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Literary perspectives: An introduction
The re-transnationalization of literary criticism
Editorial Eurozine's new series of essays aims to provide an overview of diverse literary landscapes in Europe. [ more ]
Read also A longer version of Carl Henrik Fredriksson's article The re-transnationalization of literary criticism. [ more ]
Estonia
Literary perspectives: Estonia
Waiting for the Great Estonian Novel
Essay While the Great Estonian Novel has yet to be written, the range of fiction in Estonia is sufficiently wide to serve as an indicator of the post-communist country's hopes and fears, anxieties and obsessions. [Estonian and Latvian versions added] [ more ]
Read also Jaan Kaplinski's 1992 parable of writers in transition: From harem to brothel. [ more ]
The visitor
Prose One evening, the director of a zoological museum receives a visitor with a very unusual interest in the exhibits... [ more ]
A brave woman
Prose Cynical and naive mentalities mix in an absurd short story by Estonia's most popular young author. [ more ]
Ukraine
Literary perspectives: Ukraine
Longing for the novel
Essay In Ukraine, the demand for engagement with the recent past has produced a series of novels that are better described as autobiographies. But, asks Timofiy Havryliv, is autobiography equal to the task? [ more ]
Northern Ireland
Literary perspectives: Northern Ireland
Shaking the hand of history
Essay While the Northern Irish literary tradition is closely bound up with the experience of sectarian violence, contemporary Northern Irish poets and prose writers defy the assumption that "the troubles" are all there is to the country's literature. [Turkish version added] [ more ]
Read also Alan Gillis's poem The Ulster way. [ more ]
Slovenia
Literary perspectives: Slovenia
A hollowed-out generation
Essay Slovenian novelists are developing original responses to the experience of transitional society, writes poet and critic Ales Steger. While male novelists take a hyper-realist, social-critical approach, their female counterparts are creating fictions only loosely connected to contemporary time and space. But first, an excursus into the Slovenian booktrade's current fad: the self-help manual... [ more ]
Read also Protuberances: poetry by Ales Steger. [ more ]
Read also The first chapter of Fuzine blues, a novel by Andrej E. Skubic. [ more ]
The Netherlands
Literary perspectives: The Netherlands
"Profound Holland" and the new Dutch
Essay The new need for security in the Netherlands is reflected in the work of two novelists in particular: Jan Siebelink, whose fiction evokes the "profound Holland" overturned in the 1960s; and Arnon Grunberg, whose portrayals of male disintegration withhold any such reassurances. But a parallel strand of contemporary Dutch literature sidesteps such concerns: novelists and poets with migrant backgrounds introducing new styles into the Dutch literary repertoire. [ more ]
Read also Hella S. Haasse's short story, A stone jar from Arelate (in French) [ more ]
Read also The first chapter of Jan Siebelink's novel Kneeling on a bed of violets (in German) [ more ]
Read also Excerpts from Arnon Grunberg's novels: The asylum seeker and Tirza (in Dutch) [ more ]
Hungary
Literary perspectives: Hungary
Mastering history through narrative?
Essay In the first essay in the Eurozine "Literary perspectives" series, Gábor Csordás reads the newest Hungarian novels. All share a concern with narrative, holding out to the reader the hope of mastering history. [ more ]
Read also György Spiró in interview: A witness of the first century. [ more ]
Satire Literary EU standards? A satire by György Spiró. [ more ]
The body of the text
Corporeal writing in Péter Nádas's "Parallel Stories"
Essay Parallel Stories, the new novel by Péter Nádas, interweaves four sets of narratives driven by the twin motors of politics and eroticism. But Parallel Stories is more than the sum of its plot lines. [ more ]
Read also Peter Nadas on Hungary '56: A headless revolution. [ more ]
Why does anyone translate?
On translation The English translator of Imre Kertész talks about the lack of literary translations in the UK and US, and assesses past, present, and forthcoming efforts to bring Hungarian literary fiction to the English-speaking market. [ more ]
Imre Kertész and his time
Not Jewish. Not Hungarian. Not anti-German enough.
