceivable. It also teaches me that desires are not forerunners of their prompt fulﬁlment, but carriers of dreams, trailers of melancholy, agents of longing and of my compassion.

In other words: complexity makes me happy. Sometimes one can easily cut out something and be glad about it. One can greatly delight in something simple, undoubtedly.

Whether for a long or only short while is a question of temperament and of taste, I suppose.

18 However, where something must be and remain simple, it is soon constraining and simple-minded. Literature is not here for this. And fortunately, too, not always ﬁlm adaptations of literature.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

19 WHAT’S NEXT? THE LAW OF THE SERIES

New storytelling in old media – Breakthrough of new media groups – Industrializing writing.

By Rüdiger Wischenbart

Where do we begin? It’s probably best to start with the tried-and-tested turnaround of storytellers – a surprise coup of death and rebirth.

1. New television? How boring!

«How boring!», I’d still have declared a few years ago when the medium of TV was the talking point and to discuss how digital storytelling instantly stirs things up across the entire media industry. Because for almost two decades there were repeated murmurs about the convergences of TV and Internet. In one of the ﬁrst Virtualienmarkt columns here I had quoted the former Bertelsmann boss, Thomas Middelhoff, who dreamed of exploiting content across all formats and channels in the global village. But this much lauded convergence never happened.

Until of all quarters to give the most unlikely hint of revolution suddenly news emerged of a new style of narrative, thrilling stories and fantastic craftwork: from American cable TV networks. With «Sex in the City» (from 1998), the maﬁa clan episodes of «The Sopranos» (from 1999), or the crime-thriller series «The Wire» from Baltimore (from 2002), the premium network HBO laid the foundations for a new look at television. At the latest with the fantasy epic «Game of Thrones» (from 2011), based on the novels by George R.R. Martin, this approach has become the new standard for storytelling in the mass media.

The decisive note in this case is that this ‘new’ television is mainly digital, distributed online through streaming and paid for by subscriptions. It can be consumed on TV sets and computers and tablets. However, probably a different device – the smartphone – is the most important driver of the new TV.

Consumers can decide at whim and depending on their circumstances which content they play back and when. This

20 TV content, particularly TV series, inﬂuences a fundamental shift away from linear television, where a broadcaster could decide at the end of a long and exclusive value-added chain when a story can be received. Everything is reversed in the new world. Here, the consumers decide (and, as we will see, several new network organizations as well): now I want to, and no matter where I am – online,ofﬂine,at home or even on the go – I can catch up with the «Game of Thrones» episodes that I’ve missed. But I’m paying a regular subscription for this.

In autumn 2017, the American-British children’s book author and TV producer Jeff Norton bluntly stated: «TV is now the dominant medium of culture.» (https://bit.ly/2FPwVFI)

2. Why series?

When I was immersed in the middle of the third volume of the Swedish «Millennium» crime-thriller series by Stieg Larsson (1954–2004), I was not only sure that the real model for the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, could only be a certain Swedish friend of mine called Lasse, who of course is also a journalist. One day en route to my regular Viennese coffee house, I also caught myself expecting almost instantly to meet Mikael Blomkvist here. At the latest, mid-way through a season of «Breaking Bad» – and I’m also convinced about this – most people identiﬁed their close circle of friends with the main characters in this series.

Of course, the trick of identiﬁcation is old hat in literary history. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) called his great novel series «The Human Comedy» to highlight the universality of the narrative. Marcel Proust (1871–1922) resorted to «In Search of Lost Time» until every reader made the moment of lingering over the cup of tea with madeleine cakes their uniquely personal experience.

The American modern-day Balzac counterpart «Doonesbury» by Garry Trudeau (*1948) appeared from 1970 in consistent daily doses as a comic strip in about 1,400 newspapers. An overflowing repertoire of fictional and real people (Donald Trump was already included in the late 1980s) revolves around the figure of the football quarterback B.D. Over 43

21 years, the comic strip developed into a chronicle of America that was even awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The continuous storytelling came to an end when Amazon Studios commissioned the Doonesbury inventor Trudeau with the production of a satirical WebTV series which premiered in April 2013 under the title «Alpha House».

The interruption and its quite ironic punchline is no dramatic ending, but rather a transition to new forms of serial storytelling.

3. Commerce plus art, that’s the trick

To make a direct comparison here between the pioneers among the writer-producers of the new series genre like Jill Soloway («Transparent») or the Coen brothers («Fargo») with Balzac, or even with Proust is certainly a «stretch» (in new-American speak). However, their contributions are respectfully considered in the serious literary feuilletons, and this clearly signals to us: in this case, something important is going on here!

The stars of conventional authorship have long since been asked about their favourite series (Daniel Kehlmann (*1975): «Mindhunter») and whether they also intended to write a screenplay for Netﬂix. (Kehlmann’s response: «Why not? Only, so far nobody has asked.» I’m surprised about this because I could certainly imagine him as a fantastic partner in an unpredictable and new kind of production.) (https:// bit.ly/2zwFAHz)

What is more interesting to me here is that among the foibles, at least of the series for upper cultural classes, it seems to be common to argue unexpectedly and extensively about the essence of ‘narration’ and each time with a warm- up that obviously signals: pay attention! Now, real thoughts are under consideration!

One example sufﬁces: at the end of the ﬁrst season of «Westworld», with the meaningfully glammed-up title «The Bicameral Mind»,and after another round of countless fatalities, Anthony Hopkins comes forward (signal: «Cult»! «Silence of the Lambs»), who mysteriously controls the whole series

22 in the background as «Ford». (Dr Ford naturally appeals to pioneers of serial production in the US car industry whose Fordism had already inspired Aldous Huxley to write his novel «Brave New World»). In short, Anthony Hopkins suddenly strikes this omniscient fatherly tone, ‘Son, I’m now telling you something important’ and murmurs: «You will lose control over us!» (The wildly labyrinthine story of «Westworld» is about artificial people that stage Wild West-themed simulated scenes in infinite loops with deviations from the narrated storylines for paying guests, while the real humans are allowed to mow down the artificial people («It’s only a simulation»). But soon everything somehow goes to pieces.

Then, Ford/Hopkins unveils the alter ego Bernard, so the point is simply how we should all be saved because in the end it’s always about «The suffering. The pain that the world is not as you want it to be.» Cut. Then Hopkins/ Ford continues: «Since I was a child, I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us... become the people we dreamed of being.» And this self-reﬂexive musing ultimately indicates that at this point nothing less than the «birth of a new people» is at stake. Credits. End of the ﬁrst season. Everything is left open for the next series.

All components of the «open work of art», as the semiotist (and bestselling novelist) Umberto Eco (1932–2016) called it, are recycled here; they are shaken up to be re-used again and newly combined according to all the rules of narrative art, like in a puzzle. This is not meant in a derogatory sense. Classical modernism also engaged in something similar to the sublimity of ancient art, and therefore already laid the foundations early on for a thriving modern art market with its stars and gallerists, collectors and muses. In the beginning, it was in a few avant-garde cities like Paris, Berlin or New York, but nowadays this is global with new, prospering hubs in Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore or Manila.

For the viewers, perhaps Anthony Hopkins’s slightly awkward theory-murmuring fulﬁls the proven purpose – as presented in the open work of art – of creating blank spaces, which we ﬁll, inquisitively and creatively, with our projections in the narratives and pictures that were kept deliberately ambiguous.But now the debate becomes intriguing and

23 the artworks become relevant, because thanks to these interactive movements they are suddenly suited to offer formulae and patterns for a present that overloads us through routine daily experience.

4. Narrating like on amphetamines

Narration in many of the series is primarily achieved with picture setting, cut, rhythm and the sequencing of scenes, and only on a secondary level with the actors’ text, or quite often thanks, too, to some narrator voices offstage.

As a reader of novels who often has already forgotten the plot halfway through the book, already shutting and pushing aside an entertaining crime thriller two chapters before the ending – and then still insistently recommending the book, since I enjoyed it – what fascinates me most is the visual narrative ﬂow of many good series. Just like the sound of a novel captivates me and carries me carefree over the pages – W.G. Sebald’s «The Rings of Saturn», where 250 pages further on I frankly confessed, I didn’t quite know what the book was about that I was just devouring. In exactly the same way, I occasionally slid into an episode of the series and into a maelstrom of visual impulses!

A good example of this is «Fargo» by the Coen brothers. Only a month or two after I surfed my way through scores of episodes, I read through some content summaries in amazement at how my memory of the story almost completely dissolved. But images, moods and especially the rhythm have made an impression.

Some series grant the stories that they relate seemingly unlimited time. They are almost the radical opposite of the supposedly so impatient ‘mobile phone culture’ of their core target group of ‘millennials’ about whom it is always claimed that they just about have the attention span of mayﬂies. A great number of series are rampant with a plethora of individual characterizations and deviate massively from the main narrative plot. My personal paradox as a reader is that the epic scope of most series far overreaches my patience to memorize temporary minor characters and storylines, or even such peripheral details that maybe suddenly turn up again later in an episode as the central feature.

24 In fact, plenty about these loops and turns occurs not mainly as narrative, but as a picture sequence, as a visual and unpredictable patchwork. In the very best moments such sequences then remind me of 1950s and 1960s experimental literature, of the Nouveau Roman when this became a narrative depiction like Nathalie Sarraute (e.g. «Tropismes», 1957) or Alain Robbe-Grillet («L’Année dernière à Marienbad», a ciné-novel, 1961), or Ernst Jandl’s poetry (1925–2000) whenever he placed his trust purely in words and sound. There is an impertinence about this that I like. However, the aesthetics of the series gives this impetus in another dimension.

I am fascinated and equally shocked, like in series such as «Fargo», where every performance, every dialogue implodes seamlessly on the viewer. Breathlessly. Ecstatically. It’s narrating like on amphetamines. It is, and yet these are irreconcilable contradictions, a seamlessly woven narrative tapestry that is simultaneously ﬁlled – the key word is open work of art – by those open, since meaningless projection ﬁelds for my fantasies, which modernist art had made so provocative. However, similar to the way in which post- modernism excludes itself from modernism, there is a random aspect, almost boredom, which is ideal for blissfully losing oneself binge watching on the sofa with friends on a Sunday afternoon.

5. Sofas: placeless, story: from the village.

The setting comprising a sofa, friends and binge watching is placeless. The same applies for many of the previously mentioned series. It’s an adequate condition, if we imagine a middle-class environment somewhere between Minneapolis, Barcelona, Bogotá, Copenhagen, Dubai or Singapore – so, people who have the time, education and financial means to devote to this frivolous exercise. These middle classes have grown over the past two decades by hundreds of millions of households around the world. They are globalization’s target group and their greatest beneficiaries. They incorporate the most diverse cultural identities, religious affiliations and political preferences. Recently, a fair number of them vote in democratic elections for those who are fighting precisely this globalization. What unites them is above all the option to design parts of a private life.

25 One aspect of this design incentive is to tell one another stories in which thoughts, fantasies and also anxieties as well as life plans and rupture points are repeatedly woven into new tapestries.

This is why many of these stories work almost everywhere in the global village. But in one way or another each one of these stories is also simultaneously quite speciﬁc.

Even if the output, which is now difﬁcult to keep track of, and the growing rivalry, of the major US companies like Netﬂix, Amazon Studios and HBO (and soon several more from Disney to Comcast) is dominating the world market for TV series, several striking alternative examples are worth mentioning.

Denmark’s small public broadcaster DR – with «Borgen», «The Bridge» and especially «The Killing» – is regarded as a breeding ground for the Danish mini-series wonder, the series-counterpart for the preceding world hit of Nordic Crime with books such as Stieg Larsson’s «The Millennium Trilogy».

The magic formula for the series (and also for the preceding crime-thriller books) is: «Keep it local, put the author at the centre of the production and avoid TV adaptations.» (https:// bit.ly/2KJuCmn) That’s the verdict of Morten Hesseldahl. He was responsible in the decisive years for all these productions from the TV channel DR. He has recently changed medium – once again in his professional career – and in these times of abundant and surprising turnabouts he now directs the biggest Danish publishing house Gyldendal.

The motto «keep it local» and «trust the authors», not some intermediaries, has in the book world already catapulted several worldwide popular hits via a kind of wormhole shortcut from the extreme margins to the global distribution centres of the culture industries. An early example is the South Indian village story «The God of Small Things» by Arundathi Roy (*1961) from Kerala, published in 1986, long before the Ayurveda holiday boom. But the journey of J.K. Rowling (*1965) also belongs in this group. At about the same time, she wrote the ﬁrst volume of her Harry Potter series – when series were still regarded as unmarketable – in Edinburgh coffee shops.

26 Today, Netﬂix repeatedly presents a Cinderella glass-shoe writer, usually from the margins ignored by the culture industries, such as the Croat-Bosnian Ivica Dikic (*1971, Netﬂix series «The Paper», 2018, https://bit.ly/2SdZFco), or Hannah Gadsby (*1978) from Tasmania whose «Nanette», according to «USA Today», even «revolutionized» the genre of stand-up comedy. (https://bit.ly/2E3K9x0) Admittedly, it’s mostly local writers who in their – sometimes still so small – home market have already earned their laurels and put their professional skill-set to the test. Even Cinderella only had the biggest break after the begrudging stepmother had noticed her.

Not all new series formats are aimed at a global audience. On the contrary, once the format is developed it allows for thoroughly national spin-offs. France’s Canal+, as a production partner for decades a pioneer of European as well as African authors-cinema, jumped on the bandwagon of the series model with nothing less than an homage to the sun king and his belief in the progress of the Grande Nation. The three seasons of «Versailles» about King Louis XIV (1638–1715) and the architect of the epoch-making palace and gardens of Versailles firstly present a computer-generated design, that is, if you wanted to fit the French universe as a whole on a games console. And sex and naked flesh don’t miss out, there is even a fleeting glimpse of the king’s pubic hair concealed in his mistress’s lap.

It’s more fascinating, because it’s more surprising how the evolution of technology during the early modern period, the connection of science with conﬁdence in the circle of visionary thinkers is interwoven as a minor theme amidst all the chatter of simpering courtiers that satisfy the taste for gossip and stories. And in the grand spectacle surrounding today’s rather tired, middle-ranking power, France, only a mischief-maker may stretch things from Louis in Versailles Palace to the current reform enthusiast Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée. However, it’s silly that after the third season «Versailles» already came to an unscheduled and premature end. Ultimately, not every homage is borne out by the people. (https://bit.ly/2TTlUGx)

27 The examples listed here of last decade’s boom in the series are, of course, only a heavily edited best-of review and not a representative cross-section of the immense output of the new digital video stories.

Perhaps, the real surprise about the success story is totally different: namely, the unbelievable volume of anecdotes and stories, of narrative styles, themes and genres, which obviously for a long while went unnoticed in the conventional feature ﬁlm departments of most television broadcasters and by many book publishers.

6. Netﬂix as a paradigm

With 124 million paying subscribers from 190 countries, 11.7 billion dollars revenue in 2017 and strong gains of 40 per cent in the first half-year of 2018, currently Netflix is the brand icon of the new global media industry. In the current financial year 2018, Netflix plans to invest 13 billion dollars in its own productions. In 2017, the figure was 6 billion. (https://bit.ly/2zvxS0i)

As a comparison: the world’s biggest publishing company, Penguin Random House, reported sales of 3.359 billion euros (= 3.83 billion dollars) for the ﬁnancial year 2017. As its German parent company – also including the RTL television group and magazine publisher Gruner & Jahr – Bertelsmann achieved sales of 17.190 billion euros, however, without eye- catching expansion fantasies in recent years.

Netflix is not alone here on the wide media spectrum. With a massive injection of its own funds, Amazon Studios has long since stepped into the ring. The scale of the funds involved here becomes clear from a press release in the Financial Times in spring 2018 that suggested Amazon plans to invest one billion dollars to film the Chinese science fiction trilogy «Trisolaris» by Liu Cixin (*1963, «The Three-Body Problem», «The Dark Forest» and «Death’s End»). The resulting series should become a new «Star Wars». This is possibly more a PR gag than a factually based preview of a commercial plan, but the note clearly pushes the bar upwards. (https:// on.ft.com/2DuXv44)

28 In summer 2018 a bidding war with stakes into the high two-digit billion ﬁgure between Disney and the cable TV group Comcast for parts of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire also made clear that here an almost epic battle for the future control of content and their consumers is being fought out on a truly mammoth scale. (A summary can be viewed at https://bit.ly/2OKxQal.

Three strategic dimensions overlap here:

• Linking global range and simultaneously local proximity;

• Linking content to pinpoint personalization;

• The confrontation between all the conventional, national or regional content providers with new global competition that acts ﬁnancially on completely different levels.

Taking these into consideration together, it’s probably no exaggeration to discern the step towards a new age of entertainment media here.

Markus Dohle, the boss of Penguin Random House, who is well aware of how infectious his youthful self-conﬁdence can be, gives an assured performance on all platforms where he appears. Dohle believes in good times for «storytelling» which has always been the core of book culture and the publishing business. However, he adds the caveat that the publishers should understand that their authors, not themselves, should stand at the centre of all their activities.

Netﬂix has particularly grasped the latter part of this statement and made it a pivotal point of its global expansion. Of course, Netﬂix is also in discussion with classical book publishers and has even commissioned a respected New York literary agency to carry out ‘publishing scouting’ to discover interesting book material. Successful books naturally are a constant source of material for popular TV series.

Elena Ferrante’s worldwide bestseller «Una amica geniale» («My Brilliant Friend») was recently distributed with great

29 acclaim in Venice when HBO screened the first instalments of the film version of the series. The coproduction with Italian TV channel RAI was «staged dead» grumbled German broadcaster, Deutschlandfunk. (https://bit.ly/2FNbFjP); the official HBO web page: https://itsh.bo/2Q48mJW). Naturally, all the major national stations rushed to secure the rights, starting with the Parisian Canal+ for France and French-speaking countries in Africa, Sky for Great Britain, HBO via its Euro- pean subsidiary for Spain, the Scandinavian countries and large parts of Central and Eastern Europe, VRT for Belgium and Digiturk for Turkey. (https://bit.ly/2zyiSPh; whether the broadcasting rights have now finally been awarded in Ger- many was still unclear at the time of going to press; but Suhrkamp’s acquisition of publishing rights for the books already happened later than in most other major book markets irrespective of Italophilia among German readers.)

Occasionally, it can even happen that the series dynamics outstrips the creative powers even of an ingenious writer. This also happened, and is widely cited at HBO, of all things with «Game of Thrones» when the logic of the series and the worldwide fan base demanded the ending, but Martin couldn’t deliver the ﬁnal volume. In the end, the original book and the series script went their own separate ways. (More about the book: https://bit.ly/2gPKVTv; and the series: https://cnet.co/2P9Dm5Y)

It’s obvious that book publishers are no longer involved as coproducers in these projects. Rather, they become one member among numerous service providers in a wide-branching value-added chain that other entities control. For Ferrante, it was good fortune that the additional revenue boost was substantial, and there was also a consulting role for the ﬁlm version as a double package from two smaller publishers, the Italian Edizioni E/O and its American sister publisher Europe Editions. This highlights how the new world of the series not only involves an arrangement among the established major players.

However, the enthusiasm of Penguin Random House and its CEO Markus Dohle about the new dimensions of storytelling also confronts entirely different parameters that even overwhelm the world’s biggest trade publisher, of all things,

30 because of a lack of wide-ranging appeal. Because talent and content development are one strength of Netflix and the others. The really long arm to the consumer – both worldwide and individually – is the other, strategically presumably decisive element in the new story about storytelling. In spring 2018, Netflix posted a job advert in Manila on the Philippines. The ad was for an «editorial analyst» whose main tasks were to «watch, research, rate, tag, annotate and write analysis». However, the specific requirements of the professional binge watcher also aimed high: «The ideal candidate has a deep knowledge, 5+ years experience, and education in the film and/or television industry, can write efficiently with attention to detail, is comfortable using a variety of publishing tools, and is thoughtful in the delivery of information while working on a diverse team», and he or she should preferably be fluent in another language besides English. (https://bit.ly/2zyj15h) Netflix,just like all other major digital groups,employs growing armies of people who at first manually and by virtue of their human intuition accomplish a painstaking process of ‘tagging’ – or indexing using thousands of keywords – the deluge of digital content. The deluge is to some degree shared out in streaming, waves and then divided up even more in individual drops and compiled in miniscule structures in databases. This material is then further processed via machine learning and artificial intelligence so that ultimately – and adjusted for the individual viewing habits of every single subscriber – it is used to set up personal favourites lists. This longwinded process is certainly immensely more worthwhile for a series with countless instalments and seasons and running for months and years than for a single film lasting 90 or at best 120 minutes. Series that captivate, engage, entice and disappoint me as a viewer and then reconcile with me again are simply better suited to finding out what I like, and who I am! Based on this process, Netflix, just like Amazon, is not only a content provider or marketplace, but at least halfway to being a technology business as well. In the end, all of these favourites profiles are different. They make each one of the currently 124 million Netflix subscribers

31 an unmistakeable individual customer, while simultaneously granting Netﬂix an equally unique treasure trove of data.

This is where the true distinction runs between Netﬂix, Amazon, Facebook, or Google on the one side – and the rest of the world.

7. Industrializing writing

And what does it all mean for writers?

First and foremost, new options. In light of the shrinking book markets across Europe and around the world, this is primarily excellent and signiﬁcant news. Because alongside the possibility of new commissions and publishing models, it’s a groundbreaking sign that narration – even in differentiated forms with everything that goes along with storytelling and discourses – does not represent a dying pleasure of outdated cultural elites. On the contrary. The present-day with its overexerting confusions, its unclear perspectives and inter- pretations once again searches for the maximum diversity in terms of projection ﬁelds in new stories. Because, as already mentioned, the most astonishing thing about the boom of the new media groups and the series is that these stories have not predominantly found their forums with the traditional establishments – from publishing houses to national TV institutions.

