Ruritania comes to London on 12 May

Tomáš Zmeškal

Londoners are in for a real Ruritanian treat on 12 May when authors Tomáš Zmeškal and Hamid Ismailov are to be found in conversation with Ruritanian revisionist theorist, Misha Glenny.

Tomáš Zmeškal’s debut novel "Love Letter in Cuneiform" is a family saga - a story of marriage, love and destiny set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and 1990s. Josef meets his wife, Květa, before the WWII at a public lecture and she marries him instead of their mutual friend Hynek. But when her husband is arrested and unlawfully imprisoned, Květa gives herself to Hynek in return for help and advice. Exploring what is not spoken, what cannot be said and the repercussions of silence, Zmeškal's tale, told as a mosaic of events, exposes the larger, ongoing struggle of post communist Eastern Europe to come to terms with suffering when catharsis is denied. 

Hamid Ismailov’s latest book The Dead Lake, long-listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a haunting Russian tale about environmental legacy of the Cold War. It tells a story of a gifted violinist Yerzhan growing up on the Kazakh steppes, the Soviet test ground for atomic weapons. Yerzhan falls in love with the neighbour’s daughter and to impress her, he dives into a forbidden lake. Its radioactive water stops his growth and he becomes trapped in a boy’s body while the girl he loves grows into a beautiful woman. Drawing attention to atomic tests taking place between 1945 and 1989 in Kazakhstan, Ismailov creates a parable of modern arms race impacting on people’s lives and tradition.

Full details can be found here

Josef Jedlčka book launch at Waterstones Piccadilly 14 April

Subversion and Laugher: Growing up under Socialism in the 1970s and 1980s

 

Next week, the marvelous urban anthropologist Pavla Jonssonová will be joined by the author Jiří Pehe, academic Martin Machovec and poet Tomáš Míka to celebrate childhood and growing up in "socialist" Czechoslovakia in the1970s and 1980s.

Expect subversive insight and laughter!

Imre Kertesz - RIP

The 2002 Nobel Literature Prize winner died this morning aged 86 at his home in Budapest. He had been ill for some time. One of Europe's best stylists in the novella form, his work drew on his own experiences as a teenage Holocaust survivor and beyond.

Written between 1960 and 1973, his first novella "Fateless" was rejected for publication at first by Communist censors and was finally released in 1975, but was largely ignored in Hungary despite the  500,000 Hungarian Jews being killed by the Nazis.

It would be fair to say that Kertesz had a tempestuous relationship with the Hungarian state both before and after the regime changes in 1989. He was a noted critic of the current administration. However, his talent was not limited to painful descriptions of murder. His novella "Union Jack" set during the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and featuring the flag of the Her Majesty's Ambassador's car right at the end of the narrative is one of the finest and funniest satires to emerge from central Europe. Your correspondent will read some of that novella this evening.

The Una keeps on rolling quietly - Irish Times Review

"The majestic Una river becomes a metaphor for life – and death – in this delicate, haunting novel by a veteran of the Bosnian war', wrotes Eileen Battersby in her review of Quietly Flows The Una by Faruk Sehic. 

"Faruk Sehic is a Bosniak veteran of the Bosnian war of the 1990s (“the Serbs and Croats tried to persuade me to write ‘Bosnian Muslim’ because Yugoslavs didn’t really exist, they said”), and he has accepted that he has become two people. One is the boy who loved exploring the natural world of the Una, which dominates homeland and narrative. Sehic’s other, lesser self is the soldier who went to war and knew that “tomorrow we would be burning houses and killing people with the same names as us”. These personalities unite in the telling of this autobiographical novel."

Rivertrain blog's ecstatic review begins: "This is an extraordinary book by the Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić . The language is lyrical and poetic. The writing cannot be categorized, it escapes all definitions, one form metamorphosing into another, just like the river that is the central character and forms the constant, a paradoxical constant, for even as it is always there, a presence that is both reliable and loved, its nature is shifting and protean".

The author himself will attending a launch hosted by the EBRD tomorrow evening for which registration is required. The event provides an excellent opportunity to discover the importance of metaphor in South-eastern Ruritania.

Faruk Šehić – Quiet Flows the Una
Translated by Will Firth
Published by Istros Books
ISBN 978 1908 236 494 

Owls deliver JK Rowling's letters

There is some deliciously oldie worldie and other worldly about JK Rowling's creations in general. The orphan saved by the wizards' boarding school is a particular favourite. One will not dwell on the other fetishist innuendo but only wonder how, in the age of email, does JKR receive rejection letters by post? The obvious answer is surely that they are delivered by owl...

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