"Zlatka" by Maja Hrgovic (2012) Project 196 - Croatia

                                                           Croatia

Project 196, my attempt to read and post on a short story from each of the 196 countries of the world, will run up until November 15, 2016.  So far I have covered 36 countries.  It may not be possible to complete this.  In covering South America, I was unable to find online in Englsh short stories by authors from Suriname and Paraquay. I will check periodically for newly published works and am open to referrals.   I have decided to do a tour of countries on the Adriatic Sea, inspired by Ruffington Bousweau's classic (1937) travel book, Adriatic Agonies. 

Croatia has been a place of turmoil and sectarian violence for a long time.  Like the last story I posted on for Project 196, set in contemporary Montenegro, "Zlatka" is another story centering around a character's attempt to deal with the urban decay brought on by long years of unrest, poverty, and war. "Zlatka" is set in the capital of Croatia, Zagreb.  In a captivating very sensuous open sequence the female narrator is in a salon getting her hair washed  by Zlatka, a very attractive woman.  Later that night the narrator goes to a nightclub she often frequents. The walk to get their through a poetically rendered urban miasma of blight is really brilliant.  The nightclub is a place to get drunk amidst the techno-blast.  She by coincidence runs into the woman who earlier in the day did her hair.  They become lovers in an exquisitely rendered scene.  The presence of Zlatka's daughter is a marvelous touch that adds great poignancy and reality to the story.  There are great mysteries left untold in this marvelous story.  

"Zlatka" is about escaping pain and loneliness in sensation, about growing up in an urban nightmare world.   

I read this story in Best European Fiction 2012.

Maja Hrgović

MAJA HRGOVIĆ was born in Split, Croatia, in 1980. She studied theatre and women's studies. Since 2003 she has worked as a journalist in the culture section of the Novi List Daily, and from 2005 to 2008 she was a member of the editorial board at Zarez, a Journal of Cultural and Social Affairs, where she publishes literary reviews.

In 2009 she was awarded first prize for journalistic excellence by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). Her work has also been published in magazines and news portals such as Nulačetvorka,Cunterview, Kulturpunkt, Op.a, Grazia, andLibela. She regularly writes for the portalZamirzine, focusing on women's rights and their treatment in the media. Her first collection of short stories Pobjeđuje onaj kojem je manje stalo was published in 2010.

I have located one of her short stories online and will soon read it.

Within a Budding Grove - Vol.II of Remembrance of Things Past- by Marcel Proust 1919

Rembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust is one of the supreme artistic achievements of the European Tradition. I think the primary reason it is more admired from afar than read is the daughting length of the seven volumes.   This serves to limit the work's audience largely to those with a generous amount of time for serious reading.  

Here are some of the many things I really liked in Within a Budding Grove, Vol II of the novel.

The sensibility of the narrator becomes more and more refined as he gets older.  Beauty in many forms deeply moves him. As the volume opens thanks to a family friend the narrator makes a visit to the theater to see a famous actress preform.  In one very erotically charged scene the narrator wrestles with the daughter of the Swanns and has his first orgasm on this occasion.  The narrator begins to explore his sexual feelings as the story progresses.  He develops a fixation on a group of girls. He begins to spend a good bit of time at the house of the Swann's and may fall in love with the daughter Gilberte.   The Swann's, Odette Swann was at one time part of demimonde Paris.  He begins to closely observe minute markers of social class.  I loved the narrator's description of varieties of intelligence.  The novel is totally worth reading just for the psychological insights of the narrator. I admit I was not expecting a visit to a brothel but one of the friends of the Swann's take him along on a visit.

As time goes by he seemingly loses interest in Gilberte.  He goes on a trip with his beloved Grandmother to a hotel the family often has frequented.  He meets yet another mentor, from a very aristocratic family, who impacts him greatly.  I sensed the first stirrings of homo-erotic fascination with the narrator's reaction to Robert de Saint-Loup.  He is the grand nephew of an old friend of his grandmother.  