It is plain how far these two worlds of old and new have already drifted apart not least in view of the most recent stars.

Jill Soloway must be mentioned here for multiple reasons. Without knowing the name, I first got hooked thanks to a video sequence lasting only a few minutes and not somewhere online, but in the Jewish Museum on Upper East Side in New York. A handful of video clips were playing in an infinite loop as the most up-to-the-minute examples of Jewish- American identity. I went back again specially to watch a scene a second and third time: obviously, a Jewish wedding party is being ushered together for a group picture; everyone is chattering among themselves, everybody is celebrating his or her personality foibles, until finally someone takes

32 control and begins to direct them – once again, a hint of self-reference of the genre – until the ofﬁcial photographer ﬁnally has the proper, valid picture in the box. This miniature is staged with a virtuosity and simultaneous nonchalance that is breathtaking.

In the middle of the anarchic troop, an older man in white women’s clothes spins his small pirouettes – and by now, it’s already clear for series fans that the scene must be from Jill Soloway’s cult series «Transparent». Okay, the fans have in any case long since internalized this scene!

The episode opened the 2015 second season of a self- ironically narrated, semi-autobiographical story about Solo- way’s father coming out as transgender. «Transparent» was produced by Amazon Studios, Jill Soloway’s most important client. The main character Morton Pfefferman is delightfully played by Jeffrey Tambor. But all the success couldn’t prevent the scandal that erupted soon after the broadcast – and caused the cancellation of the series – when Tambor was accused of sexual assaults. Soloway and her lead actors – only recently a dream team – fell out. Not only that, meanwhile Soloway has also changed her own sexual identity and will no longer be addressed by he or she, but only in the neutral form their.

Here, it’s not (or: not only) about an intertwining of artistic biographies with the zeitgeist and even with social policy. Instead, topics are tackled head on that are hardly addressed in the conventional culture industry. This relates not merely to content, but also to design as well as organizational forms, in which radical new ground is broken. This is happening not in some isolated ‘off’ niche, but professionally and commer- cially with sights set on the mainstream and realizing with self-awareness that this is turning the great wheel of the new media industry.

Soloway is both an author as well as producer and makes her personal life a manifesto and her personal identity the linchpin of higher ambitions. The production company is programmatically called «Topple», derived from ‘toppling’ pa- triarchal power relations. Recently, Soloway is also responsible for a book programme under the publishing arm of Amazon

33 and focusing on queer topics, naturally also under the label of «Topple Books». (https://nyti.ms/2Ptec2V)

All this doesn’t mean, of course, that in future all writers have to mutate to media entrepreneurs. But the option is more obvious than in the past. And the changing terms from (ingenious-solipsistic) writer to talent and from the work – that is to be sent ready-packaged to the editor please – to content development certainly allows a suspicion to resonate that not only one individual is striking a high tone here. This transforms the old handcrafted creative process into a much greater thought-out, industrial framework.

If necessary, even the stories by the most respected icons, as happened with George R.R. Martin, can be drawn to a conclusion by a team. Conversely, however, quick as a ﬂash, all ignored stories can suddenly form a new centre.

For authorship this means the risky leap from the late 18th century, a time of revolutions and risk, into a rough landing in the 21st century, which most likely is not characterized by accident both by incomparable turmoil as well as similarly lofty hopes of something new.

8. What’s next? Like starting over!

«Everything remains different», we can sum up with a nice pun. Books never had a monopoly as the best, or even only medium, of delivering stories to the audience. From the epic troubadours of pre-history to theatre and opera and all the technical media of the past two centuries – photography, ﬁlm, television – there were always several competing and cross-fertilizing formats for the ultimate question, which small children already intuitively express, about prolonging the good night story, about another twist – or instalment: «What’s next?»

There is more than only one valid form of telling a story in the right way. However, there are amazingly few long-lasting variants. These are neutral as far as media and formats are concerned.

On the one hand, aesthetic forms are fundamental. The basic tendencies to introduce and develop characters, to build

34 tension levels to a crescendo and then calm them down, to create surprises, to disappoint, to evoke laughter and emotions have not changed much since the early days of recording stories about two and a half centuries ago. There are not many basic building blocks.

On the other hand, there are very clearly distinguishable lines. Chinese or Indian epic tales function in a different way to all traditional Greek dramas. That’s still true today. Excellent examples of this are the wonderfully light ﬁlm adaptation of the classic Chinese novel «Journey to the West» by Cheang Pou-soi from Hong Kong, a series of feature ﬁlms, but created as a popular series exactly like the 16th-century novel by Wu Cheng’en, which it is based on. Where one escapade and adventure follow another, and the characters remain stoically unchanged, you feel as though you are transported back in time to the early modern icons of European narratives – from Cervantes’ «Don Quixote» to the Flemish «Till Eulenspiegel» and the picaresque novel «The Adventurous Simplicissimus Teutsch» by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, published in 1668. All of these are pioneering narratives and, incidentally, reading them today is not only worthwhile but also works well.

The contrasting post-classical Greek mode of high dramatizati- on in complicated arcs and theatrical forms, which abrupt cut frame-sequences in the current series are also aesthetically committed to, this is all extremely fertile post-Shakespeare territory. Perhaps for this reason, too, it’s important to have the ever-recurrent self-reference for self-legitimation. The world’s literature and theatre festivals have long since discovered these riches. More conservative corners of the cultural worlds still shy away from an inquisitive break-out into these zones. But that will still happen.

Whatever... The game that we are witnessing is certainly older than we thought when this provisional research began. This game is audacious, relentless and decadent. Which is why we like it so much.

«A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, & c. But that’s all one, our play is done,

35 And we’ll strive to please you every day.» (William Shakespeare, «Twelfth Night», Epilogue)

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

36 2. THE EUROPEAN LITERATURE DAYS 2018

ABLOG by Ilinca Florian

European Literature Days 2018 | Day 1

About a Giraffe’s Neck and Questions of Thinking Men 2.0

It is seven o’clock in the evening and the opening of the European Literature Days 2018 is imminent. We – that means almost 40 writers, filmmakers, editors, several creative artists and journalists have met in the «Salzstadl» Restaurant in Krems to enjoy a long-awaited dinner. Many are speaking German, and some English. The meal is appetizing and the conversation flows. The table talk involves questions about personal reading habits and streaming. «Do you read more on the e-reader?» – «Or analogue?» – «I need the haptics!» – «No, the light of the e-book is not harmful for your eyes.» Society reads, looks at and creates cultural works, but there are already studies on the consumption behaviour of these particular works. People in the modern era seem to find it more difficult to keep focusing on something over a longer time. «In-depth reading, slow reading just for the sake of reading has become less common. That’s a proven fact», says an editor. «You quickly check through the text.» And it’s easier to be distracted by other things on the iPad, for instance, – when you «read digitally». An email or message comes in – and the reading (and thought flow!) is already interrupted!

How much time will pass, until my hand reaches from my fork to my bag to take out my telephone and check something? I persuade myself that I’m only doing it to look at the clock. Surely, it’s already late; soon, we will walk to the Minoritenkirche, only a few minutes across the wet cobblestones to attend the opening event of the European Literature Days. A young man at the table relates where he has travelled from. «You’ve destroyed the environment!»

37 exclaims a writer. She is immediately enlightened: the man has arrived by train. So, it’s not so bad. Almost on the instruction of a mute and mainly invisible director in the room, a conversation immediately starts up about cruise ships, riverboats, which travel around the Krems region on the Danube and pollute the environment. Between the last bites of his potato salad, somebody declares: «I prefer artists who create projects about environmental pollution and who ﬂy about the world with or for these projects.» There is a real awareness of our world and its state in 2018 – «the problems and challenges of our time», you could also say in social-educational terms. But what can the woman/man who thinks and writes and participates in panel discussions change about all of this? I quietly and secretly ask myself to give the transition of this text its absolution.

I jump, because that is possible in thought and alright, and this is no text perfected by a computer algorithm, because I can think and produce connections and come up with new, or even old things, but they spring from my own brain synapses. Similarly off course, like my recent jump, and sometimes also non-synchronous and flowing in a path like an errant roller coaster of thought processes – this is how many of the reflections seem to me of the two discussion partners on stage in the wonderfully blue illuminated Minoritenkirche over the next few hours. The hall is well filled with older people, although mothers with their children and a school class are also in the audience.

Leading the discussion are Robert Menasse and in German- speaking countries currently the most famous philosopher and book author, Richard David Precht. Their questions focus no more and no less on «what keeps our intellectual world together». «How our world is educated» is the headline theme for the evening. This implies the question about education in the world and how one creates it. The answers to these questions emerge as slightly less worldly: Precht and Menasse succeed in a conversation ﬂow – it is impossible to reconstruct – by starting their discourse on the meaningless- ness of a giraffe’s long neck (which became like this in the course of evolution, yet also simply is like this, as a neck in itself, which it is and remains so until today), sailing past Kant and Hegel to risk a somersault again into the kingdom

38 of the ancient Greeks, touching on questions concerning the modern technocracy of China and her pressure not to let economic growth fall below the ten per cent hurdle – and to approach the presumably most concrete topic on tackling the landing: how to evaluate our current education system in the German-speaking context up to the university career? Where is the system stuck and where are things in really bad shape, and how is the virus to be treated when it has been identiﬁed? Here, Precht has a few concrete tips and also reveals some anecdotes from his son’s school day to illustrate things and the audience frequently laughs – most likely this is due to a recognition effect that is difﬁcult to deny. A short analysis follows of individuals’ inherently narcissistic behaviour disguised in the social media actions of our society. Precht points out that we were probably always so vain, but in recent decades the echo chambers have only become bigger and more easily controllable.

Personally, at the end of the discussion, I can certainly not say whether cultural pessimism or optimism should be recalled here, or whether anything at all should be – which I like again – but one thing gradually becomes clear to me: thinking will not be unlearned so soon, this artiﬁcial intelligence, which every year is widely announced countrywide as wanting to take over and rule the world, and cannot yet hand the water to homo sapiens erectus 2.0. Here, the thinking is controversial and dialectical, and the audience is listening, and I even imagine that I’ve only heard a mobile phone ringing once. Okay, the woman in the row in front of me has been scrolling on her smartphone as Richard David Precht explained that the medieval period was not such a dismal time as all educated individuals have thought so far, but it was probably an exception. Oh, I had forgotten Marx. Richard David Precht and Robert Menasse also made an intellectual sailing excursion to Marx. Our world of ideas is not entirely unfree of economic matters. Marx already realized this correctly. Both speakers euphorically draw their discussion to a close not without paying homage, alongside the joy of thinking, at least to the delightful activity of our small human life: pleasure. They propose a toast with full red wine glasses because, according to Precht: «The world becomes lighter, when you feel how it turns.» The quotation naturally isn’t from Precht; he has only passed it on. Handed

39 it on. Recited. But who is the source of the saying in the original? I won’t google it now.

European Literature Days Day 02 – Back to school

Chewing Gum Machines and Beautiful Mutations

I was given full poetic licence for the presentation of this blog. Because – at least here in Spitz an der Donau, and in Krems and far beyond on all the small plots of ground in the picturesque countryside where the European Literature Days reach out – art is free. Because the amiable festival director, Walter Grond, doesn’t seem to be someone who wants to prescribe, demand or push through things that you must or must not do. In business and politics, as we know, things are different. And in his role Walter Grond is more than just acquainted with them. He shakes – as I can imagine – Ms Politics and Madame Business not only by the hand over an Aperol spritz or this season’s red wine, but he most likely sits a while longer with them at a table. His only wish from me was good texts, and that I should review and describe everything going on here and my experience.

Now, I hereby ofﬁcially confess: apart from several good con- versations at dinner, I didn’t learn very much about the work of my many international, sometimes more, sometimes less wildly gesticulating colleagues. I didn’t manage to attend many sessions because yesterday and today I was presenting workshops in local schools. On behalf of the European Lite- rature Days. And that – above all retrospectively – seems to me a wonderful, inspirational and sensible exercise. (Mainly in retrospect, because looking forward to this task I felt some trepidation and awe.) While I looked into twenty faces of young pupils from Lower Austria who occasionally watched the teacher’s podium with open mouths, or occasionally with raised eyebrows when Ms Florian was on today’s timetable, I couldn’t avoid remembering Richard David Precht’s slightly sarcastic comments from the previous evening. How absurd the current school system is that it educates people norma- tively, yet not to become independent personalities and so forth.

40 After two ﬁfty-minute sessions talking about literature and ﬁlm, I cannot give a verdict on the status of educating the boys and girls who stared at me with wide eyes. However, I can say with certainty that they were interested. They listened and also asked questions, and that impressed me. At least in Melk an der Donau, I think, you should not be worried that future generations no longer know what a book is and only surf on the data stream into digital nirvana. A boy gave a response after I had read from my novel and described the language as particularly vivid. In his own words, of course, but he had listened very attentively and also absorbed something from listening and – I don’t know how it should be described and suddenly feel very naive – but I don’t stand very often as part of my daily routine in front of today’s adolescent generation and talk with youngsters about how you write or could try to write texts and even earn money doing so. And I enjoyed it. How the boy analysed my language. Although it was sobering counting the hands that went up after I asked how many of the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old school pupils take one or two books with them on holiday – I think about a third of the class put their hands up. However, I can easily imagine that a survey in my school days during the 1990s wouldn’t have turned out so differently.

I must also reflect on those days as I was strolling up the narrow alleyways of the pretty town of Spitz to join my colleagues – more than much too late – and many other participants of the literature festival to enjoy lunch at Schloss Spitz. I walk past a chewing gum machine, the tooth of time has gnawed away at the outer material, traces of scratches and weathering are visible, but the pale orange of the paint is still easily recognizable. Whether it has been standing here since the 1990s or not, we don’t know... After a little too much discussion about smartphone and e-readers and artificial intelligence yesterday evening, (and yes, I also asked the pupils: «Do you read books on e-readers or analogue?»), I sense the triumphal thought flash across my mind: «Plenty of things have also not changed.» Some things stay the same. At least there are not many visible signs of technocracy in the narrow alleys of Spitz, and I’m pleased about that. The shoe shop is next to the watch shop and, for decades, the signs reveal the same ornate writing, and no traces of

41 «Amazon» and «Google» here. Indeed, I was attracted by the chewing gum machine and my own sense of nostalgia. I haven’t even mentioned the dozen or so smaller and larger cultivated vineyards that complete the entire tableau and let you sense a strange calm, which spreads across your chest, and as a city-dweller you treat yourself to this far too infrequently. I am gently lulled by this atmosphere; the mist has descended but doesn’t make me sad, and the dew, which lasts until midday, doesn’t disturb me in the least. The «Loch Ness Weather», which encompasses Spitz and the literature festival since yesterday, and yet still doesn’t spoil the atmosphere for us, is just ﬁtting for the time of year, as the driver explained to me when he drove me this morning to the school in Melk. After all, the entire summer and autumn were «unusually warm».

The day draws to a close with a reading by Vea Kaiser, one of Austria’s most renowned writers,thanks a few years ago to her debut novel «Blasmusikpop – oder Wie die Wissenschaft in die Berge kam». In no time, Vea Kaiser mutated to a shooting star of German-speaking literature. This evening the focus is also on mutations, as the writer explains to us, while she introduces her musical accompanists, two likeable young men. The band «Sain Mus» has made its mission «working according to Darwinist principles». If the audience hasn’t responded well a few times, no song is kept in the repertoire. Their joint rehearsals constantly make a good job of sifting out the numbers that deserved to be worked on more, and those that don’t. Vea Kaiser’s life and work also seem to have undergone profound transformations just recently: she proudly tells us that she has just got married and about a film version of her debut novel that will also be released soon. She reveals snippets of her latest novel which should be published next year. As my eyes grow tired, I let myself be transported a little by what to me seems very powerful music of the duo «Sain Mus»; it sounds a bit like the landscape around Spitz, which has an effect on me: peaceful, rustic and somewhere you can always hear the leisurely flow of a small stream or the River Danube. Towards the end of the programme, however, the duo sends us home with a sound slightly resembling the «Mission Impossible» soundtrack, and I enjoy this no less. I needed the energy boost to look ahead with curiosity to the upcoming finale of the Literature Days.

42 ˚

European Literature Days 2018 | Day 3

Over and Done, but Things Always Go On!

It is Saturday afternoon and there is plenty of lively activity again at Schloss Spitz after the initial effects have been overcome of a long night drinking wine by some more than others. Yesterday, after two interesting discussion sessions with international and Austrian filmmakers in Krems, today is the last discussion panel of the European literature festival. The headline theme is the «Law of the Series» and the venue is packed. After a few opening remarks, while the moderator presents a short sketch of the development over the past 30 years of the market for the series – on TV and streaming websites – and finishes his talk with an outlook filled with interest and questions about the future of entertainment formats, the panellists are invited onto the stage. They are all writers working in television or audio drama and/or (female) novelists. A television producer and the head of the Drehbuchforum Wien have also taken a seat on the panel. I am deliberately not mentioning all the participants’ names, because there were too many, and this text should not have the aftertaste of a list.

However, I want to reveal that I witnessed the event live and it was deeply engaging. It is difficult to remember all the questions, which were raised, but the important ones were the following: how useful and important is it for a writer to think early on about the intended audience, – whether via streaming or on the good old television set that, according to statistics, at least young people switch on less and less to consume entertainment? Does it make any sense at all to think about this legendary, quota-defining, abstract entity of «audience/viewer», while one is creating a story? Or let’s say more accurately: how far is it possible to calculate, anticipate, or know what they want to see? Once again, it’s possible to ramble on about artificial intelligence that actually is already available in this area. It has become reality that companies, which offer streaming services, evaluate and analyse the data about our clicks on their web pages, how long we spend on their websites; they set up profiles on whose basis it

43 should be efficient and increasingly easy to calculate what the thirty-five-year-old entrepreneur looks at, or what the young mother as well as the fifty-year-old business man. What the city residents consume and customers in rural areas. It is a plausible option, and I’m not doing it precisely because it would lead beyond the scope here.

The filmmakers and narrators have assembled on stage to discuss storytelling, the power of narratives in all their forms and not statistics and consumers. It is undisputed that narrative forms over the past decade have changed at a pace that is difficult to stop; and it is hard to overlook what monopoly streaming services like Netflix und Amazon have fought for over recent years thanks to their self-produced serial formats. Both among the audience and on stage, opinions are temporarily divided: is this presumably new form of following characters for longer periods of their fictional lives a fashion fad, profound and genuine narration or cheap entertainment that only better caters for the consumers’ desire that something always carries on, and something new and funny is always told? The question is also always how one narrates something and how much time it takes to create this world. Here, the conversation slides into a brief excursion into the world of daily soaps. It’s always easy to say that they lack content. However, if you take a closer look there are also dramas, stories, imagined emotions here that should and are meant to tell something about human existence – however, the producers of these formats from production to direction and also screenwriters, the screenplay author and colleagues in the writers room don’t have the time to recount stories with incredible insight. The style of the production demands a new daily instalment. Every day an episode is filmed, cut, plotted and a dialogue book form is written out... Personally, I’m not surprised that the quality suffers because of this. But what are well-narrated, serial stories? Is there a big difference between the form, the narrative style of «Breaking Bad» or «The Wire» and an epic novel like the one by Nino Haratischwilli (now I have revealed a name, after all, she sat in person on the stage) «Das achte Leben – Für Brilka» («The Eighth Life»), which extends over more than a thousand pages? We could also have discussed Dostoevsky and Zola. Although we didn’t do.

44 Current events seem exciting enough. It seems exciting enough to discuss not only contemporary cultural works, but also what these mean for the economy. And to consider the unimaginable power that successful streaming providers like Netflix preside over and how they also use it, for example. Modesty is a well-known virtue of success. This is the comment of a friendly and open-minded writer colleague from Zagreb who is presently probably in the rarest situation in the European industry of having sold a series as lead author to Netflix that Netflix had negotiated with the Croatian company creating the series as «a Netflix original». And that was despite the series already having been broadcast in Croatia and another three European countries (as a Croatian series). When this was used as a point of argument the view on behalf of the Netflix organization was: «It’s not so bad, Netflix reaches 120 countries, so 3 or 4 don’t matter.» So, the three small, Eastern European countries should be irritated because they already knew the format as an original from Croatia and not as a Netflix original, given that this doesn’t exactly count for much against the hundred-plus countries that the Croatian channel and production companies had never reached with their (own) broadcast.

At the end of the very lively discussion round, a writer from the audience asked the question whether this serial production and also consumption «in series» wasn’t just a bit dubious. She could not speak from experience because she watches too few series, but her children were completely infected by this format and recently one of her children asked her: «Is that really only ONE book that you are always writing?» (The writer has already published several books, but not one that is continuous.) So, the theme goes: «Doesn’t that continue at all?» Her children were so inﬂuenced by this style of consuming stories that they could no longer even imagine the closed form of a narrative.

As so often in the last few days, the panel doesn’t close the session with conclusions or answers but certainly with questions that whet the appetite for even more debate. Everyone in the room is unanimous: new forms always need the courage of those who create them to be able to see the light of day at all. Without courage, without the willingness to take a risk, the paths that have not been taken

45 yet would also remain untouched. Where too much control and fear dominates, and too much is at stake in advance about generating success or not – whether with the good old measure of quotas or the click counter on the Internet – presumably even more fear and ignorance is being bred, instead of ideas for new and surprising stories told in an unexpected light and bringing characters to life.

European Literature Days 2018 | Day 4

The Courage and Will to Learn Something New

Accompanied by wonderful music from the «Contraston» trio, a chamber music ensemble from Budapest, whose creative repertoire includes both Baroque and Jazz, the European Literature Days 2018 draw to a close. At Schloss Spitz, many festival guests meet again, as well as writers and ﬁlmmakers, to attend today’s prize-giving ceremony for the «Austrian Book Trade Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action».

