The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Eastern Europe II

ALBANIA

Under the rule of Enver Hoxha from the end of World War II until his death in 1985, Albania was the most isolated nation in Europe, a totalitarian state essentially cut off from the rest of the world. Even its closest allies, the Soviet Union and then China, began to distance themselves when they began to liberalize after the deaths of Stalin and Mao. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Albania there was less emphasis on fostering the arts than in many Communist nations, but stricter adherence to socialist realism. Even in the post-Communist era, Albania supports only a relatively small literary scene.

Some officially sanctioned literature was occasionally made available in translation by the Albanian authorities before 1990, such as some of the works by Dritëro Agolli (b. 1931), who, as the longtime head of the national Writers’ Union, was the regime’s standard-bearer, but he seems to have been able to move beyond the ideological limitations Albania imposed after its fall. The dominant figure of modern Albanian literature has long been Ismail Kadare (b. 1936). (Note, however, that the majority of the English versions of Kadare’s books have been translated from the French translations, not from the original Albanian.) Kadare’s international success and renown presumably allowed him more freedom in what he wrote than was afforded to most other writers, but this did not prevent some of his work from being banned. Most of his criticism of Albanian conditions in his carefully conceived fiction is veiled, with much of his writing allegorical and set long in the past.

Kadare uses historical events simply as a starting point in many of his novels, ranging from Pharaoh Cheops’s grand project in The Pyramid (1992, English 1996) to minor episodes like a research trip to Albania by two scholars in the 1930s seeking to unravel the enigma of Homer’s oral epics in The File on H. (1980, English 1998). At his most creative, Kadare offers free fantasies such as The Palace of Dreams (1980, English 1993), which describes an Ottoman state with a bureaucracy for handling all its citizens’ dreams. This is also one of his novels that was banned in Albania shortly after its publication. In the novel, the protagonist, Mark-Alem, who comes from an illustrious family, begins work in the Tabir Sarrail, the government institution that is the “Palace of Dreams.” Dreams are collected, sorted, and analyzed here, ostensibly to root out crimes or conspiracies, and as Mark-Alem rises through the ranks in the mysterious organization, he finds just how far the state’s reach extends.

Living in exile in France since 1990, Kadare has since written more directly about Albania, most notably in The Successor (2003, English 2005), based on the actual mysterious 1981 death of the designated successor to Hoxha, Mehmet Shehu, and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2000, English 2002), which considers more recent changes in Albania. While the death at the heart of The Successor first is officially described as a suicide, in fact, it is unclear whether the successor took his own life or was murdered. Kadare revisits the case from a variety of perspectives (including, ultimately, the Successor’s own, from beyond the grave), making for a chilling and disturbing portrait of an isolated totalitarian society dominated by uncertainty.

From the Greek government’s zealous opposition to the name of the Republic of Macedonia to Serbian claims on Kosovo, territorial and ethnic issues remain extremely sensitive in this volatile region, and divergent historical claims are a constant source of antagonism. Kadare has been criticized for the strident nationalism evident in some of his works, notably The File on H. and some of the other fiction from the Hoxha years, but foreign readers may well find that it offers an authentic Balkan feel. While this nationalism cannot be entirely disregarded or excused, it should not be allowed to blot out the entirety of his work.

The Loser (1992, English 2007) is currently the only one of Fatos Kongoli’s (b. 1944) novels available in English translation. It is a remarkable though bleak account of one man’s life, symptomatic of a whole nation crushed by totalitarianism. Already extensively translated into other languages, more of the talented Kongoli’s work should also soon become available in English.

CONTEMPORARY ALBANIAN FICTION

The anthology Balkan Beauty, Balkan Blood (English 2006), edited by Robert Elsie, is the best overall introduction to contemporary Albanian fiction. The fourteen stories include a few published before the end of the Hoxha regime, including Dritëro Agolli’s “The Appassionata,” which describes the consequences of personal desires and ambitions in this tightly controlled state. Three stories are by Ylljet Aliçka (b. 1951), of which “The Slogans in Stone,” about a schoolteacher sent to a remote region to tend to what amounts to a garden of slogans set in stones, stands out; it is also the basis for the film Slogans (2001), directed by Gjergj Xhuvani.

Ivan Vazov’s (1850–1921) classic Under the Yoke (1893, English 1894, 1955, 2004) revolves around the 1876 uprising against the Ottomans, who then still ruled much of the Balkans. This remains Bulgaria’s foremost national novel, and only very little Bulgarian fiction has been translated into English since then.

