the houseguest (amparo dávila, tr. matthew gleeson)

Dávila’s collection of short stories tend to feature the incursion of a bizarre, threatening element into the life of the protagonist. In the titular story, this is the houseguest, whose menacing presence ruins the narrator’s life. In other stories it might even be a Dostoyevskian version of the narrator him or her self. The stories possess a crisp economy, a sly window into the neuroses of mid twentieth century Mexico. 

maria, maria (marytza k rubio)

Rubio’s collection of short stories dabbles with the dark side. One particularly engrossing tale, Tijuca, deals with a woman taking her decapitated lover’s head and burying it in the jungle, according to his instructions. There’s a gothic beauty to this and other tales, many of which seem to emerge from the twisted soil of Calexico. Because these are tales from a lost land, the Mexican North America, a Chicano vision which folds the Yankee psyche into the stranger pulse from across the border, stretching down from the isthmus to the jungles of the Amazon. There was a time when the southern states of the USA belonged to a different consciousness, and in Rubio’s stories we get a glimpse of what that might have been. 

men in the sun & other stories (gassan kanafani, tr hilary kilpatrick)

Kanafani’s stories deal with the consequences of the Nakba, rather than the event itself. Desperate refugees, having lost everything, doing what they can to make ends meet. The celebrated opening story recounts the tragic journey of three men seeking to cross the desert from Basra to Kuwait, a land of supposed opportunities. (Following the same path that Saddam fatefully took years later.) It is a mission that ends in absolute disaster, of a similar vein to the disasters that occur at borders across Europe and between Mexico and the USA, among others. Desperation is the driver, a desperation far removed from the kind of problems these characters’ ancestors might have faced. Ancestors who lived quiet lives near the orange and olive groves, in villages which no longer bear the names they did then, or don’t even so much as exist. To think that Kanafani’s tales are even more prescient today than when he wrote them is just another factor in the indictment of the Israeli state’s crimes against the Palestinian peoples.

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.

counternarratives (john keene)

Keene’s collection consists of several stories which seek to tell the unspoken history of various figures whom history has failed to grant a voice. In a sense this is a highly Derridean project: an ambition to write in the margin of the authorised version of the western cannon. Unsurprisingly, many of these voices are of African descent, some of them slaves, although this is not always the case. Keene’s remit is broad, stretching from the discovery of Manhattan to twentieth century Africa. Along the way, the writer’s stories occur in Haiti and Brazil as well as the United States. Many of the stories relate to recognisable historical or fictional characters (Huckleberry Finn, Mário de Andrade, Miss La La), rooting the text with a historical authenticity which at the same time playfully questions that very authenticity. The stories that are set around the time of the US Civil war, a war that often seems to have been brushed under the carpet, felt particularly enlightening. On the whole Keene writes with a fluid, natural prose style, luring the reader in to his unlikely tales. A Haitian girl who draws her apocalyptic visions and in so doing perhaps brings them to life. A black servant who ends up participating in the balloon reconnaissance division of the Unionist army. The leader of a Brazilian quilombo. (One imagines Keene is aware of how this word has entered the South American lexicon.) The text never fails to surprise and at the same time succeeds in its radical mission to rewrite the reader’s understanding of what “history” really is, a considerable fictional achievement. 

jesus' son (denis johnson)

This collection of short stories is pretty much the perfect length for a collection: eleven taut stories, all of them screaming silently about the state of the fucking nation. The nation being the USA, the date any time you’ve been lost in the great wilderness of backwaters USA. Even if only in a figurative sense. There’s something so remarkably homely about these tales of drifters and petty criminals, losers the lot of them, just trying to find a way to get by in the maw of a cruel world. Johnson bestows the gift of poetry on these poor souls, as though he wants to redeem them and himself through the power of the broken word. The penultimate story is nothing more than a conversation with a man about being shot by both his wives, as the narrator shaves his moustache and says he’s going to immortalise him in print. Which, in a way, he has done. You can understand why this collection in particular, with its nod to the Velvets, has acquired a cult status. Maybe it’s just those of us who grew up in the Anglo-Saxon world, but all of these characters have an innate affinity with the flotsam and jetsam of the great capitalist mother hen. From William Carlos Williams to Bukowski, from Huckleberry Finn to Slothrop, there’s a dance to be had through the badlands of the North American psyche and in this collection Johnson joins the dance with  the cruel verve of a Lou Reed monologue and the wit of Cale guitar riff. It’s not going to kill you to read this, and it might just make you exhale with relief that you have landed on the right side of the various tracks, in this life, at least. 