This year the prize goes to the writer Ilija Trojanow. The talks preceding the award ceremony already highlight how, throughout his life, Ilija Trojanow has engaged with the exploration of the Other, which includes people who think differently, and particularly foreign lands and cultures. Yet, he has not only concentrated on this, but observed very closely, too, whenever he ventured into new territory and showed interest in new and foreign things. He even refers to this in the interview on the stage after receiving the award: writers are often criticized for trying «to explain the world so smartly and for supporting utopias and ideals», but exactly why should they actually know everything better? Trojanow’s answer is that they might not know everything better, but purely because of their metier many writers are in the unusual and also privileged situation of being able to take the time to perceive and observe the world. Time is therefore a crucial factor. How many people could afford, like he has done, to take a year to travel around the world simply to write about it? A writer has time to closely observe the world and so to compile a highly exact, albeit not

46 perfect picture of it. On his travels, he has driven through Central Asia, among other places, where he encountered many big cities in which there was not a single bookshop. That made him feel sad, because during the quest for truth no medium gives a person access to the world with such clarity, and at the same time so comprehensively and with all its contradictions, as a print book. Literature has the capacity to adopt perspectives and to drop them again, to dig deeper to investigate human existence. This is also a major precondition for societies’ potential to embrace democracy. The Internet partly means a ghettoizing of one’s personal, previously created interests and pursued paths. We are to this extent treading water by perpetually circulating and wading in the same pre-conﬁrmed channels of personal existence, rather than discovering new pathways. «You ﬁnd what you’re not looking for in a bookshop», says Trojanow with his deep, pleasant-sounding voice. He reports, not without grinning about it, how last summer he got locked in overnight in Innsbruck’s «Wagner’sche» bookstore and stumbled, among other things, upon erotic literature that he was previously totally unfamiliar with.

Trojanow is delighted to receive an award for «tolerance in thought and action». However, he also emphasizes that he is an intolerant person when the focus is campaigning against power. And in our world, as it exists today, there is still far too much need to act against perﬁdious and all-encompassing political and economic power structures. The writer warns about the ongoing sinister and dystopian effects of prevailing turbo capitalism. In response to the question what appears to him to be sacred, he says only common goods and rights are sacred for him, and that they stand above everything else. For example, the Charter of Human Rights. In other words, the opposite of a comprehensively commercialized world order. He recounts the brutal absurdity of our present age in which even relief projects have to produce proﬁts.

I haven’t yet read any of Ilija Trojanow’s works, and after reﬂecting these thoughts, which I could only partially describe here, I am more than motivated to catch up very soon on this omission. I’m pulling my suitcase across the carpet of pebble stones stretching between the castle walls at Schloss Spitz; I enjoy a last dish of delicious dumpling soup and bid farewell

47 to many new friends whom I was privileged to meet at this festival. The shuttle bus is departing for Vienna Airport, and on the right is the beautiful, murky Danube, which it ﬁnally leaves behind. The mist of the past few days still hangs over Wachau, but my spirit feels a little brighter after these days spent exchanging ideas with my colleagues, writing and, it’s true, maybe even a little thanks to the excellent Grüner Veltliner from Spitz.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

48 ILIJATROJANOW–THECHARMING‹COLLECTOR OFWORLDS›

Ilija Trojanow will be honoured for his work with the award of the 2018 «Austrian Book Trade Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action».

By Beat Mazenauer

Ilija Trojanow was born in Soﬁa in 1965. Aged six, he and his family ﬂed to Germany where they were granted political asylum. Their journey was the start of a life in many different places: with the family in Kenya, back in Munich for studies, in Mumbai or Cape Town, and repeatedly back in Vienna, where Ilija Trojanow currently lives.

«In our turbulent times, cultural diversity and world citizenship are necessary preconditions of human existence. Those who accept this recognize that the other person is not the enemy, not the alien... not even an other.»

The source of this quotation is from a book that Ilija Troja- now co-authored in 2007 with the Indian poet and cultural critic, Ranjit Hoskoté. Its programmatic title is «Goodbye to Conﬂict» («Kampfabsage. Kulturen bekämpfen sich nicht, sie ﬂießen zusammen.») The cited passage gives a very clear and precise calling card.

In 1996, he made his debut as a literary writer with «Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall». In this book, amidst magical scenes and reality, he describes a child’s ﬂight from Bulgaria with his parents – and we can assume that there are also autobiographical excerpts. This impressive book with its equally charming as well as sophisticated narrative lays the foundation for two main aspects of Ilija Trojanow’s work:

49 First of all, he repeatedly engages with the homeland of his childhood, namely Bulgaria. The 1999 travelogue «Hundezei- ten», subtitled «Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land» is dedicated to this country and its circumstances as well as the memora- ble and impressive magnum opus «Macht und Widerstand» published in 2016.

Secondly, in a series of books he embraces the entire world to capture both its cultural richness and economic hardship. They include the novel released in 2006 «The Collector of Worlds» (translated by William Hobson) and «The Lamentati- ons of Zeno» (the 2016 English translation by Philip Boehm of «Eistau», 2011) and multiple reportages about the «entfessel- ter Globus» – another title in which Trojanow doesn’t even stop at Oberammergau.

Inevitably, there are gaps in this record. The list of his activities also includes his work as a translator and editor of the book series «Weltlese» as well as his work as a campaigner in «Angriff auf die Freiheit» (co-authored with Juli Zeh, 2009) or in the aforementioned «Kampfabsage», which is available in a new, extended edition.

All of these aspects are compiled in the philosophical- aphoristic essay «Nach der Flucht» released in 2017. In 99 paragraphs Ilija Trojanow lists the distressing scenes ac- companying migrants during and after the journey. And he gives an account in 99 paragraphs of the rescues associated with such journeys despite all the tragedies. For example, the alertness of the senses, cultural richness and the occasional liberating feeling of alienation. With an agile, dialectical pi- rouette, Ilija Trojanow succeeds in giving a positive account of the subject of escape – an experience that intensiﬁes one’s gaze and makes one acutely sensitive to listening. This change of fortunes culminates in a quotation that is typical for Ilija Trojanow’s work:

«The danger is not that we water down our culture, but that we cannot get enough of what is foreign.»

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

50 51

LAUDATIOSPEECHFORILIJATROJANOW

By Robert Renk

Esteemed Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Ilija,

This is how I would begin: Nuruddin Farah, Lola Shoneyin and Wole Soyinka in safe defence. In goal, of course, the wonderful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Mid-ﬁeld: Ngug˜ ˜ı wa Thiong’o, Teju Cole, Nadifa Mohamed and the unpredictable Akwaeke Emezi. As forwards – probably Chika Unigwe and Vamba Sherif and naturally Ishmael Beah.

A little travel game, ladies and gentlemen, that we play – far too infrequently – when we’re on a long journey. Ilija Trojanow and me. Putting together literary national teams.

And gratifyingly, we often agree, we would both e.g. immediately play Alois Hotschnig,this nimble,elegant and mischievous winger of Austrian literature. Or the magniﬁcent Edgar Hilsenrath for Germany who is still living and yet who is – for so many – forgotten. But I feel a great need to catch up not only with the forgotten, but also the unknowns. I know how great this is since I’ve known Ilija Trojanow. Previously, it would have been impossible for me to name even more than ﬁve writers who were born on this neighbouring continent with the most spoken languages – there are far more than 2,000!Try it out for yourself quickly: how big would your African team or your Indian team be?

The stakes in this little game are about nothing, naturally not about restricting fantastic literature within nations, but rather more about expanding horizons. Perhaps, too, just slightly to highlight what the South African commentator Trevor Noah did after the football world cup when he remarked with a glint in his eye: «Congratulations to Africa on the world cup win.» It was a joke with a measured dose of truth which, however, the French ambassador among others didn’t ﬁnd funny at all.

53 It’s idle to claim that I have become acquainted with most African writers through Ilija Trojanow, and indeed, in the literal sense of the word. And precisely where I was lucky enough to get to know him and his wonderful wife Susan: in the literary Black Forest metropolis of Hausach.

At that time, he was living in Cape Town and came to Hausach for a weekend. I said, now that’s also not the shortest journey – and he answered, you put up with it for a friendship. He was talking about the wonderful German- Andalusian poet, José Oliver, who was responsible for this festival and who would, as far as we two are concerned, certainly play both for the German as well as the Spanish team.

For over 10 years, Ilija Trojanow brought a little piece of the African world to the Black Forest. Unforgettable readings that every time in the overcrowded townhall in Hausach led to tangible African temperatures.

Trojanow not only spent his childhood in Africa, or more precisely, in Nairobi. Early on, probably too early, he tried to be an intermediary. He personally describes an anecdote from this time, which I quote:

In 1990, the world was undergoing a revolution, and I entered a bookstore in Duisburg and introduced myself as a young publisher. What kind of books do you publish then, asked the bookseller. Books from Africa, I proudly replied, African literature. Africa, repeated the bookseller, as though she were eyeing a presumably inedible morsel. No, thank you, we already have a book.

How easy it would be – ladies and gentlemen – to give a laudatio speech, if Ilija Trojanow only had one book. Claudio Magris once answered me – in response to the question what he found most difﬁcult about the writing process: the most difﬁcult thing is to make the leap from the research to text. Too little research would be libellous, but too much can bury the entire project. This happened to him once. When he spread out the entire collected material on an Australia novel in the attic (I still have this vivid memory of it), he was overwhelmed and at that very moment shelved the novel project that he had been working on for years. At the time, I didn’t quite understand this. As a matter of

54 fact, however, when months ago I spread out Trojanow’s complete works – in the absence of an attic – in the dining room on tables, chairs and crockery shelves, and gradually more speeches and new books were added, such as e.g. the recently published «Gebrauchsanweisung fürs Reisen» – that we will discuss a little later – and my Trojanow text universe expanded into the living room, over the sofa and TV set... – then I could understand exactly what Claudio Magris meant.

So, in recent months I was travelling. On the Trojanow continent. It’s at least as diverse as India. And – here the literary cat beautifully takes a bite out of the worldly tail – ultimately,I am familiar with the vividly coloured diversity of India from Ilija Trojanow’s books. Now I can admit it: it was one of the most thrilling, multifaceted and yet most coherent journeys of my life. And I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of the books, every one of them is worth the journey:

I sat with Alexandar and his hearty godfather Bai Dan on the tandem...

I was together with Richard Francis Burton, this anomaly, in India and Africa, and even more, I was allowed to see him in the mirror, not only from the viewpoint of his arrogant English friends, no, also through the eyes of his Indian servants or African leaders. This is one of the things, among others, that makes this novel «Der Weltensammler» («The Collector of Worlds») so extraordinary.

I went along the Ganges, completed the Hajj pilgrimage, travelled across Bulgaria both geographically and historically, went to glaciers in Tyrol that are melting away and travelled on a cruise ship to the Antarctic... And I did all that without leaving my two rooms.

In summary, I can say: the world is incomprehensible, but the saving grace lurks in the right book!

It’s ﬁtting that in his «Gebrauchsanweisung» the master even brings this form of travel close to us: he observes: «Even a single location can be the playground of a journey of discovery. For instance, a bookstore.»

55 Of course, I have to mention that well over a year ago Ilija Trojanow got locked overnight in the Wagner’sche bookstore in Innsbruck, where he travelled through shelves and worlds, as he describes in his «Gebrauchsanweisung». And I think with this kind of reference we can hardly be denied the prize for the «bookshop of the year 2019».

Our prizewinner is not only an exceptionally gifted traveller, but also a wonderfully alert spirit who doesn’t mince his words to point out dangers and injustices. Sometimes, something unforeseen can happen. For example, once he was refused entry to the US right at the time, and probably purely by chance, when the book «Angriff auf die Freiheit» – co- authored with Juli Zeh – was published about the expansions of the surveillance society.

Trojanow has therefore – albeit not entirely voluntarily – provided proof that literature can make a difference.

He – and in a few minutes, he will justifiably receive the Aus- trian Book Trade Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action – accepts, of course, that there are writers who think not everyone must play an active role in social and political discourse. For him personally – so it seems to me – writing purely for the sake of writing is not socially accepta- ble; the responsibility is to shake at the social and political injustices that belong together in an immanent sense in the act of public writing! Sometimes, he can be sharp-witted, but always with an assured sense of style, always stylish and above all never, by no means without having tackled the subject, which he criticizes, from all sides. Never, under no circumstances purely for the sake of being sharp-witted, because he is always basically focused on communication. He is not interested in a KampfANSAGE (invitation to fight) but – on the contrary, like in the book which he co-wrote together with the In- dian journalist and poet Ranjit Hoskoté – he is interested in a «KampfABSAGE» (cancellation of the fight)! Because cultures don’t contest each other. Rather, they flow into each other.

He would – I think – support those at any time who are justiﬁably outraged about conditions. However, he would

56 never agree to this all-inclusive outrage that is currently toxic throughout our society. I can quote a ﬁtting comment from the speech on the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade by Aleida and Jan Assmann:

«Be outraged!», 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel told us. His manifesto was a million-times bestseller. That was eight years ago. Meanwhile, outrage has changed sides (...). It is true that democracies are strengthened by controversy and debates, but not everything is up for discussion in them. (...) Not every opposing voice deserves respect. It loses this respect when its aim is to undermine the foundations for diversity of opinion. Democracy thrives not on controversy but rather on argument. (...) Karl Jaspers was among those who developed the vision of a new Europe after two catastrophic world wars. That involved for him (...) overcoming European arrogance towards other countries and cultures. (...) Accordingly, he declared: «The European arrogance is gone, the self-assurance which once called the history of the West the history of the world... » [Karl Jaspers, «The European Spirit»].

Jaspers was wrong for all his justifiable cause. It’s sufficient here to look at a drifting, red-haired would-be hairstyle of a figure with German roots who is the current leader of the US. However, in Ilija Trojanow he has certainly found an eloquent torchbearer who precisely observes the «last rebellion of the old white men».

Democracy thrives not on controversy but argument. How true! And if we read Trojanow’s essays and speeches we are gifted with abundant arguments! To stay focused on Jaspers and to help do justice to some words like tolerance, sympathy or the do-gooder, here is another quote from Jaspers: «Sympathy not in the sense of mild complaint, but of being in it oneself (Silber-darin-sein) is what makes a human person human.» How funny and scornful that any Austrian bishop, any charitable worker would concede that I (and Jaspers) are right, and almost every politician who wrote Christian in his membership book would like to contradict this almost out of reﬂex...

Being-in-it-oneself (Selber-darin-sein) includes – at least the contemplated – self-experiment. For instance, in his Solothurn speech Trojanow argumentatively showed us how compla- cently the literary canon is cultivated in Europe. As one of

57 several examples, he mentions a survey in «The Guardian», and I quote:

In2003, «The 100 greatest novels of all time» was published. Eight British writers rank among the top ten (and I mean British– no Americans). 41 of the top 50 novels were written in English, a single one in German, by Franz Kafka at Number 49. Obviously, there is a permanent Brexit in literary reception. The ﬁrst non-Western writer only emerges at Number 76, Gabriel García Márquez.

Here, Trojanow also recounts a self-experiment, namely, how difﬁcult he found it to insert a new title in a canon of 60 titles for students – and at the cost of a title that was already included!

We take far too little time for personal experiments, ladies and gentlemen. How many Indian writers can you already name?

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we – like our prizewinner – must all join Olympic summer individual disciplines for self-experiments. The very thought of having to run the original Marathon brings me to the brink of collapse, and I take my sports and ﬁtness hat off to Ilija Trojanow. He spent four years travelling the world, to train and write about it. Some things stopped at a single experiment, and other things he took with him.

Perspectives can fundamentally change during travel. Robert Menasse once mentioned in a speech that although he emigrated from Austria to Brazil, when he broke camp years later, he returned to Europe. A change of perspective with the announcement of years.

Young Ilija’s journey to the second ﬂoor of a school only lasted a few minutes. But it certainly changed a great deal!

I quote from «Nach der Flucht»:

«Class 1b», says the headmistress, «on the second ﬂoor». She points upstairs. A wide staircase. When they turn into the corridor, a door is slammed shut. The mother knocks on the door. «Come in!» A room full of children his age. He begins to feel ashamed. His mother talks: broken

58 language. He cannot do any better. «No, no», the teacher fends them off with both hands, «I already have four Turks in my class.» And shoos away mother and son. The stairs have more steps on the descent.

Can one imagine such perceptions of emotions? Do the stairs have more steps on the descent? What a simple, outrageous observation. Can one invent such a feeling? A biographical element could resonate in this. And if it should have been like this, or similar, then in this miniscule moment, in the moment of taking a step, which wasn’t there beforehand, which maybe was never there at all, yet which was a great step in our writer’s consciousness, here in the intermediate space everything was de facto decided. This young pupil was clear that he will learn this language and be good at it, like almost nobody else.

Ilija Trojanow once said on the subject of home: for him, home is where he has his books. What a wonderful sentence for a bookseller! It is ﬁne that he has now found his home in Vienna – especially for Vienna. And how wonderful for me and our game, because you can conﬁdently vote Trojanow into many teams – the Indian, African, German, Bulgarian and now also in the Austrian team... what are national borders anyway, when one holds such a cosmopolitan joker in one’s hand!

I am no longer holding things up now any more: Sincere congratulations to Ilija Trojanow on the prize and to the jury equally warm congratulations on the choice!

Laudatio speech at the award ceremony for Ilija Trojanow for theAustrian Book Trade Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action 2018 presented during the European Literature Days (Schloss Spitz, 25 November 2018)

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

3. TRENDS IN EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

POETIC MASTERWORKS WITH TANTALIZING RUSES

By Beat Mazenauer

Arno Camenisch and Dana Grigorcea are two leading voices for young Swiss literature. They both enjoy a good reception with the audience, and this is also because of their commu- nicative appeal. On the other hand, at a first glance they have few literary affinities in common. While Dana Grigor- cea grew up in Romania and only arrived in Zurich after her graduation in Brussels and elsewhere, Arno Camenisch is a Swiss national who spent his youth in a mountain valley in the Grisons. His home village, Tavanasa, is in a region where the boundaries are fluid between the Rhaeto-Romance dialect and German.

In his second novel «Behind the Station» (2014), Camenisch reminiscences about this creative hotchpotch of languages and the countless «Grüschs» (German: «Geräusche», or «noises») which the high-spirited young rascal listened to intensely. His book also realistically blends regional dialect and traces of Romansh in German by reproducing them onomatopoeically. So, we ﬁnd «Pietigott» (German: «Behüte Gott», or «God forbid!») and «orvuar» (Au revoir). This creates a lively narrative tone that also makes the past and carefree childhood days become audible.

Now, for a change of scene: a young woman travels with friends by car across Bucharest. Dana Grigorcea describes the scene in her latest, second novel «Das primäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit» (2015). The woman has returned from Switzerland to work here in her home town. Due to a setback, she suddenly has plenty of time to rediscover the city of her childhood. She encounters old songs and jokes; she remembers the childish light-heartedness and recounts cheerful anecdotes, yet below the surface they conceal a tangible, dark episode.

61 Dana Grigorcea and Arno Camenisch evidently confront a typical theme for young Swiss literature: the recovery of childhood experience. This theme forms a common bond between them; and they share a second, indirect connection. In their poetical works, they bridge a linguist-cultural divide that today still has a profound inﬂuence on their personal biographies. This is already expressed in their debut works with surprising effect.

In «Sez Ner» (2009), Camenisch develops a poetical simultaneous action by narrating a story in parallel in Romansh (on the left-hand pages) and in German (on the right-hand pages). The same story is told twice, yet the two versions are differentiated – and what is more, they accompany and complement each other. The story is narrated in short bursts of prose that describe four Alpine herdsmen who live and work for a summer on Alp Stavonas at the foot of Mount Piz Sez Ner. It is beautiful in the mountains, but also steep and perilous, as Camenisch evokes Alpine self-consciousness, which essentially has long been superseded by modern ways of living. Poetically and with refreshing irony, he averts the old myths of mountain life.

Mythical references also play a key role in Dana Grigorcea’s debut novel «Baba Rada» (2011). Set in the Romanian Danube delta, an impoverished, marginal region, Baba Rada yearns for the happiness of her albino daughter with a concoction of schnapps and magic. But a mysterious terrorist causes confusion.

The novel is difficult to grasp because it is constantly transforming. The «magnificent barbarianism» is presented as a wild mix of fables, rumours and coarseness that only meets with happiness by hearsay. A fine mist lays over everything, casting things in twilight and they only gain some definition thanks to the lively language. Grigorcea’s burlesque storytelling emerges from the Danube delta like Baba Rada’s belches, «when I have drunk this Russian, alcoholic shampoo.»

«Sez Ner» like «Baba Rada» are genuine masterworks with ruses aplenty, and they demonstrate the poetic exuberance of both writers. Dana Grigorcea and Arno Camenisch have

62 risked something, by capturing on the one hand the myths of their homelands and, on the other, the linguistic-cultural differences with delightful poise and originality.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

Arno Camenisch: The Alp. Translated by Donald McLaughlin, Dalkey Archive Press 2014. Arno Camenisch: Behind the Station. Translated by Donald McLaughlin, Dalkey Archive Press 2014. Dana Grigorcea: Baba Rada. Das Leben ist vergänglich wie die Kopfhaare. Zürich: KaMeRu Verlag, 2011. Dana Grigorcea: Das primäre Gefühl der Schuldlosigkeit. Dörlemann, Zürich 2015.

***

FAMOUS AND UNKNOWN

By Katja Petrovic

Leïla Slimani, Nathacha Appanah, Atiq Rahimi... they have all come from the Francophone world and are leading writers in France. In their native countries, however, they are not yet as well known, since often their work has not even been published here. The difﬁcult relationship between France and its former colonies is also reﬂected in the publishing sector.