Angel Wagenstein (b. 1922) is better known abroad as a screenwriter, and even though it is a bit old-fashioned, his Farewell, Shanghai (2004, English 2007) is a spirited saga of the lives of Europeans who fled the Nazis and sought refuge in Shanghai before and during World War II. Wagenstein’s stories are crowded and fast moving, as is also Isaac’s Torah (2000, English 2008), which describes the life of an Eastern European Jew, beginning with his youth in a town that was then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but in turn becomes part of Poland, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. A saga of the century that leads Isaac through the world wars and both Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, it is a story of the Eastern European Jewish experience, told with a great deal of humor.

Whereas Wagenstein is an author of the old school, focusing on Jewish experiences with an emphasis on telling compelling stories, Georgi Gospodinov’s (b. 1968) works are more contemporary in both form and content. And Other Stories (2001, English 2007) is a small collection of very short stories in which Gospodinov toys with a variety of ideas, using inventive premises and getting straight to their point. In “Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots,” only three pages long, he has two strangers, a man and a woman waiting at the airport, invent memories of a lifetime together, both the past and the future. It is a beautiful little piece that captures both the impossibility and the realization of true love.

Gospodinov’s Natural Novel (1999, English 2005) is a more extended postmodern game, a domestic story—the narrator’s marriage is collapsing—that is full of digressions and observations. The narrator is also a writer, and his personal crisis extends to his work, making the novel a meditation on writing as well. The Physics of Sorrow (2011, English 2015) is even more overtly autobiographical. In this ambitious novel, Gospodinov deftly merges personal experience, Bulgarian history, and the Greek legend of the Minotaur and his labyrinth.

• Vladislav Todorov’s (b. 1956) pulp noir Zift (2006, English 2010) is set in the early 1960s, when its narrator, known as “Moth,” emerges from prison into the socialist reality of that time after serving two decades for a crime he did not commit.

• Alek Popov’s (b. 1966) comic novel Mission London (2001, English 2014) describes the misadventures of the newly arrived Bulgarian ambassador in London.

The Romanian writers who are the most widely recognized and influential abroad are also those who left the country and wrote in French and German: playwright Eugene Ionesco (1909–1994), E. M. Cioran (1911–1995), and poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) also settled abroad, and though best known as a scholar of religion and mythology, he wrote several novels as well, continuing intermittently to write fiction in Romanian while abroad. The layered mysteries of The Old Man and the Bureaucrats (1968, English 1979) are an intriguing take on totalitarian Romania, and Youth Without Youth (1979, English 1988) is a rather odd novel of ideas (complete with Nazi conspiracy), in which an old man is rejuvenated by a lightning strike. Eliade’s most successful novel is The Forbidden Forest (English 1978), first published in French in 1955, in which he uses symbolism and mythology to chronicle the struggles of his protagonist in a Romania and Europe that are collapsing with the approach and then the explosion of World War II.

Among the earliest of Eliade’s works is the autobiographical Bengal Nights (1933, English 1993), describing an affair he had with a young woman while living in India. Remarkably, the woman, the Bengali author Maitreyi Devi (1914–1990), came across the novel decades later and, after meeting Eliade again at the University of Chicago in 1973, wrote her own fictionalized version of their relationship, It Does Not Die (1974, English 1976). The two novels offer fascinating contrasting accounts, as does the local reception of each, with Maitreyi making Eliade promise that no English translation of his novel would appear before her death, thus making her version the only one with which Indian readers were familiar for two decades, much as Romanian readers had long known only Eliade’s.

Foreign influence and experience also are evident in the work of Gellu Naum (1915–2001), one of several Romanian authors of the prewar avant-garde who adopted surrealism. My Tired Father (1972, English 1999) is a collage of prose fragments, more poem than autobiographical narrative, and the novel Zenobia (1985, English 1995) is a full-length work of fiction that constantly challenges the reader with its dreamlike evocations and shifting realities. The protagonist—the author himself, using his own name—invents and uses this Zenobia as a love object in a book that seems to move in and out of his control.

Although Norman Manea (b. 1936) published extensively in Romania, his work was censored. He went into exile in 1986. Manea’s novel The Black Envelope (1986, English 1995) is ambitious in its presentation, and the description of its disgraced protagonist’s quests, based on his investigation of his father’s death decades earlier, make for a sharp picture of 1980s Romania. His novel of exile, The Lair (2009, English 2012), presents intellectual life both under the Ceauşescu regime and in American exile, to which his characters adapt very differently. One of the figures is a thinly disguised stand-in for Mircea Eliade. The novel circles repeatedly back over events and episodes, with history—both personal and national—continuing to weigh on the characters, making it difficult for them to move on.