ps - for long term readers, the following is of note: Johnson is quoted as saying that Jesus’ Son is "a rip-off of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry"

the red cavalry and other stories (isaac babel, tr, david mcduff)

This collection of short stories is split into three. The first includes Babel’s early stories which appear autobiographical (but the excellent introduction by the translator, David Mcduff, assures us are not), telling tales of life in the Jewish quarter of Odessa in his youth. The second series deals, famously, with the Bolshevik war against the counter-revolutionary forces on its Western front. The third series returns to Odessa, telling tales of Jewish gangsters and other colourful characters. The first and last sections are clearly complementary and tie in to a Yiddish tradition that links to Bashevis Singer, among others, writers whose identity is constructed in large part by their Jewish roots. In the early stories, a progrom is described with a brutal intensity from a child’s perspective which we take to be the author’s, although as  Mcduff notes, it is in reality a reflection of the stories the Babel would have grown up with. The capacity of the writer to be on a bleeding front line between fiction and reality, war and peace, is evident again in the Red Cavalry series. The authenticity of the vision feels undeniable, the cruelty of this conflict where there are no obvious good guys. The struggle is desperate and existential, a supposedly philosophical conflict which in actuality boils down to men’s capacity for violence. Much of the conflict Babel describes takes place in what is modern day Ukraine and the echoes with today’s war are everywhere. This has been a land that has been fought over, on the hinge of East and West, for centuries, and that battle continues to be waged today, suggesting a more fundamental schism than whatever might be the ostensible reasons for war. Babel’s Jewish perspective, which places him both on the outside and the inside, allows him to view the war more dispassionately, and more honestly, in all its savagery, no matter the cause. 

things we lost in the fire (mariana enriquez, tr megan mcdowell)

Enriquez is something of a phenomenon in the Southern Cone. Many people whose opinions I value rate her highly and one can see why, from this early collection of short stories. The writing blends horror with social realism. In so doing it hones in on two complementary but not identical themes. The legacy of the dictatorship in Argentina; and the issue of specifically urban poverty, so often connected to drug abuse and the narcos moving in on inner cities, turning them into a dangerous no-man’s land. In many of the stories, the remate, or punchline, is constructed around the disappeared. Either those who are known as Los Desaparecidos, the political prisoners who were vanished by the military dictatorship, or, more prosaically, simply people who disappear, sometimes conveniently, as in the case of the annoying husband in the story Spiderweb. As the introduction outlines, Enriquez was born at the tail-end of the Argentine junta’s rule, and the echoes of their crimes filter down the years and make themselves heard in her tales. At the same time, the focus on what might be called social concerns, has a more immediate, topical feel. Buenos Aires is city where poverty is never far away. There are barrios, such as the one the DA visits in the story Under the Black Water which are no-go areas. But as well as that, there are the walking dead, the pasta base addicts, who patrol the streets, one of whom is brilliantly brought to life in the opening story of this collection, The Dirty Kid. This intersection between the zombified underclass and the struggling lower middle class, and then the middle class itself, is a febrile pressure point in Latin American society, and Enriquez puts her finger on it and squeezes, to devastating effect. The final story Things We Lost in the Fire, has a Saramago feel as it translates her themes into a more explicit feminist context. Enriquez’ willingness to use the coarse tools of horror in order to explore social and historical psychoses is highly effective. She uses the horror as a can opener, a way of exposing her society’s guts, in a way that a more measured take might not. 

