Anyone who thinks the Balkans have moved on from the 1990s should read Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come, impeccably translated by Will Firth and published now by Istros Books. This short novel, ostensibly about Montenegro today, is awash with paranoia: conspiracy theories, serial killers, natural disasters and the shifting meaning of recent Balkan atrocities. It’s…
| 28/09/2015I don’t believe those stories about pristine beginnings. True, time spoils everything. And yes, everything gets worse over time. But what is prone to spoil is not necessarily good in the beginning. Everything is bad, even at its inception. Nor do I believe the stories about the wisdom pronounced by children in their alleged innocence. I’m sure there are…
| 28/09/2015
It’s difficult to pin down why the novels of László Krasznahorkai have become so particularly successful in recent years, with the author winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 for ‘his achievement in fiction on the world stage’. One simple reason is that translation has made his work available to English-speaking readers both here…
| 27/09/2015
How long does it take for a dream to die? Five years? Ten? Fifteen? Well, I have had a certain dream for 25 years now, and you know what? After a long quarter-century of disappointments, I think I might have to let it go. Which is a real shame, because it’s a wonderful dream. My…
| 23/09/2015
Abraham Hanibal was a fascinating character in the history of Imperial Russia. Kidnapped as a child from his African home in the early eighteenth century, he was brought over by the Ottoman Empire and offered as a gift to Peter the Great. Baptized into the Orthodox Church and adopted as the Tsar’s own godson, he…
| 23/08/2015
Young Europeans today have grown up in a world on which the shadow of communism no longer falls. It is often hard to explain to them what it was like to visit Soviet-controlled Europe, as I first did, in the late seventies. At that time the bids for freedom – East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956,…
| 10/07/2015
In an essay last year on atheism, Roger Scruton, the conservative writer, historian and philosopher, recalled the darkest aspects of late-period communism. ‘Its aim,’ he wrote, ‘ was to replace social life with a cold calculation for survival, so that people would live as competing atoms, in…. absolute enmity and distrust…. where every secret that…
| 10/07/2015
Twenty years ago, American journalist David Rohde came across a decomposed human leg. It was sticking out of the ground in a village in eastern Bosnia. The leg was one of the first indications to the outside world that rumours of a massacre were true. It was mid-1995 and the location of the leg, as…
| 09/07/2015
‘Gottland is about interesting people,’ Mariusz Szczygiel said at the opening discussion of Frontline cinema’s screening of the film modelled on his stories. Joined by Bloomberg News writer Doug Lytle and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Szczygiel told us there are only two kinds of people in this world: those that are quiet and calm, and those that…
| 04/07/2015
Innocence, the posthumously published crime novel by Heda Margolius Kovály, comes heavy with expectation. It has been described the novelist John Banville as ‘a luminous testament from a dark time’ and a ‘must read’ by Cara Black. Then there’s the writer herself, author of Under a Cruel Star, one of the best – if not…
| 28/06/2015