Manea’s collection of stories, October, Eight O’Clock (1981, English 1992), with its tales of youth in wartime and then of the totalitarian state that arose in the postwar years, and the four longer works in Compulsory Happiness (1989, English 1993) are more focused, offering examples of both the burden of having survived in a concentration camp and the absurdities of life in totalitarian Romania.

Filip Florian’s (b. 1968) Little Fingers (2005, English 2009) and The Days of the King (2008, English 2011) are among the rare recent novels to come out of Romania. In Little Fingers, the discovery of a mass grave during an archaeological dig sets the action in motion. The remains are said to be hundreds of years old, but the locals believe they are more recent. This premise is less the foundation of a mystery to be solved than an opportunity for Florian to allow a number of voices and stories to unfold. The Days of the King is lighter, set in Bucharest during the second half of the nineteenth century. In the novel, a German dentist, Joseph Strauss, comes to the city—which he had never even heard of before—and sees its transformation into a cultured European capital.

Leading contemporary Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu’s (b. 1956) Nostalgia (1989, English 1995) is a story collection called a novel and is yet another Romanian work of fiction with a very surreal feel to it, grounded in Bucharest in the 1980s. Cărtărescu’s major work, his Blinding trilogy (1996–2007, English, first volume, 2013), takes place in the Communist Romania where Cărtărescu grew up, but he transcends and transforms it into a literarily ambitious work that extends into the surreal.

WRITERS FROM ROMANIA’S GERMAN- AND HUNGARIAN-SPEAKING COMMUNITIES

Romania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still has large German- and Hungarian-speaking communities, from which a number of writers have emerged. Herta Müller (b. 1953), the 2009 Nobel laureate, and her then husband, Richard Wagner (b. 1952), left Romania in 1987, and both have established themselves as leading German authors. Both Attila Bartis (b. 1968) and György Dragomán (b. 1973) are now up-and-coming authors living in Hungary. Among their books available in English, Müller’s The Land of Green Plums (1994, English 1996), Wagner’s Exit (1988, English 1990), and Dragomán’s The White King (2005, English 2007) offer good portraits of life in Communist Romania.

• D. R. Popescu’s (b. 1935) The Royal Hunt (1973, English 1985) is a harsh allegory of Romanian conditions in the 1950s, which, like the fiction of Eliade and Naum, moves far beyond simple realism.

• Dumitru Tsepeneag’s (b. 1937) works have roots in the avant-garde tradition. Examples are Pigeon Post (1989, English 2008), which explores writing a book that the longtime French exile wrote in French (and first published under the pseudonym Ed Pastenague), and his book of variations, Vain Art of the Fugue (1991, English 2007).

For some decades, Yugoslavia may have been a unified state, but it was always multilingual. In the wake of its collapse, the linguistic divisions have been accentuated, with Serbo-Croatian now more emphatically divided into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. But even in the Yugoslavian period, other, quite different, languages also had significant numbers of speakers, notably Slovenian, Albanian, and Macedonian. Serbo-Croatian, however, dominated what was known abroad as Yugoslavian literature.

Croatian author Miroslav Krleža’s (1893–1981) novels of the period between the wars describe the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, from the existential questioning of the painter-protagonist who returns to his hometown after spending years abroad in The Return of Philip Latinovicz (1932, English 1959) to a lawyer’s futile struggle against the widespread corruption of the society around him that leaves him, as the title of the novel explains, On the Edge of Reason (1938, English 1976). The Banquet in Blitva (1938/1962, English 2004) is an intense and all-too-plausible political farce pitting the fictional Baltic nations of Blitva and Blatvia against each other. Unfortunately, the English translation does not include the last of the original three volumes, and none of Krleža’s multivolume Zastave (1967/1976), set in Croatia between 1912 and 1922, is yet available in English.

Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić (1892–1975) is best known for the works he wrote during World War II, as well as The Bridge on the Drina (1945, English 1959), a historical novel spanning several centuries and built on stories centered on the famous bridge. Both of Meša Selimović’s (1910–1982) novels, Death and the Dervish (1966, English 1996) and The Fortress (1970, English 1999), are set in historic Sarajevo. In Death and the Dervish, a Sufi dervish tries, in a sustained nightmare of frustration, to save his brother from a death sentence for a crime that is never specified. The Fortress is not quite as dark, describing Selimović’s moral protagonist’s struggles in a largely immoral world in which the individual is nearly crushed by the government’s overwhelming forces that do not have to answer to its citizens and that lead by poor example.