selected stories (guy de maupassant, tr. roger colet)

What a bewildering brilliant collection of stories this is. Colet’s introduction alerts us to the fact that is just a smorgasbord from the work of a prolific writer, but it’s more than enough for the reader to get to grips with a lo-fi genius. In only one of the stories, the deranged La Horla, which reads like a metaphor for the current pandemic, does the writing indulge in what the British call fights of fancy. Which might be what those on the other side of the channel tend to expect from their Gallic counterparts. La Horla embraces delirium to such an extent that it would not have surprised me if the narrator had gone off and burnt down a 5G tower, in a sudden leap into the future. 

The other stories are rooted in a steadfast humanism. They embrace themes of love, desire, war, revenge. The writing is direct, to the point. Ordinary people find themselves doing extraordinary things. An old woman burns down her own house, knowing it will lead to her death. Two fisherman risk everything to indulge a simple hobby. A prostitute displays more nobility than her high-class travelling companions. There is an economy of action which allows the writer to deliver story after story in the space of a dozen pages or less, each and every one of them teaching or reminding us of something integral to the human condition. 

cuentos de la selva {jungle tales} (horacio quiroga)

Quiroga is one of those writers who, if Disney ever get hold of him, will make a fortune for his descendants. His life was turbulent, so I have no idea if he has descendants. Perhaps, like him, they ended up lost in the jungle, struggling to get by. In which regard he would appear to be a quintessentially Latin American author, making him a highly atypical Uruguayan one. (Uruguay has its doubts regarding whether it’s part of Latin America or not.) The stories in this volume, which Claudia tells me all Uruguayan children grow up with, relate episodes from this jungle, and are just as exotic to a Montevidean as it would be to a Londoner. Stories of the flux and interaction between man and nature. Crocodiles that fight with warships, turtles which rescue explorers, giant rays which fight panthers to save a man who stopped people dynamiting the river. In this regard the stories are both elemental in their simplicity, and sophisticated in their complex understanding of the interdependence of mankind and the natural world. An understanding which was in short supply when Quiroga wrote, at the onset of the industrial age, and still in short supply today. 

 

the doll’s alphabet [camilla grudova]

It felt appropriate to be reading Grudova’s strange stories in Mexico, the North American antipode to her native Canada. The skulls, the stitched-up painted faces, the anthropomorphism are all elements her stories and the country have in common. Grudova constructs her gothic universe across the course of the book’s thirteen stories, some brief, some more extended. The book is full of slightly vulnerable female narrators, whose relationships with the opposite sex are rarely straightforward. It’s perhaps a book to be dipped in and out of; sometimes there’s a feeling of repetitiveness as the same tropes reappear. If you like Saunders and Kafka and surrealism, The Doll’s Alphabet will probably delight.

habitat [miguel rey]

Rey’s collection of inter-linked short stories gets under the skin of young Cuban society. It consists of six brief tales, all of them narrated by a disillusioned young man, probably the same one, Liam. Liam works as a tennis coach, giving classes to tourists and the wealthy Havana elite. He inhabits a more sheltered, Westernised Havana, one which feels a long way from any kind of politicised revolution. The book is peppered with acerbic references to contemporary culture, from Hugh Grant to Chris Brown and Rihanna. In one of the stories the narrator has a friend called Maiquel Jordan Zamora, and the author makes the wry observation that people ask: is that his real name? There’s no mention of Che or Fidel. This is a Cuba that is culturally close to the US and Central America. The closest the writing gets to talking about politics is a brief discussion of The Cherry Orchard, and how its title in the Spanish translation is wrong. The narrator then makes a few playful remarks about subtext and his ignorance regarding this, but this is a writer who seems well aware of the significance of the subtext of all his references; the way they both expand and contract the Cuban perspective.