Essay The "perfect normality" of his fiction placed Imre Kertész on the sidelines of Hungarian literature during socialism, and still causes dislike, says a leading Hungarian playwright. [ more ]
Resting
An excerpt
Literature Attila Bartis's Resting (2001) portrays a consciousness for which "rest" is unattainable. Both private psychodrama and portrait of the end of the Communist era, the novel is one of the darkest to have emerged from contemporary Hungarian literature. [ more ]
Read also Ilma Rakusa's introduction to Bartis's novel. [ more ]
Zehuze
Literature A Hungarian-Israeli mother addresses her daughter in Europe in a letter she never sends. In a fictional monologue, András Forgách explores the private suffering and political ambivalence of a life in postwar Israel. One of Hungary's most interesting authors for the first time in English translation. [ more ]
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More literature in Eurozine
Why study literature?
Essay Literary studies in Estonia has taken a crash course in twentieth-century theory. With mixed results, says the editor of cultural journal Vikerkaar. Now literary critics should stop baffling one another with jargon and aim at a wider readership. [ more ]
My heart belongs to Europe. Therefore it is broken
Essay Does literature help maintain individual and collective identity, or does it inspire us to discredit it? [ more ]
The presence of African literature
The evolution of literary criticism, publishing, and readership
Essay Africa’s growing role in western European culture is reflected in the increasing interest in its literature. Soon Kourouma will be shelved between Kafka and Kundera. [Hungarian version added] [ more ]
Pornographers in black
Essay Is the female pornographic eye dangerous? Or is it just another male fantasy? Anna Friman on what happens when women write about sex. An award-winning essay on posh porn. [ more ]
The scream of geometry
(modified excerpts)
Literature "How can these cities, villages, and their people exist? How can they stand there selling tomatoes and speaking their language and drying their laundry without considering the infinite number of other places where someone else is standing, selling tomatoes or potatoes and speaking their language and drying laundry?" [Hungarian version added] [ more ]
European waistlines
Literature Swedish poet Ida Börjel confronts us with our favourite and most insulting national prejudices about ourselves and our European neighbours. But does she confirm them? In a series of insidious linguistic displacements and only seemingly naive phrases, the preconceived notions start to move. Measuring the European waistlines is not a standardizing measure. [ more ]
Anthology of contemporary Hebrew poetry VII
Poetry Helicon editor Amir Or's latest addition to the Hebrew poetry anthology presented in Eurozine. [ more ]
A heavy prelude to chaos
Aspects of literary anti-Americanism in the interwar years
Essay Interwar European literature represented the US as the quintessence of unbridled modernity that prefigured the destruction of Europe. Jesper Gulddal surveys the uncharted territory of literary anti-Americanism. [Czech version added] [ more ]
Breakfast with brontosaurus
An interview with Harold Bloom
In conversation "Partly from encountering wisdom, I have to say I have no wisdom." American literary critic Harold Bloom talks to Latvian journal Rigas Laiks about his twenty-ninth book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? [ more ]
Is it a sin to travel?
Itinerant women in post-Soviet narrative
Russia Three contemporary Russian novels undermine the stigmatization of Russian women as prostitutes and destabilize the patriotic discourse that forbids women's travel. [ more ]
Don Quixote in the Balkans
Essay Ismail Kadare on why Don Quixote belongs to Balkan folklore, how Cervantes first came to be translated into Albanian, and why today's politicians should be banned from using the knight errant's name as a term of abuse. [ more ]
Twenty-two years later
A second reading of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
Literary criticism Twenty-two years after it was first published in Czech, Jiri Travnicek discovers a new appreciation for the narration, characterization, and above all wisdom of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". [ more ]
On the privileges of the literary critic
Literary criticism Literary lunches aside, what are the critic's privileges? According to Jörg Magenau, it's all about accumulating others' experiences, about "being in the world", about avoiding the media's barrage of facts. And about having lots of books... [ more ]
Gained in translation
On translation What is the translator's job? To bring the text to the reader or the reader to the text? And either way, do translators receive the credit they deserve? [Slovak version added] [ more ]
Against love
Seeking the literary traces of the Natascha Kampusch affair
Radical critique "The birth of love out of the spirit of totalitarianism expressed itself in exemplary manner in the Kampusch abduction story. A person is shut in, all the others shut out – that is the ideological core of romantic love." [ more ]