Armenia | Armenian | Personal Essay
September, 2013"The Man" is a short autobiographical sketch set in Paris, in 1896, during Zabel Yesayan's second year of study at the Sorbonne. It was published in 1905 in the Armenian literary magazine Masis as a response to a text examining the phenomenon of terror from an aesthetic point of view. The sketch explores the psychological effects of alienation and isolation of women as foreigners in a Parisian dormitory.
French | Morocco | Novella (excerpt)
September, 2013Once he crosses the hospital's iron doorway, the narrator is trapped. And thus begins Ahmed Bouanani's novella, The Hospital, wherein an unnamed guide navigates the labyrinthine world of a hospital on the outskirts of Casablanca. Despite scant details about the institution or the narrator's illness, we understand that his stay is less than voluntary.
What emerges is a story of Casablanca's beggars and madmen. As the narrator struggles to differentiate between reality and imagination, and maintain his sanity, he records the minutiae of the wards of one wing of the hospital. Through a series of short vignettes, the narrator describes events in wing C that transpire over a period of weeks, months, or even years. The portraits that emerge reveal his fellow patients' simplicity, depravity, and naiveté without ever verging into pity or caricature. Relying heavily on colloquial dialogue, Bouanani creates a contained universe where God, sex, and family are equally lauded, condemned, and mocked.
The narrator himself alternates between remarkable lucidity, offering his observations with grim irony and detachment, and vivid hallucinations. Bouanani uses vibrant imagery to its best effect when describing the narrator's descent into a dizzying fantasy world--one where his younger self and the incarnation of death both have speaking parts. Modeled after the author's own stint in a tuberculosis sanatorium, The Hospital offers the reader a focused, almost claustrophobic look at the patients of wing C--some (the sexual predators and parricidal killers) abhorrent but nonetheless compelling. In short, Bouanani's novella is a story of contrasts: health/disease, pureness/perversion, control/chaos, and lastly, resignation/rebellion. But more than a portrait of a single man's odyssey through madness, the work offers a larger glimpse into one of Morocco's darkest periods. Reflecting Bouanani's experiences as a writer living in a climate of political unrest and harsh government repression, The Hospital is an allegory of the position of the artist and the conditions of the production of art in Morocco in the second half of the 20th century.
Since Bouanani's death in 2011, artists in Morocco have been trying to revive interest in his works. So far, their efforts have resulted in a re-edition of The Hospital in both Morocco and France, and an upcoming Arabic translation of the novella. Bouanani's writings should be framed within a broader, post-colonial aesthetic movement that sought to valorize Moroccan literature and film. The Hospital is an undeniably important work within that corpus. Beyond its historical significance, however, the novella stands out as a compelling and unique narrative characterized by Bouanani's acerbic, engrossing, and magical prose.
Catalan | Short Fiction | Spain
September, 2013Toni Sala (b. 1969, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Girona) is an author of fiction and nonfiction as well as a secondary school teacher of Catalan literature. His books include the short story collections Entomologia (1997) and Bones notícies (2001); the novels Pere Marín (1998), Goril·la blanc (2002), Rodalies (2004, Sant Joan Prize and the National Prize for Catalan Literature), and Quatre dies a l'Àfrica (2005); and the book-length essay Petita crònica d'un professor a secundària (2001), a controversial bestseller in which the author exposed the frustration prevalent among educators with disarming sincerity and raw candor.
Egypt | Hungarian | Short Fiction
September, 2013Like most of Sándor Jászberényi's fiction, "How Ahmed Salem Abandoned God" is a story steeped in a violent reality. Drawing on his experiences as a journalist in Middle East conflict zones, Jászberényi's stories read like dispatches from the human side of war. It is the kind of writing that keeps good company with great journalist-observers of wars past, such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Graham Greene. His settings range from Libya to Syria, Egypt to Sudan, but his writing is always rooted in universal questions of faith, fidelity, and personal responsibility.