It was a politically strong sign that in Frankfurt last autumn not only France, but also the Francophone context, that is, the entire French-speaking world was represented as the guest country at the Book Fair. Among 400 invited writers were also many from the former French colonies in Africa and the Maghreb. The French-Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou made sure as a literary consultant that there was a wide range of Francophone bestselling writers – and they were deservedly in the spotlight. Yet, many writers still face the challenges of ﬁnding their audience back in their homelands.

The reasons relate to the tricky and frequently contradictory French colonial history. On the one hand, France invests plenty of money and energy in promoting the book market in the former colonies. On the other hand, many French publishers don’t take their Francophone colleagues seriously. «We are

63 second-class publishers for them,» comments Laila Chaouni, who has managed her publishing company Le Fennec in Ca- sablanca for the past 30 years. «Without their help, I certainly wouldn’t have become a publisher, but they never trusted me whenever I suggested French-speaking writers from Morocco. They prefer to discover them independently because they believe they could do this better from Paris.»

Another factor is that, despite all the progress, the publishing world in the former colonies still cannot keep pace with things in Europe. Often, there is a lack of a consistent book marketing policy both for sales and particularly in bookstores. On the Ivory Coast, there are only about 40 bookshops serving a population of 26 million. The publishers sell their books at book fairs or simply on the street. The book editions are small, generally around 300 to 500 copies, while a book is priced at an equivalent of between three and up to a maximum of ten euros.

Many French publishers, particularly the major ones, are simply not interested in these conditions. Instead of selling licensing rights to a Francophone publishing house, they prefer to offer their books direct to the market, and of course at French prices. For instance, this was the case for the Franco-Moroccan Goncourt prize winner Leïla Slimani. Her novel «Chanson Douce»/«The Perfect Nanny» about the two-tier class society in France, which tells the story of a murderous children’s nanny in Paris, became an international bestseller. However, back in Slimani’s home country Morocco hardly anyone has heard of this book. Instead of offering the novel to a Moroccan publisher, which perhaps would have marketed it as a reasonably priced paperback and sold 20,000 copies, Gallimard preferred to sell 7,000 in-house copies for 22 euros! The price was absurd for local readers. «22 euros, that amounts to 10% of the average salary in Morocco. So, Slimani will only be read by a minority in our country,» complains Laila Chaouni. «We must explain to the Paris publishing houses that they are not losing market share, if they sell their writers to us. Instead, thanks to our knowledge of the market, they also have the opportunity to introduce them outside France and to a wide readership.»

64 Nevertheless, it would be too simple to speak of a colonial Franceafrique relationship. Often, the Francophone writers are the ones who prefer to be published in France because they have better publications and professional marketing there. Most writers are often unaware of the publishers in their homeland and they are dreaming – because they write in French – of having their books published by Gallimard, Le Seuil or Grasset.

Yet, one thing doesn’t rule out the other! Many writers are not aware that in their contract with a French publisher, they can secure the rights for their home country. For instance, as Leïla Slimani did for her new bestseller «Sexe et mensonges: La Vie sexuelle au Maroc». This is how Laila Chaouni’s publishing company can at least circulate this important and honest book for people in her country about sexuality in Morocco. «I would never have achieved that without Slimani’s commitment; it is important for us to heighten writers’ awareness about these legal questions.»

There is still a great deal of educational work to do, so that Francophone writers not only have a voice in France and Frankfurt but also in their home countries. Education and tolerance on both sides.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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FLASHLIGHTSONEUROPE

By Beat Mazenauer

No No-Billag!

In Switzerland, a battle is raging about information and the media. Swiss national-conservative and neo-liberal circles have launched a campaign to abolish public broadcasting licence fees. On 6 March,the Swiss population will go to vote in a referendum. The TV and radio licence fees – popularly known as the «Billag» – are going to cost 365 Swiss francs to guarantee continuity of TV and radio provision in the four Swiss national language areas. The provision of these

65 services is expensive, but political and cultural information is a priority for public discourse and democracy. The aim of the campaign is clear: public service should be dismantled and privatized. In the eyes of the campaigners, the media are infiltrated anyway by a left-wing agenda. So, reactionary right-wing activists long to establish an information service and democracy as they think best. Just look at the US to see how that works. In bowing to the pressure of arguments, the campaign supporters appear flexible,yet this changes nothing about the fact that accepting the proposal for «no ‘Billag’ licence fees» could revolutionize the entire information system. Currently, the opinion polls suggest that this is unlikely, but it’s still important to offer some opposition. That’s even more important because now a second conflict looms. The national press agency (the Swiss Telegraphic Agency, SDA) is also supposed to be made more efficient or liberalized. The new director (and former accountant) is starting by setting a good example: his salary is rumoured to be 450,000 Swiss francs. The press agency circulates news in four languages – it’s audited and politically neutral. The sad thing about this is that the SDA is owned by the media, but mainly big organizations like Tages-Anzeiger or NZZ have secured such generous (discounted) rates that it is running at a loss. It’s almost tragic to see how the print media is cutting back the branch that it sits on. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to care about news and information. The profits from the newspapers were used a long time ago to found free newspapers and advertising platforms that conventional newspapers are sacrificed for, if necessary. Who wants to take them seriously anymore? Both developments are a genuine threat for democratic discourse and particularly for culture. If public broadcasting and the press agency want to earn profits, there is no longer any space for broad-based cultural reporting in the official media. At least, the SDA has already taken the precautionary step of abolishing the cultural editorial office.While this is tragic, it’s based on clear logic: death to the hovels, peace to the palaces! History tells us what to expect as the aftermath.

66 ˚

Think Pig! – Robert Menasse’s «Die Hauptstadt»

A pig is on the loose, deep in the heart of Brussels! It makes headline news in the free newspaper Metro and the police are helpless – or disinterested. One pig more or less – what’s all the fuss about? The city has enough building sites. In his novel «Die Hauptstadt», Robert Menasse shows us the EU metropolis as a vibrant city where an anarchic temperament meets bureaucratic sophistication. From the outset, in various locations the pig encounters the six protagonists with whom Menasse unfolds and connects the strands of his narrative. One of the characters, the ambitious Greek woman Fenia Xenopoulou has been assigned a position in culture in the EU’s corridors of power – and no ﬂower pots are rewards here. To transfer as quickly as possible to a more important role, she has to try and engineer some excitement. For example, with a glorious jubilee project to celebrate the European Commission’s 50th anniversary. She gives the task to her colleague, Martin Susman. Under the slogan «Auschwitz – Never Again», which was the post-1945 spirit of rebuilding Europe, he plans a large-scale ceremonial event.

Robert Menasse knows his way around Brussels. In his 2012 essay «Der europäische Landbote» («The European Courier»), he already concentrated in detail on the EU. In this novel, he succeeds brilliantly in mocking bureaucratic processes in Brussels, while at the same time making a passionate plea for a united Europe. He relates eloquently, humorously and intelligently how Susman’s idea gets caught up in bureaucratic wrangling. Like a metaphorical signal (or rather like a conspiratorial omen?) the confused pig repeatedly criss- crosses the paths of the main characters. Including a retired professor, who with the bravado of desperation compiles a draft plan for the utopia of a new Europe, which involves establishing an ideal joint capital in Auschwitz. Menasse manages to connect discourse and high drama, tragedy and satire. It is easy to see why this brilliant novel was awarded the German Book Prize.

The connection also proves to be a godsend for the stage. Zurich’s Neumarkt theatre has adapted «Die Hauptstadt» for

67 dramatic art – and with resounding success. The NZZ gives a glowing review of the production: «What a small theatre has achieved here as dramatic art cannot be quantiﬁed in conventional economic terms.» Apparently, after the stage premiere the author was personally touched by the adaptation.

Robert Menasse: Die Hauptstadt. Novel. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2017.

Ronald Giphart and Asibot

Some of us have already made our acquaintance with Siri and Alexa – the two helpful personal assistants from Apple and Amazon. Dialogue with these partners is restricted to rather simplistic things. But chatbot-assistants are the technology of the future. We’re reminded of this at the latest by the small ads circulating in Silicon Valley with a call for authors. Suddenly, literature is also relevant in the ﬁeld of automated communication: as a stimulator and coach for chatbot-messaging assistants that are searching for a speciﬁc character.

A recent project in The Netherlands shows what this type of coaching could look like in practice. In November 2017, as part of the now traditional campaign «Nederland leest», the popular writer Ronald Giphart and the algorithm-based Asibot got together as a writer team that was to add a new chapter to Isaac Asimov’s legendary short stories «The Robots». The book featuring the new story «De robot van de machine is de mens» («The robot of the machine is a human») was distributed to libraries countrywide.

The Asibot received scores of literary works to read, so he could improve on linguistic competence and personal development. He was then allocated a coach for the subsequent writing assignment – the writer, Ronald Giphart. He kept an eye on the ﬁngers and intervened whenever the writing falte- red. The result is interesting and worth reading. This project poses a series of questions, for instance, about creativity and authenticity: «What is the role of the human author and how can artiﬁcial intelligence be used as a writing tool?», as

68 Folgert Karsdorp, the joint project coordinator at Amsterdam’s Meertens Institute describes it.

The early answers seem reassuring. Even if Asibot was personally active, Ronald Giphart’s skill as a writer was repeatedly called on to contribute sections to develop the plot. The main reason for this, according to the developer Karsdorp, was because Asibot has a short memory and soon forgets the text’s thematic focus. An artiﬁcial author therefore still cannot handle a complex text. But what about ﬂirtatious dialogue for the linguistic operation of a shower? This area is more likely to produce successes, if the chatbots have good coaches on their side.

This year’s Solothurn Literature Festival is set to explore these kinds of questions in the productive area of literature and interaction design.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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CREATIVECRITICISM:INTERVIEWWITHSOPHIERABAU

By Léa Cassagnau

Sophie Rabau is an instructor and researcher at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris 3). In her work, she endeavours to apply critical invention, or creative criticism.

To begin with, what is creative criticism?

It’s a term I use to designate a cluster of critical attitudes from different contexts. In France we also have the theory of possible texts and detective criticism; the English-speaking world has invented the term wreading, a portmanteau of writing and reading. Anna Gibbs proposes ﬁctocriticism. Thus there are a number of ways of reading that I group under this term, but it’s that’s just my personal view. Occasionally I prefer to use a term such as rhetorical culture or theoretical invention.

What all of these designations have in common is that the reader experiences a potential writing; the reader takes on a

69 posture of writing. That does not mean the reader necessarily begins to write, but she reads by putting herself in the place of the author; that is, by being a potential writer herself as she reads. We might also say there is a kind of writing in which you don’t stop being a reader – I don’t, in any case, when I propose variations on a text.

Why creative criticism? Does it have a political or a militant aspect?

Not originally, no. On the contrary; I came to this point via the lectures of Michel Charles and his theory of possible texts. Charles himself was a follower of post-structuralism, of theorists and poeticists who took a rather non-engagé, textualist position – although Barthes had his periods of engagement. In any case, that position was not stated as something that could be political at all; it was more playful; non-serious if you will. Nonetheless, that way of reading required that we adopt a critical position of rejecting authority: the authority of the text and of a reading to be validated by the context. As a result, we challenged the workings of the discipline, the institution and the hierarchy. Others, such as Anna Gibbs for example, take a militant, feminist position, saying, «I am going to intervene in the text as a feminist.» For my part, I realized at a third stage that, yes, it was political, because it raised the issue of domination: the academic practice of reading, in commentary in particular, was always undertaken in the name of a globalizing reading of alleged majoritarian phenomena in the text. Commentaries of this type take no notice of a reader who might read the text from a minority or local pint of view. Furthermore, it goes without saying that there is a political gain to be made within the institution by questioning the possibility of ‘validating’ a reading, or the idea that there is a correct reading.

Does that mean reading can be a model of political action?

Yes, theoretically. That is one of the things I am thinking about: does this way of reading allow us to think of actions in which we would be more effective? This thinking takes place in a context in which, in France at least, those who disagree with the government’s policies often ﬁnd themselves

70 in a situation of powerlessness. To me, then, this experience of reading is really an experience of empowerment in which I take back the text to ﬁght against authority, and especially against what they tell me is necessary and invariable. So to what extent can we transpose that to make a different model: that’s what I am thinking about at present. In any case, that’s where I feel there are battles I can ﬁght.

On that point, could you mention a few creative reading experiments you have done?

A ﬁrst example: in 2009, we went to give a public reading of The Princesse de Clèves in front of the Panthéon after Nicolas Sarkozy’s remarks [on the uselessness of studying The Princesse de Clèves – ed.]. Which didn’t help, I think, because we hadn’t questioned our mode of reading: we were only reproducing a submission; in a way, we were demonstrating our submission. And besides, it was completely ineffectual.

On the occasion of the demonstration against gay marriage, on the other hand, I wrote articles in which I took up some texts that are considered canonical among Catholics, particularly Catholic fundamentalists, and I postulated a homosexual reader of these texts. I pretended he was the one reading these texts. In this way I showed that the Catholics did not own these texts, and that they were powerless, because a gay person for example could read them differently. In other words, I dissolved their canon. I’ve done a bit of that with the Bible and the Quran, too... (1)

More recently, I used theatrical means to show that there is never just one ending to a story. There are always several simultaneous possibilities: the spatial nature of theatre allows us to visualize that. The goal was to refute the argument of necessity, especially in politics, to refute statements of the kind ‘this is necessary; we cannot do otherwise’, which are problematic. My contribution was to say: «Let us learn to read differently; necessity is never more than an impression produced by a certain mode of reading, but there are others. And if we learn to read differently, we may reach a different conclusion.»

71 Further reading: or an overview of interventionist or creative criticism (call it whatever you like!), see: Marc Escola (ed.), Théorie des textes possibles (Cahiers de recherche des instituts néerlandais de langue et de littérature française [C.R.I.N.] vol. 57), Amsterdam and New York 2012: Rodopi.

The two links below are to lists of theoretical and critical works, with further links to many excerpts: http://www.fabula.org/atelier.php?Textes_possibles https://bit.ly/2Uji09S

(1) «Verily, the Scriptures point the way to healthy, ﬂourishing same-sex parenting, and the Gospel encourages the use of surrogate mothers»: see the articles in the «Sabotage littéraire» series in the review «Vacarme»: http://www.vacarme.org/article2800.html.

Translated by Marcel Saché

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LITERALLY SWISS

A Literary Cabaret

By West Camel

Deborah Levy, a leading light of British literary culture, takes to the stage at London’s Tabernacle and declares that she has never visited Switzerland.

Slightly nervous laughter erupts from the audience. This is the ofﬁcial launch of Literally Swiss – a project designed to promote Swiss literature in the UK, and to showcase Swiss writers and British writers with Swiss links. Is Levy going dangerously off script? Rosie Goldsmith, leading the project for its supporters – Pro Helvetia and the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK – and our host for the evening, is unfazed, however. Levy’s writing ranges wide – across many cultures and landscapes – and she is here to read from her work inspired by the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Levy wants to learn about Swiss literature – she is here to represent those of us who are the target of the Literally Swiss efforts, which aim to introduce English-speaking audiences to the wealth of Swiss

72 literary culture, in all its languages. Levy, in characteristic style, expresses her position with a metaphor: «I want to swim in your Swiss lakes», she declares.

In fact it strikes me that experiencing Swiss literature in a physical way is an unconscious theme of the evening. It opens with British author Alain de Botton – who was born and grew up in Switzerland – discussing his trips to and from the UK, where he went to school. Now based in England, and writing extensively about architecture, among other topics, he tells us that his current home, down to its furniture and ﬁttings, could have built by a Swiss architect in Zurich.

Another non-Swiss writer,Xiaolu Guo,who is a guest professor at the University of Bern, and has taken up writer residencies in Zurich, also discusses her experiences of the country in physical terms. Her reading is a hilarious account of her visit to Maienfeld – the area that inspired Johanna Spyri to write «Heidi». High up on the alp, Chinese-born Guo experiences the awe and wonder the green of the swath and the blue of the sky inspire in any visitor. Then she turns to see a group of ﬂip-ﬂop-shod Chinese tourists disembarking from their coach for the eight minutes allocated for Heidi photographs, before, she feels sure, they descend back into the valley to eat noodles in the only Chinese restaurant in the region.

The Swiss writers appearing at the event also discuss their home country in terms of the physical. German-speaking, prize-winning novelist Monique Schwitter is a resident of Hamburg, yet she intimates that her aim is to return home to Switzerland. The north-German city is just too ﬂat for her; the quality of the walking just isn’t the same. Is there a sense here that being at home involves something strenuous but necessary?

Walking takes on a similar symbolism for Peter Stamm. His latest novel, «To the Back of Beyond», sees a man walk out of his family home on a whim, perhaps never to return. What could be the reason? A possible explanation is the quote Stamm relates to us from the great Swiss author Robert Walser – which is greeted by giggles of recognition by many in the audience, including my Swiss friends: a Swiss man takes his heart out of his chest, examines it, then puts it

73 back inside and goes on his way. «Er nahm sein Herz heraus, schaute es an, verschloss es wieder und wanderte dann weiter.»

Where the heart lies is an issue for another of the night’s Swiss writers: Nicolas Verdan. Of Swiss and Greek parentage, he writes in French, but he tells us that to the French literary establishment his status as a Swiss writer means he is something other. The variety of these national pulls seem to me to say something about the Swiss experience.

The ﬁnal author of the evening emphasises the physical theme without really mentioning it. Not only is Pedro Lenz, who writes in the Bern dialect of Swiss German, a man of large stature, his performance is corporeal, almost visceral. In English translation his work is often rendered in the Glasgow Scots dialect – which is at the kind of distance from Standard English that Bern German is from Swiss German. After a short reading in the Glaswegian (ably performed by the Brit Max Easterman), Lenz takes to the microphone. Not a German-speaker myself, and certainly not a Bern dialect one, I understand not a word. Thus witnessing Lenz’s huge voice, his rapid, rhythmic phrasing, his massive presence and the gales of laughter from those around me who do understand what he is saying is a purely physical experience – and one I enjoy enormously.

It is, to adopt Deborah Levy’s metaphor, like swimming in one of Switzerland’s glacial lakes: literally breath-taking, Literally Swiss. And a perfect end to an event that is an object lesson in how to present the generally passive and cerebral activity of reading in an active, physical and engaging way.

Literally Swiss – A Literary Cabaret took place on 9 February 2018 at The Tabernacle in London, with an all-star literary evening of readings, conversation, music food and wine, featuring Alain de Botton, Monique Schwitter, Peter Stamm, Deborah Levy, Pedro Lenz, Xiaolu Guo and Nicolas Verdan (www.eurolitnetwork.com/literally-swiss-2).

74 4. EUROPE

ANTI-EUROPEANZONE

Strictly controlled identities in Serbia

By Saša Ili´c

In the acclaimed ﬁlm «Stalker» (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky, the director uses a a metaphor of a mystical Zone to which one travels in order to face the unknown, namely to meet one’s own deepest desires which are often hidden from oneself. Even when a person goes there with the intent to save the life of his closest family member, what they perceive as their deepest desire, the Zone can «sense» what they actually desire, thus confronting them with the truth about themselves. One of Tarkovsky’s travellers is the Writer, who sets off on a journey through the deserted and dangerous landscape of the Zone only to realise, at the very entrance to the room of desires, that he is afraid of facing the truth about himself. One could say that the same journey was chosen by the Goverrment of the Republic of Serbia, as it imagines the European Union as a «room of desires» that will make all Serbia’s dreams and wishes come true. However, navigating the Zone is not an easy task. The journey implies transformation and changes, without which the wishes cannot be realised, therefore the outcome is often the one we haven’t expected – instead of getting what we declared we need, we get the very thing we didn’t dare to express, but which was actually our deepest wish.

The cultural policies which have been in place in Serbia in the last decade, under the slogan of «alignment with the European standards», resemble anything but the European framework of values, standards and aims towards which

75 Serbia allegedly strives. Vladan Vukosavljević, the Minister of Culture, took upon himself the task of «tidying up the sphere of culture» by turning it into a space of conservative and discriminatory ideas. Literature was the first field to be dealt with, having been already in the past similarly damaged by the work of the Ministry of Culture. Namely, Vukosavljević and his team came up with the «Cultural Development Strategy 2017–2027». He intended to deliver it to the EU, but effectively in his briefcase – resembling those well-hidden desires from Tarkovsky’s «Stalker» – one could only find an ethno-nationalistic concept of culture, easily discerned in the bigger part of thisCultural Manifesto.

The greatest problem with Minister Vukosavljević’s «Strat- egy», apart from its very badly concieved aims and budget, is its actual abandonment of culture in the name of only one of its ideological offsprings. This ideological offspring is the result of the cultural policies shaped by the nationalistic agenda, which dominated the Serbian political life in the 1990s. Even though it formally advocates European integrations, primarily via its dependence on the EU funds, the Strategy defines culture as the bastion for defending Serbian identity, identity that «comprises language and literature, the awareness about its history and religious affiliation, customs, way of life, authentic forms of spiritual and historical knowledge, dominant mentality models, and the overall image that the nation holds of itself.» This ideological blend further generates the obligations for the contemporary culture in Serbia, which needs to be put in service of preservation and cultivation of the Serbian language and alphabet (favouring the Cyrillic script, at the expense of the Latin script which is uniquelly used in paralel with the Cyrlillic script in Serbia), as well as «to disseminate scientifically established findings on the genocide committed against the Serbian people in the 20th Century».

