Reading Europe goes Global (in The Guardian)

Sign in Prague yesterday saying "Take Away our President" positioned in the eye line of the visiting Chinese president

Find below, a shameless cut and paste job from yesterday's piece in The Guardian by Alison Flood. The tour mentioned at the end is likely to begin at the end of May and go on till the Brexit Polling Day, 23 June.

Read on...

Earlier this month, Axel Scheffler warned us that the Gruffalo couldn’t have existed without the EU. Last week, we heard from authors including Kerry Hudson and Geoff Dyer about what leaving Europe might mean for the arts. “You’ll have this enormous drain on creative talent,” said Hudson.

Now, independent publisher Dedalus Books is making its own small case for remaining in the EU, with its “Reading Europe” promotion, a selection of novels from EU countries intended to “let the reader know the literature, history and culture of each country better”. They are all from UK independent publishers, and all translated into English.

There are names I know – Stefan Zweig from Austria, with Beware of Pity. Eça de Queirós from Portugal, with The Crime of Father Amaro. Diego Marani from Finland, with New Finnish Grammar. But there are also lots of names I don’t: Farewell, Cowboy by Olja Savičević, translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth, about a character going back to her hometown on the Adriatic coast to unravel the mystery of her brother’s death. Apothecary Melchior and the Mystery of St Olaf’s Church by Indrek Hargla, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen and set in 15th-century Tallinn, “the last foothold before the east”.

Dedalus publisher Eric Lane has worked to put the list together, asking publishers to suggest suitable titles with the main criterion that “they tell you something new or informative about a country”.
“It was nice to discover books I’d never heard of,” says Lane. “I wanted the list to make a cultural case for Europe, without getting involved in what’s happening at the moment. It’s an opportunity to learn something about our neighbours, before we lose them.”

There are 49 titles in total, from a fantastic list of publishers: And Other Stories, Arcadia, Atlas, Bitter Lemon, Comma, Dedalus, Faber & Faber, Garnett Press, Istros, Jantar, Marion Boyars, Norvik Press, Parthian, Peter Owen, Portobello and Pushkin.

And the list itself is like a chocolate box of treasures waiting to be discovered. I’m particularly keen to check out Hungarian Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy; Lane says Bánffy “is an author who should have the stature of Tolstoy”.

Eagle-eyed Europhiles might spot that Cyprus, Malta and Ireland are missing from the list. The omission, says Lane, is “Because they are in the Commonwealth so we will remain linked to them whether or not we are in the EU, and Ireland is excluded because it’s geographically in the British Isles and our links to them will remain whatever happens.”

He is planning a virtual literary festival to celebrate the writers, and is in talks with bookshops about running promotions over the months in the run up to the referendum. I hope it pans out, and in the meantime, perhaps we can help him out with something. Despite their best efforts, the publishers have not managed to find any book from Luxembourg translated into English – they’ve compensated by giving Belgium two extra titles. I was born in Luxembourg, but shamefully, I don’t think I’ve read anything by a Luxembourg writer. Any suggestions?

The full Reading Europe from The Guardian with extra links

Today is the first anniversary of the death of Peter Pišťanek

Peter committed suicide. There is a plan to celebrate what would have been his 56th birthday in London on 28 April. The Ruritanian will post more details when they become available.

Below is the obituary written by his British Publisher, Donald Rayfield.

Peter Pišt'anek, the most brilliant of modern Slovak novelists, has died on Sunday 22^nd March, before his 55^th birthday, in a Bratislava hospital, after taking an overdose. Born in 1960, he was first known to the public as a  drummer in a rock group (a life he portrayed uproariously in his novella "The Musicians"). Even before the fall of communism his exposure of the underbelly of Slovak life and his satire of Slovak national pretensions (which he called ‘narcissism’) caused a stir. His real genius became manifest in the novel "Rivers of Babylon" of 1991, which with "The Wooden Village" and "The End of Freddy" became a trilogy, following the transformation of a ruthless village thug first into Slovak ‘businessman of the year’ and then into a Russian oil oligarch. (These three novels were translated into English by Peter Petro and published by the Garnett Press in 2007 and 2008, the first of them ending quite high up the Independent Foreign Fiction Long List.) Pišt'anek’s plotting had the ingenuity of Quentin Tarantino, the irony of Evelyn Waugh and, at times, the obscenity of Henry Miller. Yet his novellas could express sympathy for the underdog, such as the hero of the eponymous "Young Dônč". His language exploited to the full the rich mix of Bratislava Slovak, with its undertones of Viennese German, of Hungarian and of Gypsy. At the same time, uniquely among Slovaks, Pišt'anek took pride in his ability to write in Czech: the Prague scenes of The End of Freddy switch to Czech.

