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?
Difficult to say a specific favourite book from the Baltic states but Polish writer Agata Pyzik is someone whose work I really respect. Her ironically titled book “Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West” helps to uncover some of the areas of darkness so many of us have about that part ofthe planet.
She argues that twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. Pyzik makes the highly convincing case that the Western ‘democratic’ world has maintained an arrogant assumption that everybody wants to ‘buy into’ their capitalist belief systems. As well as this, she acknowledges that conservative political failures (including missed opportunities on the left) have meant that market forces and greed have also triumphed over social or collective responsibility in the East, just they clearly have triumphed in the West.
But what Pyzik also does is give the reader a new insight into the arts in a part of the planet when all creative action had a political edge to it. Russian films of the post-war era obviously had a propagandist purpose (very often) but the Sots Art movement also got away with mocking ‘unberaable, ritualised Soviet life’ while simultaneously showing how the average person could attempt a normal existence among the ruins of the old world.
As well as this, writers such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like critical realism to ‘inspire and activate the reader.’ In his earlier book “Man Without Qualities” – a superb title – he largely rejects modernity, seeing ‘the tragedy of the modern artist as someone who lost the ground under their feet.’ Surprisingly, he views this as ‘an advance rather than a difficulty.’
Again and again in Eastern Bloc culture Pyzik points out examples of the contradictions and paradoxes of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French thinking but are so often overly simplified into the black-and-white certainties of Iberian habits of mind.
Another strength of this book is that it recognises the unheralded contribution of women in the East.
It took the feminist film director Agnieska to accurately predict how female activism in Poland’s Solidarity movement would be wiped from popular memory and when this is combined with how sexuality was restricted and banned in the movies across Communist nations, it is alarming how the idea of feminine purity was so dominant. In a patriarchal Catholic Poland ‘full of open sexism’ precious few women characters of equality got through to be seen.
I love the sound of this book and actually get what she is talking about the blind faith in the captialist way can be so blinkered sometimes as some of the things in communism where good but just run by bad people and never quite worked as they should
Hi Stu, I’m intrigued…
When you mention ‘the withdrawal of the funding for so many great publishers in Translation’ do you mean university funding, or government funding or EU funding? Do you know the reason for it?
nea grants from the us government to help with the cost of translation a change in the granting of them since trump took over
Ah, of course, that makes sense…