This strategy of cultural development aims to remove the Latin script as equal to the Cyrillic and pushes for its discrimination. This will be regulated by a set of laws once the Strategy is passed in the Serbian Parlament. Hence the Minister of Culture openly offers ﬁnancial support to publishing houses who print their books in the Cyrillic, as well as openly promoting media outlets which offer their

76 newpapers in the Cyrillic. This leads to the discrimination of literature printed in the Latin script, which has so far always been available in Serbia. The goal of such cultural policy is the complete obliteration of the Latin script from the public domain, which will include the removal of all public signs of the names of streets, squares and cities, traditionally written in both scripts. This will be also applied to the names of various institutions, associations and organisations. This set of discriminatory laws may reﬂect on the publishing industry, which will resort to printing books solely in the Cyrillic, out of fear of losing the Government subsidies. At the same time, this will be the ﬁnal blow to the Yugoslav heritage which up until now survivied in the public domain in Serbia. Furthermore, this constitues an attack on many ethnic minorities which articulate their cultural production using the Latin script and in a slightly different cultural code.

The shift to the exclusive use of the Cyrillic scipt would mark the beginning of the control of the publishing industry by the state, which could in the next instance lead to strict monitoring of literary narratives, which is the aim of the serving Minister of culture, given that he would like to reduce Serbian cultural identity to the Cyrillic script and the investigation of the genocide against Serbs in the 20th Century. Also, Minister Vukosavljevićhimself takes part in the launches of the books he deemes of exceptional literary value. Recently, he spoke at the launch of a book by Božidar Zejak, the director of the Museum of Pedagogy in Belgrade. The Minister took the opportunity to emphasize that the Zejak’s main character (Zejak being so far a completely unknown author, but as the head of an important national institution directly subordinated to Minister Vukosavljević) «stems from the inspiration and the robust awareness of national identity that is firmly embeded in the mother tongue, which makes me greatly value this literary character.» Minister added that the book was written in «solid, juicy, well controlled and balanced Serbian language which is not so common nowadays.» Surely this statement is neither true nor accurate, because there is a range of authors whose use of Serbian language is very creative, as well as their treatment of the contemporary themes which arise from the very real problems that a society in transition, stuck on its way to the EU, faces today.

77 Finally, the criticism aimed at these cultural policies, raised by several independent media institutions – such as Pešˇcanik.net, Autonomija.info, N1info.com, Vreme.com – is being qualiﬁed by the Minister of Culture as coming from the representatives of dangerous acullturation processes and those who deny Serbian cultural identity, as conceived by the new Cultural Development Strategy, now being presented to Serbian MPs as the ultimate expression of the Serbian regime’s «European cultural awareness».

Translated by Svetlana Rakocevic

78 5. BOOK TIPS

ZSÓFIABÁN:NIGHTSCHOOL

By Mark Baczoni

Zsófia Bán’s first prose work, «Night School», is being translated by Jim Tucker for upcoming publication in the US. It’s rather an unusual work, defined by its dark humour and subversive blurring of the boundaries between knowledge and fiction.

«Night School» is a ﬁctional primary-school textbook, complete with images in the margins that the reader is invited to cut out and paste onto the back of the dust jacket, where appropriate spaces have been drawn for them. There are little tasks in text boxes at the end of each chapter, just like in a school textbook, and the narrative itself starts off in the tone one would expect from a Hungarian school textbook... and then comes the twist. The tone shifts and wanders from simple pre-school subjects to the darkest and most weighty adult concerns, bringing in history, identity, sexuality, and relationships. The movement is effortless, almost imperceptible, bearing you along in the inexorable current of the narration.

Bán started off as (and continues to be) an academic. She has taught at ELTE University in Budapest since the late 1980s; this is her first foray into fiction. It is no accident that she chose this slightly unusual form, which is a reflection of the crisis of doubt of someone who has spent most of their adult life teaching and eventually finds themselves wondering: what for? What is all this good for, and how much of it is getting through? The book questions the way we pass on knowledge. Is the knowledge you get in school really useful knowledge that will help you make your way through life? Or is it just knowledge you’re expected to know, because it’s easy to test – a simple measure of learning?

In a way, the author is teasing us, and cocking a snook at the school system that greeted her as a 12 year-old returning from an American school in Brazil to Communist Hungary

79 (where her parents had been posted and where she had grown up) that was both closed and ideologically committed. The thinking, then, was limited, and the knowledge in the textbooks steeped in ideology. In this book, that school system has met its match – subversive and funny, by turns dark and sometimes a little shocking, it invites us to question as adults what we took for granted as children.

And it couldn’t be more timely – because in this part of the world, it seems that cultural wars in education are once more raging.

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ULLILUST:HOWITRIEDTOBEAGOODPERSON

By Christian Gasser

Ulli Lust,in her mid-twenties,an aspiring artist in Vienna, is in love with two men: Georg, the 20-year-old actor, with whom things have ﬁzzled out in bed; and Kimata, the Nigerian refugee, with whom she ﬂirts at a party and falls into a madly passionate affair.

In «How I Tried to Be a Good Person», the Austrian comic book author, Ulli Lust, unveils another chapter from her youth: the story of an explosive ménage-à-trois and the loss of countless illusions.

Then, there is a third man in the background – her son, Philipp, age ﬁve, who is raised by his grandparents in the country and whom she visits so infrequently that he hardly recognizes her as his mother... This web of relationships has immense potential. Ulli Lust’s direct, sketchy drawings, which defy virtuosity, unravel a sense of urgency and power that the reader can scarcely avoid.

Ulli Lust caused a furore with «Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life» about her self-destructive trip to Italy as a teenager. The book was translated into 13 languages and won numerous awards. Now,the native Austrian who lives in Berlin, has unveiled another chapter from her youth. In «How I Tried to Be a Good Person», she processes an explosive

80 ménage-à-trois in early 1990s Vienna that culminates in an attempted murder.

Casting taboos and consideration aside, she probes deep into one of the darkest abysses and links her experiences to grand themes: love and sex transcending age- and cultural boundaries, women’s sexual self-determination, alternative models for families and relationships,ethnic prejudices, policies on refugees and the dream of a different society. That is convincing because Ulli Lust neither paints herself as a victim nor a perpetrator, but as a young woman who is at times immensely naive, egotistical and sexually demanding and overwhelmed by the situation and her roles as partner, lover and mother.

Lust deserves plenty of credit for daring to address cultural prejudices and for embracing the ambivalences and stereotypes in her perception and her behaviour towards Kimata, instead of paring these back to be politically correct.

Her African lover endures her independence less and less and his jealously and demands lead to violent episodes that plunge her into fear and shock – nevertheless, she repeatedly lets him back into her bed. Paradoxically, precisely the repeated and lengthy staging of their sexual ecstasies undermines the intensity and complexity of «How I Tried to Be a Good Person». In comparison to the rest of the story, they become curiously stereotypical.

Lust’s attempt at being «good» in the middle of this confused situation must be seen as a failure. At the end of the book, she doesn’t stand before us as a good person, but she is free and has regained her self-determination. The quality of these autobiographical memoirs is the openness with which Ulli Lust reﬂects on her failures and her complicity in them with great clarity and artistry.

Ulli Lust: Wie ich versuchte, ein guter Mensch zu sein. (How I Tried to Be a Good Person) Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 2017.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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81 EDWARD ST AUBYN’S KING LEAR-ADAPTATION «DUNBAR»

By Rainer Moritz

In 2016 and to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, the Hogarth Shakespeare Project was launched. Eight renowned writers (male and female) were invited to adapt Shakespeare’s time-honoured plays and translate them into a contemporary setting. In Germany, Munich’s Knaus Verlag accomplished this project and has already presented several of these versions – with varying success – including by Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler or Howard Jacobson.

Edward St Aubyn (born 1960) accepted the challenge of working with Shakespeare’s «King Lear» and this could not have been a better idea. St Aubyn, whose ancestors hail from established British aristocracy, has proved a past master – in his ﬁve «Melrose» novels – of tracing complicated, intriguing and humbling family circumstances. He is in the best company with the story of Lear which he translates into the contemporary world of English commerce and media.

Henry Dunbar, an eighty-year-old Canadian media CEO who is not only vaguely reminiscent of the figure of Rupert Murdoch, is St Aubyn’s broken hero. Like Lear, he has three daughters who show very different levels of moral integrity. And just like in Shakespeare’s tale, the powerful figure proves mistaken about his offspring – incidentally, in German- speaking countries this motif is familiar from the Grimms’ fairy tale of «Die Salzprinzessin» (based on the original «Princess Mouseskin»). The two older daughters Abigail and Megan believe their time has come to seize control of their father’s empire. They develop a scheme and evil intrigue to coincide with a decisive meeting of the executive board: a loyal aide and friend of their father, Wilson, is sacked, and a manipulated psychiatrist proves willing to declare Dunbar non-«compos mentis». The old man, who is mad with rage, is transported from the metropolis to a sanatorium in the Lake District from where he is no longer able to influence the destiny of his media empire. His kind-hearted and once disinherited daughter Florence refuses to accept this, although

82 in the beginning she doesn’t seem able to gain access to her unfailingly beloved rather.

Edward St Aubyn in his own sharp and brilliant style presents a lively social novel full of twists and turns that makes a family hive of intrigue into the starting point for a clever analysis of commercial life. The novel stays close to the plot (and sometimes even the dialogues) of «King Lear». It unfolds a concentrated and tense plot-line and reveals an aging media mogul who has no intention of being pushed to the sidelines. With the help of a fellow patient at the sanatorium, Peter Walker, an alcoholic-comedian who can only think from one bottle of whisky to the next, Dunbar manages to escape from the institution – and one of the evil daughter’s overlooked Swiss credit cards proves invaluable in his escape.

Despite all the physical frailties, he makes it to the wild Cumbrian moors and proves how tough he is. He hides in a copse from irate pursuers who even enlist the help of a helicopter pilot to catch the escapee and put him out of action. The question is which of the three sisters will be the ﬁrst to reach their father.

The other question concerns more existential matters such as how Dunbar, who is left to his own devices and must battle with nature, now looks back on his life and his shortcomings. St Aubyn brilliantly succeeds in sketching hilarious scenes and soon afterwards plunging his stricken protagonist into a deep crisis. The retrospective of his life is no game, no wheeling and dealing over power, and thanks to the clear- sighted Florence, he is offered one last chance. Although it is impossible to undo the past, he can embrace a different perspective towards his life experience.

King Lear has found a worthy literary successor in Henry Dunbar.

Edward St Aubyn: Dunbar. Novel. Hogarth, 2017.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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83 MARION MESSINA. FAUX DÉPART

By Léa Cassagnau Coming-of-age stories seem to be enjoying a revival. Today, however, education means studying at a university, writing CVs and motivation letters, jobbing under fixed-term contracts and, for those who are lucky enough, working under a permanent contract. Intrinsically, this kind of education isn’t meant to lead to the fulfilment of any young person. Aurélie, the main character of Marion Messina’s debut novel, is studying but her goal is not to learn or even «dislearn», i.e. adapt her perception of the world to reality — She just studies for the sake of it. Born into a working-class family in Grenoble, she was good at school and dreamt of getting ahead in life but soon became disenchanted. Confronted with the mediocrity of her teachers and the stupidity of her fellow students, forced to do gruelling jobs in order to survive, Aurélie progressively retreats into her shell and loses her motivation to study. Without a regular income and conscious that her ambition to climb the social ladder is impracticable, she realises that studying means barely accumulating skills and that culture will definitely remain out of reach, a luxury she can’t afford. Under such conditions, she wastes the best years of her life, «the golden age of the average Westerner», between 18 and 25. «As Aurélie set foot on platform C at Gare de Lyon, she didn’t dare challenge Paris.» This sentence expresses an attitude at the antipodes of that chosen by such characters of coming-of-age stories as Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. As a consequence, the improvement of Aurélie’s social status is barely of a geographic nature: she used to be a cleaning agent in Grenoble and becomes a desk hostess in Paris. And what about her love life? Nothing to write home about, either, as she only experiences «new age» relationships «without commitment» that «mirror the logic of mobile phone special offers». She has lovers, of course (a student who delivers pizzas in the evening, a desperate executive in his forties and Alejandro, a Columbian who dreams of being the new García Márquez and ends up as a Spanish teacher), but she never encounters real love. «I fuck, therefore I am,» she states.

84 Literary critics have already compared Marion Messina’s hyper-realistic style to that of Michel Houellebecq. Quite purposefully, as she also describes the social, sexual and relational misery of a generation that was never confronted with war, lives at the «level zero of suffering» and is con- demned to remain on «side B of life». Although she tends towards generalisation, Messina shows humour and lucidity as she describes the setbacks of young people who are «both submissive and professional», must be resourceful and pragmatic and experience work environments as a succession of «anxious hugs». Her book by no means claims to be original. Born from urgency, it speaks a clear language stuffed to absurdity with words like «CV», «ﬁxed-term» and «job centre», thus weaving a particular web that mirrors a harsh reality — that of today’s France.

Marion Messina: Faux Départ. Le Dilettante, Paris 2017.

Translated by Marcel Saché

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AUDE PICAULT: IDEAL STANDARD

By Christian Gasser

Relationships, sex, women’s self-determination and disappointments – the French comic book author Aude Picault covers these topics in her graphic novel «Ideal Standard».

Claire, in her mid-thirties, a nurse on a ward for premature infants, dreams of her ideal man, a fulﬁlled relationship, children – meanwhile, her love affairs never last beyond the ﬁrst three months. Then she meets the cool banker Franck; the adventure becomes love and soon the couple move in together. Claire is on the verge of realizing her life’s dream. Floating on her rose-coloured cloud, she doesn’t notice how much Franck idealizes her.

French national Aude Picault (born 1979) made a name for herself about ten years ago with her subtle and conﬂicted portrayal of «Papa». In the French daily newspaper Libération, her comic strip «L’air de rien» presents one of the smartest and most charming verdicts about her generation.

85 In «Ideal Standard» she illustrates how Claire, fed by advertising, social pressure, her own expectations, the effects of education and other things, loses out in the space between dream world and reality, in-between naive illusions and cruel awakenings, high standards and minor crises. She gets caught up in a net of minor delusions that at the latest unravel when she falls pregnant: she realizes that Franck and her relationship are anything but ideal.

«Ideal Standard» is a subtle genre portrayal of the life of a woman in her mid-thirties. Picault trusts her personal experience and her relationships; despite the latent feminist discourse she dispenses with any kind of programmatic statement, and with everything that is bigger or more abstract than life as well as exaggerations – except for skilfully applied stereotypes that have a hint of caricature about them. Her drawings are also minimalist and elegant and are reminiscent of Sempé thanks to their lightness, depth and resonance. Individual, carefully used colour accents underline moods or make dreams and ideas visible.

At the end of the book, at the house-warming party for her small attic apartment, Claire dreams of the happy and balanced man whom she soon hopes to meet. However, the reader suspects that the experience with Franck will not necessarily protect her from further disappointments – possibly not even the next man will be ideal, but only standard...

Aude Picault: L’air de rien. Dargaud, 2017.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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JUKUTA ALIKAVAZOVIC: AVANCÉE DE LA NUIT

By Katja Petrovic

Jukuta Alikavazovic is well known in France for fascinating intrigues and her intense language. Her latest novel «Avancée de la nuit» (The Night’s Advance)is about love, war, poetry, remembrance and transmission against the backdrop of the

86 Yugoslav war. Although the 38-year-old Franco-Bosnian writer experienced this at a distance, she still felt closely involved with things.

«One can be infected by what one knows, yet also by what one doesn’t know. Silence is a living organism; it is alive and invades you,» remarks Jakuta Alikavazovic. However, at ﬁrst her protagonists want to know nothing of this. Amélia and Paul disappear under the cover of night and let themselves drift in the darkness of a soulless hotel. This is where Paul works alongside his studies as a night porter, and where Amelia lives for a short while although she is only 18. «A place that doesn’t kill you because of excessive beauty or ugliness, but because of its indifference.» for Paul and Amélia, room no. 313 becomes a paradise. They meet here, make love, spend days and nights here, although in reality everything keeps them apart: Amélia is rich, educated and mysterious. «She had an instinct for disasters.» Paul, an immigrant’s son from a miserable French suburban background, is shy, though he ﬁghts his way through. While he ambitiously pursues his architecture studies, Amélia becomes more and more reserved. «She wants neither a degree, nor recognition nor stability.»

So, one night she disappears in search of traces of her mother. Nadia Dehr, a poet from Sarajevo, who went mad and took her own life because she lost her battle against the war. She tried in vain with «documentary poems» to describe the horror of the Bosnian war so visually that it moves everyone. The indifference with which the world allowed the siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs to be prolonged for four years also worries Amélia. But at ﬁrst, she decides to sell the box with her mother’s poems to get rid of the past.

When she ﬁnally arrives in Sarajevo she greedily devours all the war stories and falls in love with a boy, who experienced the conﬂict personally, while Amélia – just like Jucuta Alikavazovic, born in 1979 in Paris – followed this war from a distance. «I stood in-between, part of my family lives in Sarajevo; I know the city well, although I never lived there myself and I wasn’t there during the war. For years, I asked myself to what extent I am still affected by it, and ultimately everyone asks this very intimate question.» In

87 her novel, which is «not intended as a novel about war in ex-Yugoslavia», she writes: «Sarajevo was the capital city of international helplessness and the black market. Like a large stage, but the spectators who regarded themselves as spectators, also became actors, albeit without knowing. Be- cause passivity is also a choice; staying away is an action, permitting is a crime and in this way the whole world made itself guilty.»

A dull, diffuse feeling of guilt makes it impossible for Amélia to have a normal life. At night-time, it is slightly easier to endure, but as soon as day breaks, Jakuta Alikavazovic’s characters are groping again in the dark. They go in one direction only to end up going in an entirely different one. However, just as the night advances ceaselessly, in this story everything is set in motion and ultimately the cycle of suppressing, remembering and searching is continued by the child that Amélia and Paul are to have despite their estrangement. Jakuta Alikavazovic’s novel «The Night’s Advance», published in2017 by Editions de L’Olivier, examines many themes simultaneously in a narrative that is permanently on a knife’s edge. It throws sparks; it is experimental, bold and full of secrets that captivate the reader.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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GIORGIOSTRATEN:INSEARCHOFLOSTBOOKS

By West Camel

The term Borgesian is overused. I cannot help, however, applying it to this brief, enigmatic volume. Scratch out the celebrated authors’ names – among them Plath, Lowry and Benjamin; Hemingway, Byron and Gogol – and the resulting palimpsest, a literary object in which the modernist master delighted, could itself be a lost volume from Borges’ oeuvre.

Most obviously Borgesian is the book’s subject matter: lost and mythical texts. These are not, however, simply rumoured great works of which no conclusive evidence remains. They

88 are books that feel only just out of the reader’s reach; texts that would, should the stars perfectly align, should some obsessive, Borges-like palaeographer search the right library on the right day, ﬁnally be available to their dead authors’ enthusiasts.

These books include the second part of Gogol’s «Dead Souls», which the author, unsatisfied with his work, apparently burned in 1845. There is also the manuscript,assumed by many to be the original of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished «Arcades Project», that disappeared when its author committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. There is the suppression and censorship from cultural history of Byron’s «Memoirs»,some parts of whicheven today might be considered scandalous. There is the loss on a train in France of the manuscript of Hemingway’s first novel,«A Movable Feast» – an incident van Straten describes as «of all the stories I cover in this book... certainly the one I am inclined to take most lightly, since the lost pages do not represent the irreparable destruction of something that could never be rewritten».

There is even «The Book that I Actually Read (but did not photocopy)» – namely «The Avenue» by van Straten’s friend, Romano Bilenchi, which van Straten, and several of Bilenchi’s other friends, managed to read after the author’s death, but before his wife destroyed it shortly in advance of hers.

Contributing to «In Search of Lost Books» Borgesian tone are the puzzles surrounding these mislaid, destroyed and elusive texts. Solving these problems seems, superficially at least, to be van Straten’s main purpose in this book. He states in his introduction that «everyone seeking [these eight lost books] is convinced that they exist, and that they will be the one to find them». In this regard, the story of Walter Benjamin’s final days represents the perfect solvable mystery. Having dragged both his weak body and a black suitcase «he refused to abandon’ across the French border into Spain, he promptly took his own life. The suitcase, along with the manuscript inside it, apparently evanesced along with him, offering the tempting hope that ‘there might be some forgotten, yellowing papers in a wardrobe or an old chest in the attic of a house in Portbou».

89 What in my opinion makes this oddly touching book most redolent of Borges, though, is its lace-like nature – the com- bination of delicate threads of fact and enticingly elaborate lacunae. Ultimately each of van Straten’s eight slight but carefully researched histories can only describe a vacancy. Each chapter ends without the carefully outlined gap being ﬁlled – any potential conclusion slipping through the author’s, and the reader’s, ﬁngers. The result is literary fretwork – paths fork, but take us back on ourselves. Van Straten – on the strength of this book an undeniable Borgesian – has created a set of beautiful labyrinths, the centres of which are out of reach... for now, at least.

He ends the book with a completely ﬁtting temptation. The ﬁnal chapter is the story of the Sylvia’s Plath’s unpublished novel, «Double Exposure». After her suicide, Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, exerted complete (and controversial) control over the publication of the sizeable body of work she left behind, which includes, it is thought, the «Double Exposure» manuscript. Before his own death, Hughes deposited at the University of Georgia a quantity of Plath’s papers «that may not be consulted until 2022» – sixty years after her demise. Might «Double Exposure» be among these?

«I smile too», says van Straten; «I am prepared to wait and see.»

As would Borges be, and as would anyone be who delights in the literature of literature.

In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes – by Giorgio van Straten. Translated from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Published by Pushkin Press, 2017

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LIVSTRÖMQUIST:THEFRUITOFKNOWLEDGE

By Christian Gasser Liv Strömquist’s «The Fruit of Knowledge» is a unique non-ﬁction book about female sexuality.