            Rivers of Babylon has now been translated into several European and Asian languages; Pišt'anek recently published a new novel, The Hostage, which was to be filmed. He seemed at the threshold of international recognition. But despite psychotherapy and a happy remarriage, the depression that periodically plagued him, returned.

            Peter Pišt'anek took delight in provoking authority: his "Tales about Vlad" were a thorn in the flesh of Vladimír Mečiar, the Slovak prime minister. For all his dark satire and knowledge of the worst of human nature, however, Peter Pišt'anek was a kind, reticent and considerate man, with an uproarious sense of humour. He was an expert on many things, for instance brandy and whisky, having visited all the distilleries of the Highlands and Islands. He had an endearing resemblance to Uncle Fester of the Addams family, and those who had dealings with him — whether as friends, translators or publishers — felt both admiration and a desire to look after him, a feeling which we now know we expressed inadequately.

Donald Rayfield

Rivers of Babylon - Peter Pišťanek book review

The finest novel written in Slovakia ever, Peter Pišťanek's The Rivers of Babylon was first published to great acclaim in 1991. Inside its covers, the character Rácz was revealed as the archetypal post-Communist "East European gangster". This revelation came as quite a shock to those controlling the local foreign exchange trading in Bratislava and the goons operating further east. 

Rácz was drawn so closely from the competing Bratislava post-Communist "elites" that it became difficult differentiate "the real Rácz". Was he an ex-secret policeman, an ex-member of the Czechoslovak Politburo, an up-and-coming "Slovak Nationalist" politician or a real live rural ponce trying to make it as a post Soviet Prince Michael? He was all and none and more.

Despite making only a cameo appearance in the second volume of what later became a trilogy,"The Wooden Village" was first oublished in 1994. Pišťanek's readers delighted in further tales of the "wild east". Already familiar characters described their participation in Rácz's byznyz: hotels, drugs and prostitution; and their ancillaries: the white slave trade, fetish clubs, porn movies, money laundering and other adventures and opportunities derived from the "privatisation" or "theft" of former state owned assets in the former self-governing province of Czechoslovakia.

By 1999 and now free from subsidising Slovak notions of self-determination and democracy, the Czechs of the former Czechoslovakia re-established themselves as a constitutional monarchy in the final installment: "The End of Freddy". In a flourish of Biblical proportions, The Royal Czech Navy assists Slovak separatists in a northern Arctic archipelago in return for a promise of the crude oil seeping up from the coastal tundra - killing Russian-speaking mercenaries along the way. Led by the reformed pornographer, Freddy, the absurd became real and the real absurd. 

Published in English in the late noughties by the marvellous Garnett Press, The Rivers of Babylon received rapturous reviews in the TLS, Independent, Guardian and Telegraph written by Britain's leading literary critics and authors. Those reviews made comparisons with the comic writing by Rabelais, Balzac and Gogol (Tim Beasley-Murray in the TLS); "less Dostoyevsky and more Tom Sharpe" (Tibor Fischer in the Telegraph). 

However, Pišťanek and Rácz were not praised enough. The Rivers of Babylon trilogy is a striking piece of alternative social history pretending to be satire. Absurdists from a different era: Havel and Ionescu are shown to be polite and dated petit bourgeois parlour pseuds. Pišťanek is raw and compelling and still fresh where the absurd is real and the real absurd.

Something that could be described as Ruritanian Gothic...