Proust seemingly sees through everything.  The narrator develops greater and greater self awareness as he ages.  There is just so much in this novel to love.  I am so glad I decided to reread In Search of Lost Time (Proust preferred this English name for the novel).  To those pondering reading it, I know for many it will take up much of their precious reading time for perhaps months, I say do so as soon as you can so you will be able to reread it several times.  

Please share your experience with Proust with us.

Mel u

 

"The Coming" by Andrej Nikolaidis (2012) Project 196 Montenegro

                                                                Montenegro

I am attempting to post on a short story from each of the currently recognized 196 counties of the world.  I am giving myself 196 weeks to complete what I like to call "Project 196".  Today, reading a story in Best European Fiction 2012, I will be featuring an intriguing short story, "The Coming",  by an author from Montenegro, Andrej Nikolaidis.  

The story is told by a private detective.  Like most such characters, he has seen it all and has little for

the human animal.  As the story opens he is viewing a bloody crime scene.  He tells us that the majority

of his cases are women checking on cheating husbands or vice versa.  He says all you really need

do is listen to what the client suspects and then come back confirming their suspicions.  His remarks 

would be right in place in a noir genre Hollywood film of the early 1940s.  

About one third way into the story, the narrator goes into an extended rant against the people of

Sarajevo to whom he applies an incredible list of very negative characteristics.  Basically he sees 

them as near inhuman brutes who have destroyed a once beautiful country.

I enjoyed reading this story.

Andrej Nikolaidis was born in 1974 in Sarajevo, to a mixed Montenegrin-Greek family. Until the age of six, he lived in the city of Ulcinj, where he returned in 1992 after the war in Bosnia erupted. Since 1994, he has written for regional independent and liberal media, as well as for cultural magazines. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential intellectuals of the younger generation in the region, known for his anti-war activism and for his promotion of the rights of minorities.
Nikolaidis also publicly defended the victims of police torture, which resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance. 

He has worked as a columnist in the weekly magazine Monitor and for publications including Vijesti (Montenegro), Dnevnik (Slovenia), Slobodna Bosna (Bosnia-Herzegovina), E-novine (Serbia), and Koha Ditore (Kosovo). Since 2010, he has been employed as an advisor for culture and free society in the parliament of Montenegro.

Mel u

"Yom Kipper in Hell" by I. L. Peretz (1915, translated by Hillel Hinkin)

I. L. Peretz (1852 to 1915, Poland) is one of the best known of Yiddish writers.  (There is background information on him and Yiddish literature in my prior posts on his work.) His stories range from tragic accounts of the lives of Yiddish Jews in Poland to comic stories.  All of work is meant to teach a lesson and to help keep alive a culture that was already under threat in Peretz's life.  As far as I know, the best and perhaps only place to read his short stories in English is in the Yale Press  The I. L. Peretz Reader, a superb book introduced by a foremost scholar in the field, Ruth Wisse. 

The story opens on a traditional high holy day, Yom Kipper.  The story is set in Hell.  The devil has noticed something seems wrong.  There is a town in eastern Poland of 25,000 thousand or so people that has never had any one sent to Hell.  The devil dents some minions to investigate.  They report back that the town has it share of sinners.  The devil soon finds out there is a cantor there whose voice is so beautiful that when God hears where a person is from, he automatically lets them in heaven no matter how they have lived.  Of course this outrages the Devil who sends demons to bring the cantor back to Hell.  

Peretz gives us a vivid picture of a traditional hell.  I have left the twist close of the story untold so readers can enjoy it.  This is a comic story, fun to read and culturally informative.

My thanks to Yale University Press for a very generous gift of books.

Please share your experience with Yiddish literature with us.

Mel u

"Virtue and Sin" by Sunil Gangopadhyay (1982, 16 pages)

Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934 to 2012, Bangladesh) was a very prolific writer, in the Bengali language, 

two hundred books.  He was a highly regarded poet, novelist and short story writer.  Two of his novels 

were made into movies by Satyajil Ray.  He was a close friend of the American poet Alan Ginsburg.  

