Berlin by Andre Kuprišs

Latvian fiction

Original title – Berlin

Translator – Ian Gwin

Source – Personal copy

I brought this trio of books from. Open letter books just after I read about the withdrawal of the funding for so many great publishers in Translation. I had some other books preordered from different publishers. However, I had been keeping an eye on this collection before the announcement. I had this down if I was going by one of the three books that Open Letter calls a translator’s choice for a country. It reminds me of the Peter Owen series of books, which they released several years ago, featuring three books from each country per year. I think someone could run with this as a long-term project to build a collection of world literature, with the opportunity to acquire a selection of books from each country. I noticed after reading the collection that Andris Kuprišs holds a master’s degree in photography. I can tell the very short stories are like a wonderfully framed photo, a glimpse at a life, a moment.

He put his hand on her stomach, sliding it lower. With his fingers he found her hip bones and felt them. He brushed her left leg, his fingers sliding down to her shin, then back up, his fingertips resting just above her knees.

“You were away when it happened. He was already drunk when he got here, the door was unlocked that night. At first I wanted to tell him to leave, but he insisted he had something important to tell me. He asked me to pour him a drink, so I let him have the last of the whiskey from my birthday. We satin the kitchen until I finally said something, that it was time for him to get going, but he just sat there, listening and slowly drinking. I said he had to hurry up because you were coming home soon, and he said I had nothing to worry about because he knew that night you weren’t.”

He had stopped caressing her and was sweating again.

A woman recounts something thagt happened in the story The Rape

The collection now comprises 19 short stories and a novella titled Berlin. I will leave Berlin to you, a reader, to say that it captures the expat experience in that city. If you are from the Baltic states, the rest of the collection is also set there. So, the rest of the book is composed of a collection of short stories and what may be flash fiction. A couple are in bed as the woman tells the man about what had happened whilst he was away. A friend, drunk at the time, came into the flat when she invited him in, she tells her partner. Then she says she couldn’t get away after she had let him in. This is a theme that runs in some of the stories, unease another sees a young boy fearful of answering a ringing phone. The short pieces are like little gems. How do we view someone in two ways? Why are his hands cold?

The first way in which the following situation differs from an-other, similar situation, is that I met him—a person I respect and regard quite highly—here, where I figured I would never have met him at all.

The second way, no less important to this situation, but perhaps far more important than the first, is that just as I went to shake his hand and ask him what he was doing here, he took me by the hair and forced me down. I fell to my knees, my face nearly touching the ground, him angrily saying almost shouting-“Learn humility!”

From the story two way in. which the following situation differs

Again a play with duality of life here in this flash fiction piece

There is a pervasive sense of sorrow and melancholy throughout this collection. It is a series of stories about the darker side or the underside of life. Being maybe an outsider in a town, and how that affects you moving forward. I also said this is like a collection of black-and-white photos. I wonder if that was his medium in photography, where the world is very black and white, with shadows and a feeling of gloom over the world we visit. He also plays with two characters interacting at the heart of some of the stories, which is that interplay and the way power and mood can shift between them. Whether it is a teacher and student, parents and their children, lovers in bed, or a man awakens in a bed and the man next to him thinks he is Jesus (I remembered the NYRB book about The Three Jesuses of Ypsilanti). Do you have a favourite book from the Baltic states?