Rather than politics, the stories relate random sexual encounters; tawdry Havana nights; minor porn addiction and tennis coaching. This is low-key living, told in a deadpan style. It has something in common with other seemingly disengaged texts such as Pedro Mairal’s La Uruguaya or even Pauls’ The Past. Tales from a post-political generation. Where the search for meaning isn’t found in big ideas, but in the kinks in the mainframe that can only be registered by experiences lived on an intimate, personal level. 

henri duchemin and his shadows [emmanuel bove]

Bove’s stories are full of young men who seem to have become separated from their selves. Either by choice or chance. Clearly there’s something of his contemporary, Kafka in all of this, as well as hints of the post-war writings of his compatriots, the existentialists. However, there’s something more mundane about Bove’s characters. They are insistently normal. A man who suspects his wife of infidelity, haunted by the night she might or might not have had with a lover; a man who plans to return to his family after an absence of years, but upon arrival at the family home feels as though the abyss that has opened up between them could never be bridged, and flees. Another man who believes he has found a friend to support him in at a moment of poverty, but the friend is a phoney do-gooder, who collects lost causes and discards them as quickly as he finds them. Perhaps most hauntingly of all, another man who, seemingly for the hell of it, chooses to cut the ties to his happy life and walk away, leaving only confusion and upset in his wake. In most of the stories the characters inhabit a seemingly stable world which is in fact in danger of evaporating at any moment. The void is just around the corner.

This voice also feels like one that resonates with the chaos that Europe became in the first half of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century certainties were ripped asunder and young men and women edged towards existential crisis, a crisis that would reach apogee in the second world war. At times it feels as though Bove is talking about people who survived some terrible calamity, but never managed to fully recover, instead finding themselves forever on the cusp of madness. One imagines the lost exiles of Syria and beyond, those who fall through the net, forever inhabiting the kind of half-life which Bove’s characters lead. The trauma might have dulled but the effects will never be ended. 

civil war land in bad decline [george saunders]

Saunders' short stories have a rebarbative, offbeat feel. The prose is abrasive, occasionally challenging. The author creates unusual, surreal american worlds where surprisingly normal sounding people struggle with demented situations. In Bounty, the longest story, a man born with a deformity which means he belongs to the flawed sector of a world divided by a new form of apartheid sets out on a journey across the country to rescue his lost sister. The journey looks both backwards and forwards: at once an allegory for an escaped slave but also a terrible vision of a post apocalyptic USA. It's The Road meets Gravity's Rainbow meets Native Son, told in a sparse 80 pages. The US has become a kind of theme park in Saunders' imagination, something to be cannibalised for entertainment purposes. It’s a dystopian vision, and the clanking prose seems like part of this; even the language people use to communicate has become mechanised, atonal.

all the lights [clemens meyer]

All The Lights is a collection of short stories. There are plenty of them (15). There are no overt connections between the stories, but plenty of covert ones. These covert links have the effect of sparking associations in the reader’s mind: did this character crop up in another tale? Haven’t I read this somewhere else in the book? The book’s title, for example, is a phrase that recurs with regularity across many, if not all of the stories, and every time you come across this phrase it helps to construct a network of communality between apparently diverse episodes. (This might be even more apparent in the original, it’s hard to tell, although it should be noted that the translation by Katie Derbyshire is excellent.)

The stories are all set in the Eastern side of a reunified Germany, the former DDR. As such, they are the haunted tales of history’s losers, in one way or another. Even the foreigners who appear, including a Dutch boxer, are losers. They are the ones who history will not celebrate, whose stories are never going to be more than bittersweet. Which is not to say there is no light in the book, or that it’s remorselessly grim; just that there’s an aura of lost possibilities, of the unfulfilled dream. The shadow of the West. 