(there is additional background information on him in my prior post on him)  

"Virtue and Sin" is a story about the lives of ordinary people, a police officer, a well known thief and his

working as a prostitute daughter.  It is about the pervasive corruption of daily life and the way religious 

taboos and customs in a very diversified society confuse things.  The police chief gets a tip that a 

"most wanted" thief has been spotted at an inexpensive brothel.  The chief knows he will get big

kudos if he catches him and is very excited over the prospect.  He does wonder why the thief, quite

old, would be at such a brothel until he learns the Nan's daughter works there.  In one scene with

a great depth to it, the police officer knocks on the door of the daughter, she says sorry I have an

all night customer, come back tomorrow.  The officer goes in any way  and is shocked to see her fixing

her father dinner.  Events get complicated when they discover a statue of a God in the room. The

problem is that no body in the police officer's detachment is of the right caste to move it.  The statue

may be stolen.

"Virtue and Sin" is a well done story I greatly enjoyed reading.

Please share your experience with older Indian short stories with us.

Mel u

"The Supreme Night" by Rabindranath Tagore (1918)

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941, India, Nobel Prize - 1913) was an incredibly influential figure.  Einstein, a good friend, enjoyed metaphysical discussions with him,Gandhi sought out his advice, Yeats greatly admired him and wrote a preface for one of his books.  He wrote the national anthems of India and Pakistan and was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize.  He is credited with reshaping the Begali literary tradition.      (I have posted on a number of his stories and there is additional background information on him in those posts).

"The Supreme Night" is a decent story about the emotional turmoil of a young man from Calcuta, focusing on his desire for independence from his father and his love for a young woman.  I think this story was translated by someone who learned Englsh in school (no translator credit is given by Gutenburg) as the prose is stillted and arcane at times.  Here is how the story opens

The narrator is eighteen, nearly past the normal age for marriage in his culture.  He decides rather than be placed in an arranged marriage, he will leave home for the big city of Calcutta to seek his fortune.  The plot, this is not a best of Tagore story but it is very much worth reading, is kind of cliche romantic drama.  He hears Surabala has married someone else and his heart almost breaks.   I don't want to tell the close of the story as it is an interesting if a stock idea from romantic fiction of the era.  

Please share your favorite Tagore stories with us.

 

Motl, the Cantor's Son by Sholem Aleichem (1907, translated by Hillel Hinkin)

Sholem Aleichem (1859 to 1916, Ukraine) is, through his creation of the character Trevor the Dairyman on whom Fiddler's Roof is based, by far the best known of writes from the Yiddish literary tradition.  I loved his epistolary novel The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl.  These letters between husband and wife are just flat out hilarious and provide a wonderful look at life in Eastern Europe and Yiddish culture.  Included with this work by Yale University Press is a first person account coming of age story of a young man, Motl, The Cantor's Son, the son of a recently deceased cantor (a singer of traditional songs) and his family.  It starts in the Ukraine and ends in New York City after the family passes through what the narrator keeps calling "Ella's Island".  

Aleichem starts with a child's view of Yiddish life.  We see the families struggle to survive, their relationships with their neighbors, Jewish and Christian, the family relationships, the growing maturity of the narrator, and have a lot of fun along the way.  About half way through, the family begins preparations to go to the promised land, America.  We see their difficulties in securing tickets (there were also sorts of scammers ready to prey on those hopeful to move to America) and we are along on the ten day voyage to the holiest of cities where the streets are paved with gold, no one goes hungry, and there are no Cossacks or secret police.  Everyone knows of someone who went to America with nothing and now is rich.  The biggest fear the family has is that the mother will not pass the physical at Ellis Island.  

Once in America, the younger family members soon master street English, play stick ball and are experts in dealing with the new challenges and opportunities New York City provides.  Aleichem lets us see the development of a hybrid argot combining  the slang of the tenements of New York City and Yiddish.  You can see the narrator is forgetting to a large extent his Yiddish heritage as he becomes more and more Americanized. 

This book was a great pleasure to read.  

I thank Yale University Press for a very generous gift of books.