Though not a full-fledged exile—he frequently returned to Yugo-slavia—Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) spent much of his life in France. His writing evolved from book to book, showing a variety of influences from James Joyce through Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges. His work set around World War II, including the powerfully understated novel of a childhood experience of the war, Garden, Ashes (1965, English 1975), as well as Hourglass (1972, English 1990), is based on his and his family’s experiences. The father in Garden, Ashes is the central figure in Hourglass, though identified only by his initials, E. S., until he signs his name, Eduard, in a concluding letter. Much of this complex fiction, a study of the impossibility of trying to fully understand another person, is presented in the form of an interrogation. Among Kiš’s later fiction is the more overtly political A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976, English 1978), a collection of portraits of revolutionaries and their fates that uses much factual and documentary material to indict Stalinism.

Borislav Pekić’s (1930–1992) major works are characterized by the author’s tremendous range. The Time of Miracles (1965, English 1976) is a radical revision of the life of Jesus, particularly the miracles he performed, and his death—with Simon of Cyrene crucified in his stead. The tragic-comic novel The Houses of Belgrade (now published as Houses; 1970, English 1978) connects the city’s history with a protagonist who has spent decades sequestered in his home before venturing out into the Belgrade of 1968. The epistolary novel How to Quiet a Vampire (1977, English 2004) is about personal demons, not actual vampires, but is no less gripping for that. It tells the story of Konrad Rutkowski, a professor who was once an SS and Gestapo officer who is traveling to a Mediterranean resort town for a vacation twenty years after the end of the war and confronts his Nazi past there. A philosophical exploration of Nazism and personal responsibility dressed up to feel almost scholarly, this is nevertheless also a compelling personal story.

Milorad Pavić (1929–2009) experimented with a variety of nonlinear and interactive fiction throughout his career. His encyclopedic cross-referencing Dictionary of the Khazars (1984, English 1988) is the most successful of these works, but the formal experiments of novels that allow for different readings, such as Landscape Painted with Tea (1988, English 1990), which is presented as a sort of crossword puzzle, and the “Tarot novel” Last Love in Constantinople (1994, English 1998), in which the reader may read the different chapters in the order designated by laying out a pack of tarot cards, are interesting examples of the possibilities of hypertexts. Several of these books are also published in separate “male” and “female” versions, though the textual differences between them are, in fact, minimal. Pavić’s attention to narrative and story and his ability to craft his puzzles on these solid foundations make these works more appealing than most such fiction.

The protracted dissolution of Yugoslavia began in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia, and then Macedonia, declared their independence. Several of the region’s most prominent authors have emigrated since then, notably David Albahari (b. 1948), Dubravka Ugrešić (b. 1949), and Slavenka Drakulić (b. 1949). Especially in the heart of the former Yugoslavia, the extended conflict among ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups has strongly colored much of the recent fiction by the writers still living there.

Dubravka Ugrešić and Drakulić have also written a considerable amount of nonfiction, often based on their own experiences and observations, and much of Ugrešić’s fiction is only a small step removed from this. Her Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988, English 1991), a novel about the international community of writers, written and set in a time when there still was a divide between East and West, is a good point of reference, and her later works then consider the changing circumstances in Europe. Both The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996, English 1998) and The Ministry of Pain (2004, English 2005) examine the experiences of the East European exile. Ugrešić describes in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, while also mixing in essayistic digressions, the work of artists like Ilya Kabakov who are trying to hold on to the past or to re-create it She presents modern rootlessness and the loss of home and identity in different combinations, using examples of exiles adjusting to and hiding behind layers of identity.

Words Are Something Else (English 2003) includes selections from five of David Albahari’s collections of stories. All were written before he moved to Canada and first were published between 1973 and 1993. It is a very good introduction to this writer, with several of the pieces dealing with his family and his relationship with them, as well as short examples of his narrative techniques. A more sustained effort about dealing with his father’s death, as well as the difficulties of writing about it (or, indeed, anything) can be found in the short but dense Tsing (1988, English 1997). Bait (1996, English 2001) explores memory in the context of a parent’s death. Snow Man (1995, English 2005), despite its potentially off-putting presentation as a single unbroken paragraph, is a darkly comic novel of the frustrations of exile, writing, and academia. Besides the story collections, Götz and Meyer (1998, English 2004) is Albahari’s most approachable work. It is a disturbing examination of the routine of mass murder under the Nazis. Its eponymous protagonists are mere cogs in the killing machinery but, as Albahari insists, share in the responsibility.