Under this umbrella, the author constructs elegant portraits of the little people trying to make their way. The immigrants, the warehouse workers, the salesmen. There’s a touch of Carver in all this, but there’s also a flavour of Cortazar in the way Meyer elides time. Like Cortazar he is not afraid of skipping backwards and forwards within the timeline of the story. The effect is disorientating, in the same way in which life can be disorientating. The present and the past and the future collide head-on in a single paragraph. This demands an assurance and skill from the writing; Meyer is not afraid to lead the reader to the border of incomprehension before reeling them back again to the through line of the narrative. Again, this frequently reflects the state of his subjects, people who don’t feel in control of their destiny, who never know if they’re about to fall off a cliff or get knocked out, but battle on regardless.

[As an aside, in Berlin last weekend, we visited the “DDR Museum”, a place which in the end I found unbearably sad. All the hope (all the lights) of a utopian dream reduced to rubble, steamrollered by the capitalist machine and corruption. In the museum people smirk at the Trabant or the mono-politics. It’s all but forgotten that beneath the surface there was once the dream of a more egalitarian and less materialistic society.]

my documents [alejandro zambra]

My Documents is a collection of 15 short stories which are elliptically connected. A character charts the process of giving up cigarettes in one story and then in another another character with a different name talks about the time he used to smoke. This is just one of many latticed connections that hold the book together, lending the text a buoyancy as it unfolds. All the stories are “cotidiano” - low key, domestic, almost Carveresque tales about various individuals finding their way in the curious world of modern Chile. The spectre of Pinochet and the dictatorship hangs over the early part of the book. There’s a great description of an anti-Pinochet slogan mysteriously appearing on a school blackboard, and the teacher’s response to this. However, as in Fuguet’s text, The Movies of my Life, politics lurks below the surface, rather than on it. Much of the book deals with characters who appear subtly but almost invisibly damaged, like the child who repeats his year in school again and again, or the Walter Mitty cousin who’s house-sitting turns into a spiralling series of lies and minor deceptions. These tales are told both dispassionately and compassionately at the same time, if that’s possible; there’s no apparent sentimentality but we end up rooting for the characters the writer focuses on, largely because they are the underdogs and you always root for an underdog, even if their goal is nothing more grandiose than to give up smoking. When I started reading My Documents, it almost felt like an extension of Fuguet’s book; the opening pair of stories appear to be autobiographical and I began to wonder if all Chilean novelists weren’t secretly engaged on writing the same book. But as the stories roll out, the writer’s palette becomes more diverse, the self-referentiality less apparent. As it does so, the book starts to gather steam, taking the reader further and further into its complex Chilean world, until it gets to the final story which is genuinely nightmarish; whilst at the same time redemptive. By the time you finish the book, you feel as though you’ve been in the hands of a skilled operator, who has surgically dissected his society without appearing to have made any cuts at all. 

laughable loves [milan kundera]

Kundera's early work is a collection of eight short stories. They all deal with the pleasures and pitfalls of sexual relationships. It feels like a young man's book, but a young man who has a sly understanding of the way in which the domain of the sexual encounter in the human sphere is far more complex than the mere mating instinct. Tied up in the act of seduction or desire is the will to power, the will to survival or the will to just get by. At the same time, the stories offer a sideways view of the complications of living within a totalitarian state. A portrait which is all the richer because it reveals that this state still permits the simple pleasures of flirtation and debate, but impinges at the edges, constantly marking out the limits of possibility, with a fall from grace forever on the edge of the subject's view. At times the preoccupations and worries of these cold-war Czechs don't seem that far away from those of Updike's suburban Yankees or today's harassed first-world capitalists. For all their intelligence, sexuality and charm, they are still neutered by the demands of the system they inhabit. Something which infiltrates the mechanisms of desire, which are conditioned as much by power as Eros. But no doubt it was ever thus, and it's a reflection of Kundera's nascent mastery that he succeeds in revealing how human instincts, especially of the more romantic kind, are always compromised and complex, no matter the ideological context within which they are framed.

hypothermia [alvaro enrigue]

Enrigue’s quasi-novel is a smart, cold stab at puncturing the balloon of globalisation. A series of delicately connected short stories range across the Americas, from Peru to Washington DC, related by a succession of first person narrators. Through a process of osmosis the text skips from Lima to North Carolina, from DC to DF. Many of the stories address the issues surrounding the word ‘gringo’, (which might have made for an alternative title), as the narrator, more often than not a Mexican male, adapts to life in the US. How many years, the book seems to ask, does it take for a Mexican living in the States to transform himself into a gringo?