The problem is not the men who are not interested in the female sex organ, claims Liv Strömquist slightly surprisingly

90 at the start of «The Fruit of Knowledge». Rather, it is those who might have developed too big an interest in this – and she ﬁrst presents the top ten of those who misunderstand women. For example, men like the doctor and cornﬂakes inventor John Harvey Kellogg and the theologian Augustinus apparently contributed to the stigma that the vulva is impure and a source of numerous diseases. Due to medical and countless other reasons, this was preferably mutilated, cut or treated with acid...

After this introduction, the Swedish author (born 1979) pro- ceeds to a comprehensively researched cultural history of the vulva that is delivered with feminist verve and vitriolic sarcasm. This begins with the (matriarchal) prehistory up to the present-day, from primeval female ﬁgures with powerful vulvas to modern portrayals of women without any visible sexual organs. Not least, it also recounts how feminine sexuality, identity and self-determination was for centuries suppressed, pathologized and declared inferior.

Strömquist processes (revealing her sources with scrupulous precision) numerous stereotypes, prejudices and lies from biology, psychoanalysis, science, art and religion and stuns with hair-raising, yet exactly presented absurdities that still have an impact today, with heresies and incongruities – there is no other way to explain the increase of surgical procedures in the ﬁeld of feminine genitalia.

This appraisal of the female moist zone is anything but dry-humoured: as a comic-strip illustrator, Liv Strömquist is also an entertainer; she doesn’t hide away discreetly in an off-domain like an «objective» historian, but rather guides the reader through «The Fruit of Knowledge» like a stand-up comedian works through a routine. She directly appeals to her readers (men and women); she is emotional, sarcastic and furious, repeatedly astonished herself about the erroneous facts that she heaves to the light of day and without concealing her opinion. This also epitomizes her illustrative style: Strömquist draws like a punk rocker creates music; her stroke is simple, crude and direct and she constantly interrupts the ﬂow of pictures with bold text panels and exclamation or question marks.

91 In short, «The Fruit of Knowledge» is an equally entertaining as well as informative pamphlet which is immersed in a crafty sense of humour and honest outrage that is of high educational value.

Liv Strömquist: The Fruit of Knowledge. Virago Press, 2018.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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ELIZABETH TAYLOR: ANGEL

By Rainer Moritz

Paradise Lost — We can get to know her again: the novelist Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor (born in 1912 in Reading; died in 1975 in Penn) was overlooked as a writer for a long while, even in Great Britain. Too much a stranger to London and its literary circles, she appeared too modest and looked after her husband and children too meekly without ever – in Virginia Woolf’s words – claiming a ‘room of her own’. Her family were hardly aware that she wrote wonderfully poetic novels and short stories. In the US, she had important supporters on her side, including William Maxwell who published several of Taylor’s short stories as editor of the «New Yorker».

Thanks to Dörlemann Verlag in Zurich, Taylor’s eminent place in 20th century European literature is also gradually being acknowledged here. The follow-up publication, after the masterful «A View of the Harbour» and «A Game of Hide and Seek», is Taylor’s «Angel», the third novel in German in a wonderful translation by Bettina Abarbanell and with an engaging afterword by Gabriele von Arnim.

92 «Angel», first published in 1957, is the eye-catcher among Taylor’s works. For the first time, the writer worked with historic material. At least at first glance, it seems that Taylor strongly differentiated her protagonist Angel(ica) Deverell from her autobiography. «Angel» is an artist’s novel about a writer who was born in 1885. She rises to fame as a celebrated bestselling author with terribly pretentious, kitschy stories. She feels insulted to be spurned by the critics and – as her fame fades – she gets even with her ungrateful audience and stops writing.

Angel grows up as the daughter of a grocer in the small town of Norley. After an argument, she refuses to keep going to school and begins to broaden her vivid imagination. Inspired by a nearby country manor, Paradise House, she starts writing rapturous romantic and sentimental novels that have nothing to do with her humble background. A London publisher realizes that he has struck gold with Angel, although he is aware of the literary banality of her texts. In no time at all, he makes her a rich woman.

Elizabeth Taylor based her sketch of Angel’s life on two acclaimed turn-of-the-century writers – Marie Corelli (1855–1924) and Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939). Angel becomes the model of an obsessive, unsympathetic woman who wants to prove something to her narrow-minded milieu. She relocates with her mother (who is not happy about this) to an elegant part of town, and although in real life she knows nothing about love and sex, she marries the unsuccessful, promis- cuous painter Esmé. As the centrepiece of her biography, she purchases Paradise House, which has meanwhile fallen into disrepair. Ultimately, her lack of literary success makes her such an outspoken campaigner for vegetarianism that her husband secretly resorts to hunting ducks.

Taylor’s novel mirrors lifelong blindness. For Angel, who exploits her close family and friends, «experience» is a «prop for the fantasy», and when she writes «about nature» she regards a walk «outdoors» as a pointless waste of time. With impressive clarity, Taylor conjures up everyday scenes about an obsessive writer, who lacks any role models other than Shakespeare and despises the world almost without exception. Above all, however, «Angel» is a very funny

93 book whose tragic underlying elements are concealed with fantastically absurd episodes. When Angel is no longer able to save Paradise House from collapse, serving her guests mouldy apple sauce as a last resort and building a tasteless monument for her dead husband that remains unﬁnished due to lack of funds, we again experience the novelist Elizabeth Taylor ‘at her best’.

Elizabeth Taylor: Angel. Novel. Translated from English by Bettina Abarbanell. Dörlemann, Zurich 2018.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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MARIANNEJUNGMAIER:SONNENKÖNIGE

By Markus Köhle

An Anti-Berlin Lifestyle Novel

«Sonnenkönige» («Sun Kings») by Marianne Jungmaier is her second novel after «Das Tortenprotokoll». In-between are the short stories «Sommernomaden». While «Das Tortenpro- tokoll» is grounded in a sense of home, «Sommernomaden» offers round-the-world tours with a light-hearted atmosphere. So, what about these sun kings?

A group of four people, the sun kings in their late twenties and early thirties, live and work in Berlin – with the emphasis on living. What we ﬁnd out about Sam, Cherry, Hannah (who at some point swaps places with Bill) and the ﬁrst-person narrator, Aidan, mostly revolves around their leisure time.

The ﬁrst part is set in Berlin, while the second part is in San Francisco or in the desert. That’s where the sunshine comes in; in Berlin, things are concrete- and winter grey, but the characters are always a colourful contrast to this. They are all garish, brash and liven things up with their drug-induced moods. We only discover incidental information about their careers or personal backgrounds and get to know much more about their individual outﬁts. Their personalities are mirrored in the way they dress and the constant switches of clothing

94 – preferably leggins or something with fur, feathers or glitter – already reveal insecurities behind the perfectly groomed facades. Introducing the main characters: Cherry: a bondage model and PhD student in mathematics with her specialist subject being tropical geometry; Sam: a historian whose specialist focus is homosexuality in the Nazi period (she was once a Goth and is still a fan of post-punk bands like Joy Division and Depeche Mode); Hannah: embraces rebellion and likes to experiment as well as ﬁght her middle-class upbringing. She works in the photo editorial department of a publishing house (like her boyfriend); Aidan: a freelancer and journalist for the online music programming department of a publishing house; he has a genuine weakness for dragons, behaves like a bookworm and has a melancholy, depressive side. This may all seem superﬁcial, but in fact underlying social problems are dealt with as an aside. Cherry complains about being a woman in academia. Aidan is offered a permanent job, not Hannah. That causes an argument and a separation. The model of open relationships is dysfunctional, which is demonstrated extensively in the successive episodes.

The party escapades and drug-inﬂuenced excesses are linguistically restrained, managing without formal exploits and being very atmospheric and believable. That also goes for the sex scenes, which are never exaggerated, but seem numerous and are described vividly. The characters are more high than depressed; there is more of a party spirit than hangovers, although they always loom in the background. These sun king/queens share plenty of longing that ultimately turns into hope and ﬁnally a new beginning.

Basically, the novel is enjoyable and light-hearted and allows the main protagonists – despite their obvious excitement – to appear as quite normal or as individuals with normal problems, desires and ambitions in life. Aidan’s dragon doesn’t spit ﬁre, but rather blows sweet bubbles for the reader to become immersed in and ﬂoat along with.

In the end, the sun king/queens are all partygoers for a while. They are party-and-good-times freelancers, play-ﬁght wrestlers in the ring, which is a group of friends, who wait for the bell to ring for the ﬁrst round played in real life. Since we’ve all waited at some point for this bell, whether as part

95 of this particular group or of another generation, this novel is worthwhile.

Marianne Jungmaier: Sonnenkönige (Sun Kings). Kremayr & Scheriau, 2018.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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AUDESEIGNE:UNETOILELARGECOMMELEMONDE

By Katja Petrovic

What reality lies behind the virtual medium of the Internet, and what would our world be without the www? Swiss writer Aude Seigne (32) tackles these questions in her novel Une toile large comme le monde

Aude Seigne’s novel begins 3,000 metres above sea level. «It’s poetic in this place, organic (...), you get the impression that it’s snowing like a distorted picture on old television sets. Crumbling ﬁsh cadavers and pulverized global trash fall to the ground» and cover a cable stretching 7,000 km from the Breton coast to the USA.

FLIN is the writer’s name for this cable. Basically, it looks no different to the cable in our living rooms, but it transports 145 million emails per second. Just like the many others, countless thousands of cables that are under our pavements and on the sea bed. Aude Seigne makes it abundantly clear to us how the Internet is submerged deep below the earth – this embodiment of virtual reality, yet something quite concrete. The same also goes for the shocking statistics behind this: one hour of email trafﬁc uses up as much energy as 4,000 return ﬂights from Paris to New York.

But what do you do with this information? Ignore it? Accept it as giving no alternative? On behalf of everyone else, these questions must be confronted by Penelope, Matteo, Ervan, Olivier, Birgit and Lu Pan. They are in their mid-thirties; they live in a variety of locations around the world. Their common status is being dependent on the Internet; they are part of a system that they increasingly mistrust.

96 Birgit is a successful professional from Denmark. She works for the association Green Web that campaigns for energy- efﬁcient use of the Internet. But she also needs the web for her love life that she conducts exclusively on social media networks. Lu Pan, a nerd from Singapore, develops e-sports video games from his kid’s playroom and is a superstar on YouTube. Penelope, a native Korean, works during the day as a programmer. At night-time, she is a hacker – without the Internet she would no longer have a job, exactly like Ervan, who works as a Community Manager for an insurance company in Portland. Finally, Matteo from Italy is a deep-sea diver. He lays the Internet cables deep beneath the sea and comes into closest contact with the web. But even Olivier, who has opted out to open a coffee shop and book store cannot avoid the Internet to place his orders.

The extent to which they are all victims of the world-wide web only gradually becomes clear to them – and the reader. For example, when Ervan’s social security number is stolen after his company’s details are hacked into – last year, this actually happened to 143 million US citizens. At the time, many people experienced this damage as identity theft. Birgit realizes how the Internet can make you ill when she experiences ‘digital burn-out’ after she overdoes things by multi-tasking; while Lu Pan’s father despairs that he has lost his game-addict son to the Internet.

Along with these risks, Aude Seigne’s novel also observes other side effects of the Internet. For instance, environmental destruction in China that is caused by the exploitation of essential natural resources to power Internet technology. Or the vast data centres, which are scattered across the world, and consume huge quantities of energy for air-conditioning systems for the data processing centres. Or the numerous toxic cables protruding from the sand in England on Porthcurno Beach... In the end, the protagonists realize that the Internet must be abolished. With the help of the hashtag #cut the cable, they plan to cause the crash and stumble upon a group of highly motivated hackers...

Aude Seigne’s novel offers countless fascinating facts and a multi-faceted discussion of the subject. However, she has not achieved an exciting thriller which the material could

97 have suggested. Too many roughly sketched characters appear in the narrative with its many sub-sections – mainly, they serve the purpose of conveying information. Their encounters also seem artiﬁcially constructed and are not always linguistically convincing. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing read. Aude Seigne’s novel Une toile large comme le monde was published in 2017 by Éditions Zoé.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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IMREORAVEC:ARÉGGYERMEKEI(THECHILDRENOF THECLOD)

By Gábor Csordás

Evoking a Betrayed World

Imre Oravecz’s third volume of his trilogy «A rög gyermeke» (The Children of the Clod) has concluded an enterprise that continued for over twenty years. Although the ﬁrst part of this trilogy was only released in 2007 by the publisher Jelenkor, Oravecz’ ﬁrst book about the inhabitants of Szajla, «Halászóember» (Der Fischermann) was set in 1998. Strangely, this book was a poetry volume whose texts were exclusively dedicated to the people, places, events and mythologies of the mountain village of Szajla in north-eastern Hungary. The individual poems, which were initially published in magazines seemed so trivial, but the book version merges them into an epic poem about a lost world: namely, the traditional farming life, which was destroyed by Communism, rather than leaving it to internal modernization and an emergent agricultural industry generating local products.

Imre Oravecz (b. 1943) was born into a farming family from Szajla. His multifaceted biography was regarded as totally uncharacteristic for the so-called socialist era. He left Hungary twice; he lived for many years in the U.S.,including linguistics studies at the universities of Iowa and Illinois. So, he followed in the footsteps of his grandparents and many other residents of Szajla, who escaped from a life without prospects, and

98 whose aim was to ﬁnd a secure livelihood and maybe even some dignity.

The publication of the first part of the trilogy («Ondrok gödre». Ondrok’s Pit, 2007) highlighted how «Der Fischermann»was a kind of preparation for a real prose text about the citizens of Szajla and their emigration. The plot of the first part of this series is set in Szajla. The heroes are a young couple called the Árvais. At first, they try to make a living in their native village at the start of the 20th century. When they realize that their life is destined to be a constant struggle, they decide to leave the country. The story ends with them and their two small children, as well as hundreds who share their plight, embarking on a steamer headed overseas.

The second part, «Kaliforniai fürj» (California quail, 2012), aroused considerable attention as the very ﬁrst description of the fate of millions of Hungarians who left the country at the turn of the 19th and start of the 20th century. Initially, the husband, István/Steve, ﬁnds a job at a steel works. As production declines, he is forced to look for work opportunities elsewhere. The couple and their children relocate to California. Steve works in the oil industry which at that time had become the powerhouse of the American economy.

Steve and Anna originally arrived in America with the intention of saving some money and returning to their home country to buy a plot of land. But their children, who were already born and grew up in the New World, didn’t want to leave America. Finally, they bury the idea of returning when Steve and Anna invest their savings in a ranch in California and go back to a life in farming.

The hero of the third part ( «Ókontri») of this trilogy, which has just been released, is one of the Árvais’ sons. He is also called Steve, though he soon changes his name to István. Although he was born in America, he decides to start a new life in his parents’ home country. In 1938, he and his adoptive child Georgie arrive in Hungary – the Americans call this«Ókontri» (the «old country»). In Szajla, he takes ownership of the plot of land, which he inherited from his grandfather; he purchases more land and sets up a new farm. As time goes by, he also ﬁnds a wife, Julia.

99 This new beginning and the repetition of the names is Oravecz’s allusion to the mythological return that traditionally influenced the farming world. Yet, this kind of return is no longer possible. This is the era of the linear flow of world history that rapidly leads to a new world war and then to a divided world. Steve and Julia, who are declared «kulaks» (affluent peasant farmers) are exploited by the new, Communist regime and ultimately threatened with ruin. Not surprisingly, at the first suitable opportunity during the 1956 revolution, they flee Hungary. And the trilogy ends here.

Oravecz was one of the foremost writers among Hungary’s neo-avant-garde circles during the 1970s, a kind of Hungarian representative of neostructuralism. His style of prose is unem- bellished, so being particularly suited to the unsentimental evocation of a lost, forgotten and betrayed world.

Oravecz Imre: Ókontri – A rög gyermekei III. Magvet˝o Könyvkiadó, 2018.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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KRISTINEBILKAU:EINELIEBE,INGEDANKEN

By Rainer Moritz

What Might Have Been... — Kristine Bilkau as Narrator

Some books slip through the back door into their readers’ minds. Some books don’t need to make showy,grand gestures, or to demonstrate their authors’ skill on every page. Kristine Bilkau (b. 1974) writes these kinds of novels. Her debut novel, «Die Glücklichen», proved to be an exact seismic record of a social class that on ﬁrst inspection leads a life of privilege in the metropolis, while at the same time being controlled by the underlying fear of losing this secure framework overnight.

In her second novel «Eine Liebe, in Gedanken», Bilkau takes two steps back in time to the supposedly rejuvenating 1960s. A young woman, the ﬁrst-person narrator, is clearing the house owned by her late mother, Antonia. Thanks to old

100 photographs and letters, she begins to unravel the confusing strands of her late mother’s life. At ﬁrst glance, this is not an especially original idea. However, what Kristine Bilkau makes of it is the touching portrait of an ambitious woman who can only experience her one great love affair «in her thoughts».

In her early twenties, Antonia – living in Hamburg – meets Edgar who is slightly older than her. They both beneﬁt from the advantages of the Economic Miracle: they treat themselves to cost-conscious stays in elegant hotels and drive through town in their ﬁrst second-hand car. However, at the same time and without being rebels, both subvert the rules at least of an outwardly moral world in which women who live in rental apartments are no longer allowed to entertain men after 10 pm.

Bilkau characterizes in a few strokes the pre-1968 era, which was by no means restrictive, and focuses her main attention on Antonia, a self-conﬁdent woman. She has no doubt about her shared future with Edgar – even when he wants to break away from his professional malaise and accepts the offer to set up an ofﬁce of his company in remote Hong Kong. Antonia immediately indicates that she is not put off by this break, and that she would like to take this step with him. Edgar travels on ahead, however, he doesn’t keep his promise to come back for his girlfriend. The long-distance relationship between Hamburg and Hong Kong gradually peters out – and Antonia will not recover from the shock. Two marriages fail. Until the end of her life, her thoughts remain with Edgar. At some point, he returns to Hamburg and has no idea that Antonia habitually drives past his house every evening, though without drawing attention to herself.

«Eine Liebe, in Gedanken» is a glorious, moving book that avoids abrasive tones. Kristine Bilkau’s style is decidedly simple, sleek and with hardly any false notes; she gently accompanies the characters, allowing the quiet melancholy of ‘what might have been’ to shine through on every page and showing how life comes apart at the seams, how conﬁdence turns into restlessness and uncertainty. On the one hand, «Eine Liebe, in Gedanken» is the portrait of a wistful woman who wanted to take her fate into her own hands, and not to be placated with bourgeois solutions. On the other hand,

101 the novel reﬂects how this life has an impact on the narrator, Antonia’s daughter, and how – without it being made explicit in «Eine Liebe, in Gedanken» – she starts to think about her personal inﬂuences and perhaps what she has missed out on herself.

Kristine Bilkau: Eine Liebe, in Gedanken. Novel. Luchterhand, Munich 2018.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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KATHARINAGREVE:DASHOCHHAUS. 102 ETAGEN LEBEN

By Christian Gasser

The skyscraper as a microcosm: In «The Skyscraper. 102 Storeys of Life» German comic book writer Katharina Greve introduces one of the most original comics of the year.

«As Goethe already said: More light!, silly cow», the man shouts at his wife as he rummages in a box in the dark cellar. She is standing next to him with the torch. «If I were to kill him NOW,» she thinks, «even his ﬁnal words would be banal!»

These are the opening lines of Katharina Greve’s «The Skyscraper»: in the cellar. From here, the reader climbs ﬂoor by ﬂoor skywards, past nagging couples, confused old people and hapless teenagers. It’s pitch black in the cellar, but it doesn’t exactly get any lighter higher up. Of course, «The Skyscraper» is funny, however, the humour is rather mean and dark.

Born in 1972, the comic book writer and cartoonist Katharina Greve originally constructed her skyscraper on the Internet. From September 2015 to September 2017, every week the building grew one storey for almost two years, or to a height of 102 ﬂoors. Now, «The Skyscraper» is also available in landscape book format.

102 The idea of the skyscraper is simple, clear and striking. Greve, who is a qualiﬁed architect, opens a show apartment as accurately as on a technical drawing: with kitchen, hall, living room, balcony. The layout plan resembles a comic-strip grid mostly with three, occasionally even four images, including a short punchline.

The observation of daily routines, which usually occur behind closed doors, not only titillates the onlooker’s voyeuristic sense, but also allows Greve to simulate all imaginable (Western European) living situations within the most compact space and in the briefest form. The reader becomes a peeping Tom who secretly watches these snapshots of humorously exaggerated everyday scenes: daily routine, boredom, homework, chaos, social media and anti-social behaviour. «If you don’t kick the bucket soon,» mumbles the 15th-ﬂoor occupant, who is seated on the 1950s retro sofa from her youth, to her presumably nearest and dearest, «then I will get a divorce.»

The weekly additions also enabled Greve occasionally to refer to current affairs and to link daily routine with world events: climate change, terrorism, the housing crisis, unemployment and precariousness, the Nobel Literature Prize for Bob Dylan – everything is always broken down to the small-town average situation of the skyscraper’s residents. «Some refugees are on hunger strike again!», she shouts, looking at the television screen from her kitchen, and he echoes from the living room: «They can also starve back where they came from!» Meanwhile, on the 67th ﬂoor a young mother has a visit from a friend. While she plays with her young son, she sighs: «Post-truth era, fake news, Trumpism – how am I supposed to explain this world to my Ole some day?» The friend: «Tell him lies.»

However, «The Skyscraper» is not just a collection of amusing comic strips – Greve repeatedly and loosely interlinks the storeys. The husband on the 48th floor isn’t buying, as his wife thinks, salmon for supper, but as attentive readers naturally know, he is amusing himself with his lover on the 32nd floor, whose husband in turn isn’t visiting his parents on the 7th floor, but is involved in a session with the Dominatrix with her whip on the 16th floor.