• Among the works from the region deal directly with the Yugoslavian civil wars of the 1990s are Nenad Veličković’s (b. 1962) Lodgers (1995, English 2005), a teenager’s account of Sarajevo under siege, and Miljenko Jergović’s (b. 1966) celebrated collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro (1994, English 2004).

• Zoran Živković (b. 1948) is the author of ambitious science fiction, especially the complicated novel The Fourth Circle (1993, English 2004) and the bookish crime novel The Last Book (2007, English 2008).

• Zoran Ferić’s (b. 1961) novel The Death of the Little Match Girl (2002, English 2007) takes place in 1992 and is a microcosm of Yugoslavia’s transitional period.

• Muharem Bazdulj’s (b. 1977) entertaining collection The Second Book (2000, English 2005) contains many stories based on historical figures, from Nietzsche to William and Henry James to an Egyptian pharaoh.

Slovenia broke free of Yugoslavia relatively easily and, with its border and close ties to Austria and Italy, was also readily integrated into the Europe Union in 2004. Only a few works of fiction from there have been translated, however. Boris Pahor (b. 1913) is the best-known Slovene author of the twentieth century. Born in Trieste when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he has spent most of his life in Italy, but his 1967 memoir about his experiences in several Nazi concentration camps, Pilgrim Among the Shadows (now published as Necropolis; English 1995), is his only work available in translation.

Drago Jančar’s (b. 1948) Northern Lights (1984, English 2001) sends its protagonist to the city of Maribor in the tense, unreal time of 1938 in an evocative novel of the prewar period. Mocking Desire (1993, English 1998) has a visiting Slovenian author, Gregor Gradnik, teaching creative writing in New Orleans, thereby allowing for both a novel of clashing cultures and meditations on literature and melancholy, with Robert Burton’s seventeenth-century classic, The Anatomy of Melancholy, as a guiding text for its protagonist.

• Andrej Blatnik’s (b. 1963) short books of stories include Skinswaps (1990, English 1998) and You Do Understand (2009, English 2010).

Some of Miha Mazzini’s (b. 1961) entertaining works are readily accessible in English, including The King of the Rattling Spirits (2001, English 2004), a coming-of-age novel set in the Yugoslavia of the 1970s. The Cartier Project (1987, English 2004), reportedly one of the bestselling Slovene books ever, is an amusing look at the country in decline in the 1980s. The narrator, Egon, has learned the tricks of getting by but manages little else in the dank and dreary world he inhabits. His one indulgence is perfume, specifically the foreign, decadent luxury of the brand called Cartier, and one of the novel’s plotlines involves his efforts to get more of it. Less tied to locale, Mazzini’s Guarding Hanna (2000, English 2002) is about a disfigured mob enforcer who spent little of his adult life in proximity to other but was forced to protect a witness in close quarters for a week. Mazzini has fun with this premise, as Hanna also becomes the narrator’s protector by showing him the ways of the world from which he has been isolated.

Goce Smilevski’s (b. 1975) novel Conversation with Spinoza (2002, English 2006) is hardly a regional work but stands out among the little recent Macedonian fiction available in translation. Biographical and, not surprisingly, philosophical, it is essentially a reflection both of and on Spinoza’s life and philosophy. By directly addressing both the reader and Spinoza in parts of the novel, Smilevski also creates an unusual sense of immediacy.

Smilevski’s Freud’s Sister (2007, revised 2010, English 2012) is a lesser work but has attracted much more interest and has been widely translated. Its subject matter is sensational: four of Sigmund Freud’s sisters died in Nazi concentration camps, and the novel’s central question is why Freud failed to ensure that they, too, could escape Nazi-occupied Austria, as he managed to do so with his family. The novel is narrated by one of those sisters, Adolfina (Esther Adolfine), about whom very little is known. This allows Smilevski considerable liberties, but the novel’s ambitions—among other things, it is a portrait of an epoch (painter Gustav Klimt’s sister is a close friend of Adolfina’s), a commentary on how mental illness was regarded and treated in those times, as well as an attempt to fathom Freud’s horrible final betrayal—pull it in different directions. Already revised in the original and further edited in its English translation, Freud’s Sister feels almost too polished. With his story also based so closely on a devastating historical fact—Freud’s apparent abandonment of his sisters—Smilevski also makes the very dubious choice of sending Adolfina to her death in the gas chambers with her sisters, though in fact she was not included on the transports from Theresienstadt, where they were originally interned, perishing there instead.