This globalised vision is constructed from small, domestic tales of loss or betrayal. There are stories about affairs, about domestic tragedy, about blue-collar life. Some of the stories are less than a page long, others developed in far greater depth. It’s never made overtly clear when a story will connect with another – there’s a touch of Cortazar’s Hopscotch in the way the book skips, elliptically, between its various narrative threads. Hypothermia is a pot-pourri of modern life. Albeit one that seems, perhaps, more adept at pinpointing the zones of contemporary tension than getting under their skin. Another point of reference might be Iñárritu and Arriaga’s artful global fable, Babel. Both texts suggesting that Mexico, a country on the hinge of first and third worlds, makes for an ideal vantage point from which to observe the contradictions of modernity, where the poor want what the rich have and the rich are never sure what price they have paid in the obtaining of their wealth…or how much it costs to obtain the things the poor still possess which they no longer have. 

the return [bolaño]

Another volume from the posthumous pen of. What to make of this collection, ripped from two volumes published in Spanish, Putas Asesinas and Llamadas Telefonicas?

I have no idea when these stories were written within the timeframe of the Bolano oeuvre. My hazard-a-guess would be they come from towards the end, rather than the beginning. The author starts to show a fascination with more colourful “characters”. Porn stars, footballers, a Parisian playboy, fashion designers. It might be that these stories, which seem dependent to a certain extent on the exoticism of their characters’ professions, do not work as effectively as those which adopt either a more neutral protagonist, or, the classical Bolanian trope, either a writer or the writer’s alter-ego. Belano or Bolaño appears in several of the stories. When he does it reminds us of what a skill it is to construct a self-referential protagonist without this seeming whimsical or self-indulgent. All too often, this device will lead (pace Amis) to something clunky and unconvincing. But when Bolaño makes an appearance in one of his own stories the voice, the turn of phrase, feels completely authentic. Of course, it is a voice from beyond the grave, but it almost feels as though the text was indeed written from that vantage point, the high peaks of death. One of the stories, The Return, is told by a dead man, but oddly the dead man’s voice here is less compelling than the dead voice of the author. Even though this is also the author’s voice and even though in the moment of writing the author was not, we imagine, actually dead.

Writing is by definition a self-indulgent process. The wife of a writer friend of mine once turned on him, telling him it was all masturbation. It’s a regular attack and, when the writer isn’t getting paid for their troubles, one that is not ungrounded. The writer plunges into the morass of their own mind, hoping to emerge with gems which, for some unknown reason, might be of interest to others. This is as much an urge as a skill, more an addiction than a virtue. What’s so beguiling about Bolaño is that the reader knows this is not a man who wrote for money  or even for fame. He wrote because he obeyed the compulsion to write, something that is detached from the industry of writing, an industry which includes the whole paraphernalia of criticism. That compulsion, shaped and honed through both practice and the act of reading, lead to the unlikely event of his books sitting in your hand, or your digital device. There might be thousands of Bolaños out there, unread, undiscovered, drowned under the weight of their unrecognised words. It is worth bearing in mind that, although his success is not entirely posthumous, it is largely so. Right up until the beginning of the end, this is someone who wrote into the void, unafraid, refusing to be silenced by the absence of an echo that might have marked the point which defined the writing’s raison d’etre.