103 So, Greve creates with lightness of touch, clear strokes and a ﬁne to mean-spirited sense of humour a pleasurable comédie humaine for our time. It is a novel composed with sophistication, a sketchy genre picture that already works fantastically well on the ﬁrst reading; yet in repeatedly climbing the steps, it allows the discovery of more secret references, funny details, subtle allusions and cheerful vulgarity.

Katharina Greve: Das Hochhaus. 102 Etagen Leben. Avant Verlag, 2017.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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ROBERTPROSSER:PHANTOME

By Markus Köhle

Grafﬁti, Bombs and History

In «Phantome» Robert Prosser works through stories and Bosnia’s recent history.

How do war, displacement and dislocation change a person? How can someone gain a foothold again where he has arrived now? What remains, what plays on one’s mind and what can never be forgotten again? What helps to process the experience? These are big questions. In his majornovel «Phantome», Robert Prosser has posed all these questions and he hasn’t simpliﬁed the answers. Questions were also at the very start of his work. In 2013, during a short visit to Sarajevo, he had to admit that he hardly knew anything about Bosnia. He then began to interview a couple who were close to his family, and this was the start of an increasingly intensive analysis of what is known as the Yugoslavian war. More than two decades have elapsed. Meanwhile, the victims are ready and willing to talk about their destinies and Prosser collected these stories. As an outsider and having deliberately not learned the language, he could be a good listener.

Part of the novel is set in 2015 and part is set in 1992. First, we get to know a grafﬁti artist and his girlfriend Sara. Then,

104 the focus is on the story of Sara’s mother Anisa. These parts differ linguistically. So, the same approach should also apply in this review.

Firstly, regarding the part set in 2015. Prosser’s prose has momentum. The hero with the Bosnian girlfriend, a past spent with radicals and the present as a grafﬁti artist. Tuzla and Vienna. Sarajevo and Banja Luka. The story is about the country and the people. Atrocities in 1992. Atrocities in 1938. Guys in Tuzla. Parties in Tuzla. People who went and people who stayed. An adrenalin kick and boisterous life. Touring around Bosnia, and for the German-speaking newcomer Sara is the entry ticket to society.

This all sounds wonderfully young and part of the trendy scene, not too nerdy or superﬁcial. Facts are conveyed in concentrated form. Insights are granted into trendy scenes that you don’t usually read about in this way. That makes you want to read more. Then, there is a break in the book. We are catapulted back to the year 1992 and confronted with new characters.

Now, everything focuses on the lives of Anisa and her boyfriend Jovan. The action ﬂashes back and forth with deftly placed cuts. This is the main part of «Phantome». Who are the phantoms? For Jovan – after he deserted and Anisa escaped – his girlfriend Anisa (and vice versa): «Jovan has no idea how he should get this phantom onto the wall. What were the colours of her eyes, her lips, her skin, he wonders, how did these colours change when they were furious, happy, lost in thought?»

Jovan searches for and ﬁnds stability in drawing, and after he was picked up again in Belgrade and transported to the mountains and had to serve in the Bosnian-Serbian army, he ﬁnds stability singing traditional Sevdah Bosnian folk songs in remembrance of his non-Serbian friends. Anisa, who made it to Vienna, likes to wander through the Kunsthistorisches Museum to think of other ideas and to process her thoughts. She still doesn’t feel as though she has arrived in Vienna: «Speechlessness makes it possible to maintain distance, and learning German seems to her like the voluntary admission of not believing in her return to Bosnia.»

105 Both their stories are narrated in parallel and reach a climax. Of course, what they gravitate towards is not revealed. But the novel has a new twist in store, which is gratifying and skilful. In «Phantome», Robert Prosser succeeds in shedding light on the major themes of today and of the recent past in our former neighbouring country. This light is a search light focused on Bosnia, Serbia and Vienna, on the everyday lives of refugees and those who served in the war. It is a pleasure to follow this because of the narrative’s linguistic and formal accomplishment. And it’s ﬁtting that Robert Prosser and his novel «Phantome», which shows more than just commitment, made it onto the long list for the German Book Prize 2017.

Robert Prosser: Phantome. Ullstein fünf, 2017.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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JOACHIMSCHNERF:CETTENUIT

By Katja Petrovic

In January, when Joachim Schnerf published his novel «Cette nuit» – about Salomon, a Holocaust survivor, who must celebrate Jewish Passover for the ﬁrst time without his late wife, Sarah – nobody could guess that a Jewish family in Paris would encounter a similar fate.

When Salomon wakes up on this day, he knows that a special evening lies ahead. As the oldest in the family, he must lead their Seder festival celebration on the eve of Passover to remember the release of the Jews from Egypt. The same as every year, he will read texts about the Israelites’ imprisonment and their ﬂight from Egypt; he will dip celery in salt water to commemorate the tears of enslaved Hebrews. His grandchildren will ask him, «Why is this evening different to all the others?» Why is there only matzo? Why the bitter herbs?... Every year, these traditions are relived and passed on. Yet, on this evening things are very different for Salomon. He is missing the most important person: Sarah, his beloved wife who recently died.

106 Sarah was from an educated middle-class family; she married Salomon, a Holocaust survivor, and had two daughters, Denise und Michelle. They couldn’t be more different and make their life hell. Sarah is the soul of the family; she knew how to ease almost any tension and accompanies Salomon throughout the novel. Sarah, the dead woman, is the most present in this story despite her absence.

«How should I survive this festival without her?» asks Salomon, and remembers many Seder evenings, which he spent with his wife. The very ﬁrst one after the war, when only he and his aunt attended from his ‘decimated family’, and he was tormented by questions about his difﬁculties arising due to his time in Auschwitz. But Salomon doesn’t talk about this. «It’s impossible, I can only talk about the Shoah in jokes.» These make his family incandescent, but he cannot stop himself. «Do you know what was written above the entrance to the gas chambers in Sobibor? Mind the step!» Jewish humour in its cultural element that Salomon can only share with other Holocaust survivors at the Shoah café. But it doesn’t protect him from the images of horror that permanently interject in his mind with reality... «a ready-made feast for every psychoanalyst.»

With equally biting humour, Jewish customs and characteri- stics are described in this novel. For instance, the difference between Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews. Patrick, Mi- chelle’s husband, is «the moving cliché of an Ashkenazi (...), this type of Jew, who wants no problems with anyone, and who would rather have a swastika tattooed on his forehead than ask a child to turn down the volume of his radio.»

Denise’s Moroccan husband Pinhas, on the other hand, is characterized by ‘oriental lightness’ for which Salomon ad- mires him immensely. «His parents were allowed to grill sardines on the beach, while we went up in ﬂames. But at least he doesn’t look morbid when I laugh about Auschwitz. Sephardic genius perhaps rests on this unshakeable lightness, and at times this nerve-racking carelessness. But ultimately the Sephardic Jews are still persecuted, and how would they have survived without humour?»

107 The reader is confronted in this novel with the essential aspects of Jewish life regardless of whether or not he is familiar with Jewish customs. He sits with the characters around the table when Salomon’s family meets for the Seder fest. Thanks to the evocative descriptions he can imagine the sound of the prayers and the taste of the symbolic foods. He can freeze like a pillar of salt or laugh aloud when Salomon tells «jokes from the concentration camp».

Joachim Schnerf, born in 1987 in Strasbourg, was the grand- child of a Holocaust survivor. He wanted to share this in precise detail – and this is important when Antisemitism is resurgent again in Europe. Most people are not familiar with everyday Jewish life. This is also one reason why clichés like ‘all Jews are rich’ are so insidious. In March this year, this is exactly why an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, became a victim who was stabbed in her Paris apartment because of greed for money. It was an Antisemitic act; and for the ﬁrst time in France it also sent shock waves beyond the Jewish community. «The fact that, shortly after my novel was published, this family had to celebrate the Seder festival without their grandmother is obviously a sad coincidence», remarks Joachim Schnerf in an interview. «But it’s high time that the subject of Antisemitism is openly discussed again and taken seriously.»

Joachim Schnerf: Cette nuit. Éditeur: Zulma, 2018.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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SIMONEHIRTH:LIEDÜBERDIEGEEIGNETESTELLEFÜR EINENOTUNTERKUNFT

By Markus Köhle

Simone Hirth’s debut novel «Lied über die geeignete Stelle für eine Notunterkunft» is a particularly eye-catching contribution. It’s a wonderful book. A green book. An unusual photo of the author. It’s anything but a conventional book title. An unusual front cover (with pictures of wall plugs, pliers, a hand drill, brick, screws and inside the chapters are then nailed

108 together). But that’s enough of the formalities. Let’s carry on with the review!

The heroine is in her mid-twenties; the family home has been destroyed, all life plans have collapsed and the focus is on setting up some temporary emergency accommodation and succeeding with the reconstruction. The loss of family heritage leads to dropping out and a temporary phase of self-sufﬁciency. However, the goal is to achieve some form of reintegration into society – by reliance on all linguistic means. Or rather, by different linguistic means than the usual ones.

The first person absorbs voices. The first person – the butcher’s daughter and shoemaker’s lover– absorbs voices from the surroundings; the first person makes interesting observations (about handcart deliveries and rules for allot- ment plots), it has a weakness for words (the company rat, emergency hammer, hobs and their value, rosehips and gera- niums of all things), it indulges in solitary singing (a kind of anti-isolationist sound, then later with info centre blues), it plays with the wreckage of language, has to process petty misdemeanours at the DIY store (theft of seeds and cement and so forth), suffers from an immense loss of everyday routine but a blossoming fantasy (insects instead of social security to be carried into the nest) and intensive dream sequences.

Formally,the achievement is convincing. It is a model example of deconstruction on all levels. Fragments are presented: prayer variations, inserted facts about fungi, lists, speeches to the wall, onomatopoeia («drridridrüh») and romantic hymns and songs. Unworldliness is the programme; a critique of civilisation and progress, or rather, of the status quo underpins the novel’s foundations.

As a novel house this book has excellent foundations and is anything but emergency accommodation. Rather, it is an eccentric, bold yet solid construction with plenty of windows and doors (and a good view of the sky). Counteracting business study theories and the attitude in cases of emergency also develops a surprisingly comic side. This novel is generally surprising with its language, its form and its intent. It is a new style of ruins literature: full of relish, adventurous

109 and yet precise. The form consolidates the content. And it’s highly recommended!

Simone Hirth: Lied über die geeignete Stelle für eine Notunterkunft. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 2016.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

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THE POET AT THE CONFLUENCE OF CAPITAL

By Saša Ili´c

LIKETHEGANGES

It takes a little boredom to feel things. Let us say: it is August, you sit on the edge of the bed in the Mediterranean stone house in the pleasant coolness. The mildew spreads out from the beautiful reminiscence. Everything hums around the bushes and the bottle-neck. You don’t know where to go with the hunched back, hands on knees, the beard, the wilderness, which grows in profusion, without stopping.

Only the rain has stopped, in April already, and the snakes break like crumbling rocks. That is outside, and the dry air (the dream of all bronchia) reaches inwards not without desert sand. The radio news is read by a baritone with macabre voice, so you know what hopelessness is, melancholy, cleaving like a tumour. When you close your eyes, you detach yourself from here and see, the credit, it ﬂows like the Ganges. But how?! when there is no snow at all any longer that could melt.

This poem is the centrepiece of the main cycle («Capitalism») from the new poetry edition by Petar Matovi´c(*1978, Užice)

110 entitled «Iz srećne republike» («From the Happy Republic») and published by the «Kulturni centar» in Novi Sad. This poem in many respects represents a montage of all of Matovićs’s poetic and intellectual special themes from the other five cycles of this book. It could also be considered the culmination point of motif lines from an earlier edition «Poetical Life» («Koferi Džima Džarmuša» (The Luggage of Jim Jarmusch) 2009; «Odakle dolaze dabrovi» (Where Beavers Come From) 2013), or as a turning point as well as delta from where river channels extend to something greater – a new theme from which this poetry is elaborated. We will deal later with this greater, unspoken element in this poem. First, we return to the lines of the poem «Like the Ganges» which suggest an interpretation in the form of a journey.

«Like the Ganges» comprises two verses that evoke a Mediterranean reminiscence. The context for this memory is the subject’s insensitive numbness as well as confrontation with the end of life. To feel things again the subject escapes into memory games and especially to those moments which he believes emerged from ‘beautiful reminiscences’: August, a Mediterranean house, the heat outdoors and being in the pleasantly cool shade. Silence as the second language of poetry (a favourite topos for Matovi´c) is transformed here into the buzzing sounds of summer and the insects. You might say that the only thing that calms him is the process of profusion surrounding him which happens beyond his control. The second verse is opened with the picture of drought that has begun in mid-springtime. The macabre baritone voice that reads the news (most likely Radio Belgrade 1) concludes the image of the memory and brings back the subject to the melancholy of that here and now. Afterwards, there follows meditative immersion in the world beyond the summer holiday, the Mediterranean, the silence in what brings forth the existential trembling and is identiﬁed by the subject as «like the Ganges».

Having read this poem, its conclusion leaves a lasting impression on the reader because one is ﬁnally able to decipher its title. However, if we re-read the poem – and it invites us to do so – we realize that this title, exactly like the end of the poem, reveals a weak, almost phonological connection that leads us to examine an important side track: the Ganges

111 is the holy river of Hindus; Matović’s poem is a literary memorandum about the loss of sacredness. In his poem the Ganges is a ‘river’ but not the Ganges; its mention is a reminder of the old Indian practice of naming all rivers and tributaries of this immense water course ‘like the Ganges’. Therefore, what flows through Matović’s poem also has a similar intent that it arrives at in view of the mythological image: its length (2,500 km), force, connection of unimaginable opposites (the Himalayas and the delta in Bangladesh), the unstoppable flow and ultimately the integration of all tributaries, settlements and neighbouring areas, the sky – the point of its source – and the earth that it flows through as far as its estuary where forgiveness of sins is said to be located. Similarly, there emerges the connection of the living and the dead just like along the riverbanks of the Ganges, where funeral pyres burn endlessly, and from where the ashes mingle with the waters of one of the most polluted rivers of our present time (thanks to the impact of ‘big business’). During the spring rituals, millions of the faithful bathe in these waters.

Matović’s river is not the Ganges but it is very similar to it. We reach it only after the poetic subject has gone back along the path of several terraces of consciousness to survey the entire course of the river at the moment of deep meditation. The cipher that helps to overcome the paralyzed state of the poetic subject is credit – the only thing with which nowadays one can afford the power of a Ganges. Now torn from the beautiful reminiscences by the macabre voice on the radio, the subject is one of these tributaries that, along with millions of others, one day will flow into the vast bay with immense efforts. Of course, there are many reasons that prevent this goal ever being reached. A single glance back at the high mountains that provide the source of this mystical river shows that there is no snow at all any longer that could melt. The abyss begins after this verse, as the Unspoken happens: this river (the capital) is not renewed through the natural water cycle but by absorbing millions of tributary rivers (debtors) that flow to its powerful riverbed and fill it without stopping. Of course, the river source is not in the sky, but emerges from the enslavement to debt; it also withdraws from us what we do not have, pumping us out like the biggest river estuary in the world. Its course is unfathomably long: it deprives many

112 debtors of countless months and years in their best years until their lives’ end – at least during their working life.

The Ganges was a river of Mother Nature, of repentance and cleansing, of the renewed return to life, while Matović’s «Like the Ganges» reflects the relentless process of the ‘insemination of capital on the part of the bankers’ that leads to the wide delta where the Unspoken begins: the realm of social inequality. It is here that the entire collection «From the Happy Republic» opens up – the image of a transitioning society («Povratak sa tržnice» (Return from the Market)) observed from the province («Kako nešto nestaje?», «Ukus aluminijuma», «Strepeći od celine» (How Something Disappears, Taste of Aluminium, Fear of the Collective)) and of journeys to Europe’s peripheral regions («Na perimetru» (In the Perimeter) – Split, «Budeći se u oktobru» (Awakening in October) – Baltic, «Poljska» (Poland) – Remembering the Holocaust) through fragments of religious texts that have long since diagnosed the original sin of democracy or its relationship with capitalism («Iz dnevnika oca A. Šmemana» (From the Diary of the Priest A. Schmemann)). These sources also show the intimate relationship to the Mediterranean, the place of the origin of democracy as well as the later immersion in its subterranean waters, or in other words, the river basin of creditors that represents its main artery. The cycle «New Markets» springs from here in which one suspects the outlines of a loveless world which these lack as much as America and China lack new markets. As the result of these tensions in the collection «From the Happy Republic» occasionally sporadic autopoietic sketches emerge exactly like the state of division in the last cycle with the same title. This entire world is contrasted with the fragile intimacy, the usurped warm zones, which still keep together the subject of Matović’s poetry, despite the inevitable onward flow of the rivers to one element that goes by no name – the senselessness of life.

Translation from Serbian by Elvira Veselinovi´c

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113 AHUNGARIANSPECIALEDITIONOFTHSWISSLITERARY JOURNAL «orte»

By Csordás Gábor

«You’re travelling to Hungary again. What are you looking for there? I am often asked this by Swiss, Germans and even Americans who shake their heads. In each case, I reply: Those who love literature will get their money’s worth in Hungary. Hungarian contemporary literature is distinguished by an urgency, imagination and metaphorical and linguistic eloquence that are unparalleled.» (Anne-Marie Kenessey)

While the interested German-speaking reader gains access to a growing number of Hungarian contemporary prose works, the same cannot be said of Hungarian contemporary poetry. This makes the following poetry volumes even more valuable, for example: by István Kemény («Ein guter Traum mit Tieren», Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2015, translated by Monika Rinck and Orsolya Kalász), or by Ottó Tolnai («Göttlicher Gestank», Edition Korrespondenzen, Vienna 2009, translated by Zsuzsanna Gahse), by István Vörös («Heidegger als Postbeamter», Edition Korrespondenzen, Vienna 2008, translated by László Kornitzer), or the poetry section of the broad spectrum of Hungarian contemporary literature that Ágnes Relle compiled in 2016 for the German journal die horen («Von der unendlichen Ironie des Seins», volume 264). A particularly valiant endeavour in 2005 was the publication of an extensive bilingual anthology of poems by Attila József, the greatest ﬁgure of Hungarian classical modernism («Ein wilder Apfelbaum will ich werden», Ammann Verlag, Zurich 2005, translated by Csaba Báthori).

The most recent presentation of Hungarian poetry also comes from Switzerland. Anne-Marie Kenessey has selected eleven contemporary poets for a special edition of the Swiss literary journal «orte» («Irgendeine schwere Frucht. Neue ungarische Lyrik», No. 195). Of course, it is challenging to give a representative overview in a single volume. What Kenessey has chosen is a kind of sample set of several generations,genres and regional afﬁliations. The oldest among the authors is Ottó Tolnai (1940), while the youngest are Orsolya Láng (1987) and Renátó Fehér (1989). One could

114 assign one group of authors such as István Kemény, Krisztina Tóth, Gábor Schein, András Ferenc Kovács and Lajos Parti Nagy to the tradition of classical modernism associated with the journals «Nyugat» (1908–1941) and «Újhold» (1946–1948). Another group like Katalin Ladik, Ottó Tolnai and Renátó Fehér is closer to the tradition of the avant-garde circle of Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) and the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s. These are the traditions that Gábor Schein describes as the most important roots of Hungarian contemporary poetry in an interview with Anne-Marie Kenessey. As usual, there are some authors who are not so easy to place in any category such as Virág Erd˝os, Tamás Jónás or Orsolya Láng.

Hungarian literature doesn’t simply mean the literature of Hungary. There are large minorities outside Hungary’s national borders. Their literary output can by no means be overlooked. In recent decades, these regional literatures were increasingly integrated into the literature of the mother country due to freedom of speech and movement. The inclusion in the anthology of Ottó Tolnai and Katalin Ladik from Vojvodi- na, Serbia or of András Ferenc Kovács or Orsolya Láng from Transylvania, Romania reﬂects this situation.

The poems are translated by Anne-Marie Kenessey with the exception of those by István Kemény (translated by Orsolya Kalász and Monika Rinck) and Krisztina Tóth (translated by György Buda). Her renditions are good of Ottó Tolnai’s minimalism and Lajos Parti Nagy’s form exploits as well as the rhythmic recitative by Virág Erd˝os. Her introduction generally offers on just eight pages the key information not only on the status and structure of Hungarian contemporary literature – and this is supplemented by the above-mentioned interview with Gábor Schein («Wege der ungarischen Lyrik nach 1989») – but also about the selected authors. We also gain a clear overview of the emergence and current intensiﬁcation of the problems in Hungarian society that form an important context to understanding and enjoying Hungarian modern poetry. The introduction also conveys the personal sadness of Anne-Marie Kenessey who is herself a German-speaking poet and daughter of a Hungarian refugee of the 1956 revolution.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

115 ***

DAVID LOPEZ: FIEF

By Katja Petrovic

David Lopez’s suburban novel «FIEF» incorporates everything that this material calls for: boxers, rappers, plenty of drugs and a little Voltaire. This turns into a sensitive mixture that has hit a nerve in France: the novel received the Prix du livre Inter audience award.

FIEF means a retreat, the place where you grew up, a private space where you feel secure and at home. For the characters in Lopez’s novel – Poto, Jonas and Habib – this place is a dull backwater in no geographical location:

«We live in a small town with about 15,000 residents, somewhere between the suburbs and farmland. There is too much tarmac around us to feel like real country bumpkins, but also too many green spaces to be one of the genuine suburban crowd (...). On the right riverbank, there are two residential tower blocks,in-between a police station,a hospital, the school, a motorway as well as an industrial estate with shabby one-Euro stores and discount retailers (...). The bookshop was recently closed down.»