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2013Patricia Esteban Erlés (b. 1972 in Zaragoza, Spain) completed her studies in Hispanic Philology at the University of Zaragoza and specializes in chivalric literature. Her own literary production, in contrast, is firmly rooted in contemporary society, as she represents the age in which she lives, with all the technological innovations and personal uncertainties of our postmodern world. Her work has been described as gothic, with a marked influence from film, featuring a disarming sense of the mysterious as she explores the points of contact between reality and fantasy. The story featured here, "Cantalobos," comes from Manderley en venta (Tropos, 2010), which won the 2007 University of Zaragoza literary award for short fiction and was named one of the top ten books of short stories of 2008.
Arabic | Germany | Short Fiction
September, 2013Zuhdi Al-Dahoodi is a Kurdish Iraqi author who has published many short stories and novels in Arabic. His university studies were in Germany, and he has taught there and in Iraq and Libya.
The short story "Two Friends" comes from his first short story collection and draws on his experiences as a young primary school teacher. In this story, the narrator, who is a very young primary school teacher, receives a lesson in hunting and in life from a sixteen-year-old student who began primary school fully grown.
Novel-in-Verse | Romania | Romanian
September, 2013Eclogue is the story of Lavinia, a widow who travels with her two young daughters from her port city on the Black Sea to the village of her husband's kin: a small rural community in the Romanian Carpathians. Lavinia succeeds to raise her daughters through strength of character and hard work as the village seamstress; in the second half of the poem, the story of the younger daughter, Lena, becomes a focus as well. The featured excerpts, in fact, concern the grown-up Lena more than her mother Lavinia, although as the future continuation of Lavinia's being and, in many ways, her attitudes and values, Lena's story is of course an extension of the primary one.
Throughout Eclogue, however, it is Lavinia who is the protagonist, bearing her own life, but she also serves as a shrewdly perceptive witness who knows everybody and lets us hear her muted voice as we hear the villagers' voices. To them, she is paradoxically an outsider, the other, in turn respected and distrusted, and likewise an insider who gradually became part of this mountain locale with its pastoral heritage. The events take place at a margin of space on the still-remembered border between the former Austrian and Ottoman empires. And they fill a thin, transitional margin of time: the Soviet takeover of Romania following World War II.
With its ironic title, Ioana Ieronim's Eclogue is, to the author, a kind of novel in verse, a book intended to preserve and understand one small place, subject to traumatic change, as a lens for much more than itself.
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
September, 2013Romina Doval teaches at the University of Buenos Aires. She has translated several books from French into Spanish, including Isabelle Rimbaud's Mon frère Arthur. Her short stories and essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including the featured story, which appeared as "La edad de la razón" in La joven guardia. Nueva narrativa argentina (The Youthguard: New Argentine Fiction).
Poland | Polish | Short Fiction
September, 2013Sylwia Siedlecka teaches at the University of Warsaw and in the Collegium Civitas. Trained as a Czech and Bulgarian scholar, she knows seven living languages and three dead ones. "Children" is taken from her debut book of fiction, Szczeniaki (Puppies), which appeared in 2010. A recurring motif in the collection is death; Siedlecka is interested in particular in exploring the feelings of the bereaved in her work.
German | Germany | Novel (excerpt)
September, 2013Forschungsbericht, at less than 40,000 words, is perhaps the most immediately accessible of Fichte’s ethnographic novels: set in the coastal Belizean city of Dangriga over the course of a two-week visit in February 1980, it depicts the attempts of Fichte’s alter ego, the writer Jäcki, and his companion Irma, the alter ego of Fichte’s long-time companion, the photographer Leonore Mau, to investigate the religious practices of the Black Carib (or Garifuna) community in Belize. The centerpiece of the novel is Fichte’s unsuccessful attempt to observe the dugu, the Garifuna feast for dead ancestors, which is presided over by the local buyei, or shaman, to placate the departed.
Forschungsbericht serves as an excellent point of entry into Fichte’s ethnographic writing, as meditation on both the consciousness of the writer and the creative process, and as illustration of the epistemological problem of knowing anything outside oneself, especially the foreign. Fichte, who originally meant his life’s work to be regarded as a history of tourism in the latter half of the twentieth century (and who might best be thought of as a French writer who wrote in German, a cross between Proust and Lévi-Strauss), is a crucial figure in that century’s literature, and deserves to be more widely known outside the German-speaking world.
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