The last story here is an account of a dream, a dream wherein he meets the poet Enrique Lihn. The story states that the dream took place in ’99. Lihn died in ’98. Lihn is therefore a ghost, although ghosts are allowed to roam free in our dreams, whilst real life ordains they remain on the other side of the crepuscular surface of ‘reality’. The story doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s just an account of a dream. It mentions the fate of another five authors who Lihn once nominated as the future voices of Chilean literature, once upon a time, all of whom have either died or seen their stars fade. What is the point of this story, this dream? It doesn’t possess the classical virtues of a well-rounded story. Yet it marks a completely satisfying conclusion to the collection of short stories. Because this is a ghost writing about a ghost. Who was also a writer. Literature, for all its masturbatory tendencies, is a death defyer. The writer, from the cocoon of his absence, maintains a presence. The universe of literature, just like the literature of dreams, resists the supposed laws of physics. The writers egotistical I triumphs. Bolaño, one feels in his writing, had a grasp of this, much as Homer or whoever else one wants to name did. Those writers who are not so much charging over the precipice of their society, as most do, for fame or fortune, but charging over the precipice of mortality. An altogether more audacious, Quixotian endeavour.

a tomb for boris davidovich [danilo kis]

I was first introduced to the joys of what is probably termed “world” literature within the UK when I used to go into the bookshop at Winchester as a teenage schoolboy. I had an account there, for some reason, and I was able, if I did so responsibly, to spend my grandfather’s money on books. The books which caught my attention, which got me really reading, were the Picadors. With their perfect spines. Calvino, Brautigan, Pynchon, Marquez. Picador were, at that time, the publisher which opened the doorway to an international library. I still have many of those books, stashed away in boxes at my parents’ home. One day they will come out and strut their stuff again, perhaps.

I thought about Picador, reading Kis’ fractured novel/ short story collection. The more you read, the more you start to wonder about the editorial choices of publishing houses. This is not necessarily a criticism of Picador who did and still do a good job, but Kis is one of those authors whose work seems to have been crying out to be published and be better known, not just now but thirty years ago. This book was originally published in 1976. Solzhenitsyn garnered the prizes, justifiably so, for his immense works about the Soviet empire. But Kis’ book offers a drier, more measured corrective. Here he presents seven characters, from varied backgrounds, all of whom will founder on the rock of Stalinism. The seven characters all have their flaws as well as their virtues. All are stout adherents to the political philosophy which will ultimately destroy them. This fact lends an instant level of pathos to their stories. Furthermore, it means that Kis surgically unmasks the realities of Stalinism, something which in his native Serbia, like much of the rest of the world, was a truth people were still reluctant to face.

The absence of rancour in Kis’ prose and the obvious pleasure he takes in writing, ensure that this never feels like a judgmental book. It is a scalpel, rather than a hammer (or a sickle), making sly incisions in its subject’s flesh. Coming from a Communist state himself, the clarity of his thought would seem to suggest, (as perhaps in the early work of another Yugoslav, Kustirica), that Communism is a system which should not be entirely damned, if it can produce minds like this. The elegance of the links which hold the book together, the stories criss-crossing, implying a novel which is barely there, matches the beauty of the writing. It feels worthwhile quoting from the titular story, as this passage both sums up the premise of Kis’ book and also shows off his remarkable talent:

“The ancient Greeks had an admirable custom: for anyone who perished by fire, was swallowed by a volcano, buried by lava, torn to bits by beasts, devoured by sharks, or whose corpse was scattered by vultures in the desert, they built so-called cenotaphs, or empty tombs, in their homelands; for the body is only fire, water or earth, whereas the soul is the Alpha and Omega, to which a shrine should be erected.”

It is a mystery to me why this writer is not more widely known. Perhaps there is something ephemeral about his work. He lacks the great lumpen-novel to which greatness is so frequenly ascribed. But Kis demonstrates a subtlety and a rigour which denotes him as one of the finest chroniclers of that historical footnote, Eastern European Communism, as well as belonging to a vanguard, alongside the likes of Cortazar, for a new literature which is both more personal and more oblique. One where the voice of the author bristles, but whose stories resist the grand narrative arcs so frequently demanded by the Western literary tradition.