Here, the boys hang out, smoke weed, deal drugs and kill time playing cards. Occasionally, one of them ends up in jail. 32-year-old David Lopez knows about this and wanted to describe how it feels to live in an ‘aquarium’, to spin around in a circle and not to get out. Because you cannot or don’t want to make it out. Like Jonas, who might have what it takes to become a professional boxer, but he doesn’t want to be better than his friends with whom he grew up. He wants to stay loyal to his roots because ultimately, he belongs here – «here and nowhere else.»

It’s a vicious circle in which the youngsters either exclude themselves, or otherwise get excluded. Whether that’s in the trendy bar in the nearest big city or at lovely Wanda’s student party, where the boys fall in love with women who are out of their league. Unless, they don’t even try to be accepted.

116 «Wanda takes photographs of me from all sides. I ask her what she ﬁnds attractive about me when she watches me like this, and she answers that she ﬁnds my beat-up face interesting. I pretend to be annoyed, and say that when I’m boxing I try to do everything to avoid the punches, and now I’m told that I have a broken face. She then looks at me for a few seconds and corrects herself; no, it’s not your face, which is broken, Jonas, but your style of expression.»

Inner-city language is also a central theme in this suburban novel. The kind of language, which is invented by those who live in the suburbs, disqualifying them for any job, labelling them and yet still being an important part of their identity. Poto, who is keenest of all to break out, pours his feelings into rap songs that he scribbles down on small notes – simply as he speaks – because he doesn’t know any better. The same as Poto, Habib and Jonas, who outdo each other with their spelling mistakes, and usually try to make light of this, although they genuinely regret their shortcomings.

«This language comes from rap. I didn’t want to resort to any clichés, but I had to make my characters speak like this so that they are authentic. It was a challenge to ﬁnd the balance between colloquial language and written prose», says David Lopez, who reverted to an old tried and tested model. Just like Abdellatif Kechiche in his ﬁlm «L’esquive», he confronts the suburban characters with a French literary classic. In Kechiche’s production they staged Marivaux’s «The Game of Love and Chance», while in David Lopez’s novel they discover and interpret Voltaire:

«Candide, that’s the story of a bourgeois guy, who grows up in a castle, learns philosophy and crap like that. He’s a good guy and just getting on with life, until he starts a relationship with the daughter of the baron and gets a real kick in the pants and lands on the street, like a criminal. (...) After he’s been through a really rough time, the guy creates a garden and in his eyes, that’s the only thing that counts and he couldn’t care about the rest. The idea behind this is that you take care of your mind, if you tend your garden, and he does this in the book by discovering new things. You know, if you only spin around in a circle in your aquarium, at some point you’re then totally convinced that the world is an aquarium.»

117 In the end, even if none of the characters manages to break out, David Lopez stays loyal to them and doesn’t turn away from youth that has few chances in France. He puts himself in their shoes and lets them have a voice in their language. With plenty of humour, rhythm and sensitivity, what emerges is not a rap song, but literature.

Translated by Susanne Kirkbright

***

ONLY THE NARRATIVE IS TRUE

By Beat Mazenauer

Fairy tales generally promise a happy ever after ending, almost an endless summer. This is exactly what the title of Madame Nielsen’s novel hints at. However, as with all fairy tales the same caveat applies: If they haven’t died. In this sense, «The Endless Summer» will also have an ending.

Madame Nielsen: The endless summer

The Danish writer promises a summer «in which there is no time and space expands and ﬁlls everything». This dream befalls a group of protagonists who gather on a country estate in the Danish province. It’s the 1980s, although this is not so important. They live through a fairy tale that begins when the wicked stepfather leaves the family. The mother is queen, and she gets her youthful prince consort. Then, there is her daughter, a good-looking youth and most importantly «the young boy, who is perhaps a girl». They are all lifted out of reality for a moment where their beauty and talents unfurl. They dream about the future, but timelessness has no later. «Mankind’s fall from grace is not the bite in the apple», announces the narrator, «but the idea of a life after this here and now». So, death will overtake everyone in this fairy tale.

Madame Nielsen’s «The Endless Summer» is an eerily beautiful and wonderfully idiosyncratic book in which a narrator conﬁdently keeps all the threads in hand and subtly arranges them. She knows everything about her characters, letting

118 them enter and leave as she likes, because it’s down to her to conjure up the narrative of this story. What exactly happens at the country estate is not so important; it’s mainly about this endless moment that must be tasted to the full.

Madame Nielsen has ﬁne antennae for changeable, dubious moods that associate her with Proust, Woolf, David Lynch or the Icelandic poet Sjón. She makes no secret to her readers that the story also sounds quite kitschy. She precisely captures the ﬂuctuations between passion and melancholy. The endless summer lasts longer than a single summer, but it’s not endless. Ultimately, reality returns: the queen stays true to herself, the handsome youth dies of Aids, the girl sinks into dull resignation. Ecce homo. There only remains «the young boy, who is perhaps a girl». The story begins with him only (almost) to forget him again. Perhaps, this is because a big part of this boy lurks in the narrator or even the writer herself.

«The Endless Summer» enchants its readers with an intensity that, in the end, leaves you waking up as though from a curious, yet coherent dream. You rub your eyes and wish for nothing other than to welcome back this endless summer. The narrative, as this book signals, is the only saviour of time.

Carmen Stephan: It’s all true

In «It’s All True» by Carmen Stephan the endless summer only lasts a moment. If only he hadn’t died... But Jacaré, the fisherman from north-eastern Brazil, disappears right at the beginning into the ocean waves. Carmen Stephan narrates the story of a long-lost film by Orson Welles. Its title was «It’s All True». Welles tells the story of four fishermen who in 1941 spent 61 days on a small raft (jangadas) and sailed from Fortaleza to Rio to present the president with their complaints. The feat was a success and the four fishermen, including Jacaré, returned home as heroes. It was worth standing up, instead of always ducking out of sight.

Faraway in California, Orson Welles read the news about the incident. The story fascinated him and he wanted to make a docu-ﬁlm about it: «I want you to do it exactly as it was», he said. But right at the start of shooting the ﬁlm the main

119 protagonist, Jacaré, was caught by a big wave and pulled overboard. Orson Welles still shot the film with Jacaré’s brother in the starring role – Jacaré only appears again at the end of the film in one of the scenes that had been filmed first.

«It’s All True» – available on the Internet at «Four men on a raft» – is an impressive film in which the adventure is narrated again with intense light and shadow effects, with ingenious ideas and magnificent shots of the rugged faces of the fishermen. «It’s All True» – but what exactly is the truth? Orson Welles will pose the question again later in «F for Fake». The truth is not real, answers Carmen Stephan for him: «The truth was deeper. It had a foundation.» In calm, almost tender prose, she meticulously narrates the story of the courageous fisherman Jacaré, of the eternal child Orson Welles and the poverty of the jagandeiros in north-eastern Brazil. The author not only precisely reviewed the long-lost film – in 1981, it was found by chance in a suitcase, as the commissioning clients wanted to lock it away. In addition to this, her sources were Orson Welles’s accounts and Jacaré’s diary. More importantly, however, she visited Jacaré’s surviving children in Brazil.

In the end, Welles no longer ﬁlmed things «exactly as it was», says the author but «as it is». She divined it more than she knows; and she allows such presentiments to prevail. This led to the creation of a slim, thoughtful, contemplative and sensitive work: wonderful literature. The moment when Jacaré disappeared into the waves stretches over a summer into eternity. Like Madame Nielsen, Carmen Stephan also knows that «only the narrative exists».

Madame Nielsen: The Endless Summer. Translated by Gaye Kynoch. Open Letter, 2018. (Den Endeløse Sommer was published in 2014). Carmen Stephan. It’s All True. S. Fischer Verlag, 2017.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

***

120 FAMILY AFFAIRS

By Beat Mazenauer

Families fuel literary inspiration like no other subject. Which youngster hasn’t come into conﬂict with parent’s values and expectations? Which couple has lived happily ever after without arguments? This is the stuff of books and makes for epic tales and intimate literature.

Marie-Jeann Urech: Schnitz

The French-Swiss writer Marie-Jeanne Urech narrates a gruesome and oblique variation on the theme. In her novel «Schnitz» (original: «Les Valets de nuit»), she creates a world that seems absurd and alien and yet reveals a realistic core. The novel tells the story of the Chagrin family who ﬁght the sudden loss of family fortune. They can scarcely make ends meet with several jobs which they do around the clock. Every week, a dubious black character knocks on the front door to demand the continually sky-rocketing interest for the men in the glass towers. The twins Zobeline and Yapaklu particularly suffer from this situation. The school bus has not stopped in their district for a long time, so they roam around and discover a wonderful pommes-frites machine. Another bizarre ﬁgure belongs to the household – Philanthropie, who rolls around in her soft layers of fat, and reclines majestically on her sofa while eating delicate millefeuilles (or Schnitz as they are called). But Philanthropie bewitches the neighbourhood with her singing every evening.

The family sticks together and is a germ cell of resistance against the men in glass towers and their thieving system. Finally, when even her house even must be cleared, Phil- anthropie makes a powerful appearance. She refuses to be carried out of the house.

Marie-Jeanne Urech’s narrative is exuberant and fairy-tale-like as well as discreetly political. Precisely this aspect attests to her subversive love of storytelling,as her previous books already prove, like the parable «Mein sehr lieber Herr Schönegel». Her stories always contain a surplus of unfathomable humour that is never entirely resolved in a conclusive interpretation.

121 In this regard, «Schnitz» is reminiscent of the masters of grotesque like Charms, Kafka or Vian.

The family‘s hope that the «wind will change» and drive away the shadows holds them together. In a dream, they are touched by a bright light of recognition, as the lights suddenly go out in the glass towers. «It’s not a power cut that shrouds people in darkness,» a nice «black man» whispers to them, «but a lack of clear vision». It would be nice, if it were true.

At the end, when a great earth tremor shakes the world, the Chagrin family ﬁnds their Neverland inside the pommes-frites machine whose bright lights illuminate the dark night.

Ilinca Florian: Als wir das Lügen lernten

What Marie-Jeanne Urech describes as a political parable was a bitter reality for families living under the regime of Conduc˘ator Ceausescu. Bucharest-born writer Ilinca Florian relates in her debut novel how in those days even children learned to lie. Children and fools tell the truth – goes the popular saying. But such openness can be fatal in the orbit of the Romanian Securitate. However, the ﬁrst-person narrator, a six-year-old cheeky kid, doesn’t ﬁnd it easy to stop her blabbering mouth. So, her inquisitive questions often go unanswered, even when politics is not the subject. Why does mother’s voice always sound so soft when she telephones uncle?

Ilinca Florian consistently adheres to the child’s perspective in her narrative. She is interested in childish readings and the mean tricks with her cousin. If she wants something, the narrator shouts it out, or screams and stamps until her wish is fulﬁlled. She doesn’t exactly know what it’s all about with Conduc˘ator Ceausescu or the Securitate. She can only tell what she observes, for example, when her mother’s mood darkens, or when her father talks about emigrating again – the young kid isn’t supposed to breathe a word about this. But the narrator precisely registers the tensions and crises within the family; these are not only related to politics. This is exactly why the concentration on her childish observation gains political explosiveness.

122 Apart from a few isolated exceptions, Ilinca Florian also skilfully maintains this kind of opaque childish perspective with her language. It takes a little time to get the measure of this book and gradually to appreciate how ﬁne cracks open and subtly produce a tense and stimulating pattern that apparently ﬁzzles out on Christmas Day 1989 with a political implosion.

Ilinca Florian is particularly at her best with alert observations that the narrator uses with the aim of understanding through childish temperament what goes on around her: when her mother tries to calm down with a cigarette, or the aunt tries to conceal a secret. Children don’t lie, even if they must learn how to lie – that’s the conclusion we can draw from this prose. Kids merely have lively fantasy.

Katharina Hacker: Alix, Anton und die anderen

Katharina Hacker’s books also convey a melancholy mood. She has a weakness for family relationships and friendships, almost like no other writer. Her prose shows her writer’s affection for her characters. In «Alix, Anton und die anderen» as well as «Die Erdbeeren von Antons Mutter» she unfolds a wonderful panorama of friendship with delicate empiricism.

Alix, Anton, Bernd and Jan form a circle of friends who try to comfort each other about their dwindling courage to face life. Anton is a doctor and longs for family happiness late in life. Jan also has a psychoanalyst’s practice and is married to Alix who suffers from mental instability. Finally, Bernd has a bookshop, and he is looking for a partner since his boyfriend left him. They are all lonely, so they visit each other frequently and regularly meet for dinner with Alix’s parents Clara and Heinrich.

«Anton, Alix und die anderen» is a book about anxieties, dreams and the painfully vanishing claims on happiness. This sounds sad, but in Katharina Hacker’s script it attains a delicate precision and consolation, which lets us participate in this book, as if we were visiting friends. The narrator observes the rule of friendship when she stays loyal to her characters on good and bad days.

123 Katharina Hacker’s narrative style is nicely economical. She draws the ﬁne allusion of a long story. This also applies for the sequel «Die Erdbeeren von Antons Mutter» in which the existential problems become more acute. Anton takes centre stage; he has met Lydia who is a doctor, like him. She helps him to overcome the paralyzing loneliness. However, their shared happiness is jeopardized by the destruction of a strawberry ﬁeld which deeply unnerves Anton’s mother who suffers from dementia. Filled with unrest and fear, she senses that her life is slipping away. The precise accounts of her dementia certainly get under the skin. But nothing simply gets lost – perhaps superhuman courage can overcome the drag of transience and disappointment. Anton, Lydia and the others want to try.

Katharina Hacker doesn’t waste many words. With ﬁne, attentive strokes she embeds her characters in an intensive portrait of the mid-forties generation. Their lives are not lost, but their opportunities are diminishing. This is exceptional narrative art! And this is the spirit that lends her intimate book a hint of greatness and worldliness.

Marie-Jeanne Urech: Schnitz. Novel. Translated from French (Les Valets de nuit) by Lis Künzli. Bilger Verlag, Zurich 2017. Ilinca Florian: Als wir das Lügen lernten. Novel. Karl Rauch Verlag, 2018. Katharina Hacker: Alix, Anton und die anderen. Novel. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 2009. Katharina Hacker: Die Erdbeeren von Antons Mutter. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2010.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

***

ALICE ZENITER: L’ART DE PERDRE – THE ART OF LOSING

By Katja Petrovic

«You lose what is not communicated; it’s as simple as that», according to Alice Zeniter’s ﬁfth novel «L’art de perdre»– The Art of Losing. However, the 31-year-old writer didn’t wish to make it quite so simple. She traced her Algerian roots and

124 has written a thrilling family saga about the Algerian war and its consequences.

For a long time, Algeria meant nothing to Naïma other than a background where her grandfather’s story once happened. In 2015 when the attacks in Paris rekindle all the questions about national identity and the failed integration of immi- grants, Naïma’s origins also come into sharper focus. What does Algeria mean for her? And for her family? How did she experience the Algerian war, the arrival in France and living here as a migrant?

She cannot ask her grandfather, Ali, who grew up in a Kabylic mountain village, because he has long since passed away. Her grandmother, Yema, hardly speaks any French, and after escaping from Algeria she turned her homeland into a fairy- tale land. Her father Hamid, who spent his early years in Algeria and travelled with his family to France in 1962, has no desire even to talk about this story. So, what should she do? Alice Zeniter gives the answer to this in her novel: «Research and ﬁction are the only things that are able to break the silence that has been handed down for generations».

This turned into the impressive story of three generations of the Zekkar family. It started in Algeria in the 1930s where Ali first became a winner, then a loser of history. An olive press that floated in after a storm makes the impoverished farmer’s son a rich olive oil dealer and a respected personality in his village. However, in the early 1950s when the conflict intensifies between Algeria and France, Ali decides for the ‘wrong side’, as it is later described in the history books. Instead of fighting for Algerian independence,he sides against the National Liberation Front (FNL) alongside the French occupiers and becomes a Harki. Threatened by the FNL, in 1962 he escapes with his family to France where he is by no means welcomed with open arms. At first, the family finds temporary accommodation in a transit camp, then in a miserable suburb in Normandy. Ali is deprived of his last remnants of dignity by working in a factory.

His son Hamid tries to break away from this environment. The second part of the novel is entitled «Cold France». However, Hamid is a ﬁghter; he works hard at school, trying

125 not to be downtrodden by the coldness and racism in France during the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, he learns how at some point the hatred turns against him and his homeland:

«When I was in college, Hamid recalls many years later, I pinned a world map in my room to study for an assignment. One evening, I came home and Algeria had been burned off with a cigarette butt – all that remained was a round hole.

–Who did that?, asks Naïma.

– Your grandfather, I guess...»

Later, Hamidrefuses to celebrate Ramadan; he reads Marx and protests for Vietnam’s independence. Things reach a breaking point between Hamid and his father. His son wants to know why he didn’t ﬁght for Algerian independence.

«Ali no longer understands anything anymore. Neither why he ﬁrst had to demonstrate his unconditional love of France, which made an ideological straight line out of his course, nor why his son now asked him to admit that he subjected himself to an omnipresent and changing power. Why does nobody concede he was right to have hesitated? To have changed his mind? To have weighed up the for and against? Is it really so easy for the others?»

But this is not good enough for Hamid who has enough doubts of his own. However, his need to rebel ceased with his marriage to the French woman Clarisse. When she confronts him about his past, he withdraws and a torturous season of silence begins. The journey to Algeria is repeatedly postponed and ﬁnally cancelled in 1997 when Naïma’s cousin is stabbed on the street by an Islamist during the Algerian civil war. Hamid declares that he would like nothing to do with this country.

So, Naïma must search for her own Algeria. Ultimately, she ﬁnds fragments during a trip to Algiers, where she is looking for works by an Algerian artist for a retrospective show planned by the Parisian gallery that she works for. Algeria of the intellectuals, artists and activists that has nothing in common with the rural Algeria «where everyone worried about olives. Instead of following the trail of her father

126 and grandfather, she is perhaps about to establish her own relationship to Algeria, a relationship that is neither necessary nor determined by her roots.»

However, there is no happy ending in Zeniter’s story because «Naïma arrived nowhere, she keeps moving and travels onwards.» The success of this novel is its openness and the nuanced approach that Zeniter dedicates to this French taboo subject. Ali, Hamid and Naïma are three characters, three eras and three parts of French-Arabic history that are described without prejudices and easily accessible to the reader.

Translated by Suzanne Kirkbright

127 128 THANKS

Thanks to to the team of ELiT Literature House Europe Daniela Freistetter, Jochen Gruber, Klaus Moser, Barbara Pluch, Nora Wenzler in Krems and Birgit Politycki in Hamburg.

Planning and Organization ELiT Literature House Europe:

NÖ Festival und Kino GmbH Minoritenplatz 4, 3500 Krems Telephone: +43 (0) 2732/90 80 33 Fax: +43 (0) 2732/90 80 31 Email: [email protected]

129 Kesselhaus Cinema, Krems

130 ROKFOR

Neugier ROKFOR ist eine Software, die Bücher und 123 Kompetenzen 123 THEMA andere Drucksachen produzieren kann. Hinter Rokfor stehen Gina Bucher, ROKFOR Redaktion, Urs Hofer, Programmierung, Interessen und Rafael Koch, Gestaltung. 123

MATERIALSAMMLUNG METHODE suchen Insbesondere möglichst große und Das Material ﬂießt in eine Datenbank, heterogene Datenmengen sind für die online gesteuert wird. Inhaltliche Rokfor interessant – unabhängig und formale Strukturen werden als davon, ob es sich um Text oder Bild Regeln formuliert, die logisch nach- oder beides handelt. Wir analysieren vollziehbar sind und Algorithmen das Material auf explizite als auch entsprechen. Um Inhalte zu katego- implizite Zusammenhänge. Zentral 123 risieren, können verschiedene Tools sind dabei Fragen wie: Welche eingesetzt werden, z.B. Listen, Ordnung führt zu Wissensgewinn? MATERIALSAMMLUNG Stichwortmasken oder Selektoren. Wie kann via Struktur eine Narration Rokfor besitzt auch die Fähigkeit, aufgebaut werden? Welche Stich- semantische Zusammenhänge als wörter verbinden den Text? Ziel ist 123 Netzstrukturen darzustellen, um es, dem Leser mehrere Zugänge zum komplexe Abhängigkeiten zwischen Inhalt zu verschaffen. analysieren Materialien abzubilden.

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Konzept 13 IDEE 123 Methode

1 123

Verlag 1 Geldgeber Datenbank 1 Inhalt 1 Algorithmus 3 Form

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1 Layout-Templates 2 Gestaltungsregeln formulieren

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INHALT, ALGORITHMUS, FORM ERGEBNIS Rokfor betrachtet automatisiertes testing Im Zusammenspiel von Gestaltung und Design als einen alternativen Zugang testing Programmierung werden die Layout- zu Gestaltung. Durch automatisierte testing Templates entwickelt. Das letztlich Prozesse ergeben sich neue maschinell hergestellte Dokument Begründungen für gestalterische kann so immer wieder neu generiert Entscheidungen. Ideen für Regeln, werden – mit unterschiedlichen In- auf denen automatisiertes Design halten und veränderten Regeln. Rokfor basiert, beinhalten unter anderem 123 stellt die Arbeit des Gestalters nicht Zufälle und Unschärfen durch infrage, sondern gewichtet den algorithmische Positionierung und Arbeitsprozess anders. Die Arbeit Skalierung einzelner Elemente. verschiebt sich von der Gestaltung Zusätzlich beeinﬂussen klassische einzelner Dokumente zur Gestaltung Raster- und Layout-Systeme die 13 eines einzigen Regelwerks für das Entwicklung von Algorithmen. komplette Ergebnis. Inhalt Form

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PRODUKTION Ein Klick auf Vorschau oder Document Export erzeugt ein PDF. ERGEBNIS 3 123 Die modulare Struktur erlaubt es Produktion NEU auch andere Formate, beispielsweise START Webseiten, zu produzieren.

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