Eastern European Literature – serie

An unforgettable invective, "Night" marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.

Ordered by two mysterious men to write a statement of about 100 pages, the narrator of Chinese Letter--who's not sure of his name, but calls himself Fritz--faithfully records the bizarre occurrences of his daily life: his absurd conversations with his mother who is abducted by slave traders, his visits to his friend who works in the hospital's autopsy room, and his sister's tumultuous marriage to the butcher's son, to name a few. Widely respected in Serbia, the term "Basarian" has been coined to refer to his unique writing style, reminiscent of the best of Samuel Beckett for its directness, existential pondering, and odd sense of humor.

Things in the Night explores a world on the edge of disaster--plagued by mysterious power-outages and threatened by ominous conspiracies--juxtaposed against images and stories of unsurpassed beauty and tenderness. Beginning with the simple but moving words, "My Dear, I feel I owe you an explanation," and ending with the passionate, lyrical, and immensely sad, "Those were beautiful years, beautiful autumn days," this astounding novel, set in Estonia near the end of the millennium, is a hymn to the very best in the human imagination and a eulogy for what humans, at their worst, may destroy.

From one of Serbia’s greatest contemporary writers, Hidden Camera opens with the narrator finding a mysterious, blank envelope stuck in his apartment door inviting him to a private showing of a movie. Or so he initially thinks. Upon arrival at the theatre, he discovers that there’s only one other person in the audience, a very attractive woman whom he’s seated next to. Then things get a bit more mysterious. The movie he’s been invited to see includes a scene showing him sitting in a park. Believing that he’s an unwitting participant in a complicated hidden camera show, he goes along with the variety of setups he’s faced with, which continue to get more involved and absurd. As the show develops, he becomes more and more paranoid and distrustful, but he keeps up the ruse to its thrilling conclusion.

Clutching a bouquet of flowers, hurrying to catch his bus, and arguing with the driver once he's on, a man rushes to a train station platform to meet a woman. This sequence of events occurs and recurs in remarkably different variations in "Vain Art of the Fugue."In one version, the bus driver ignores the traffic signals and is killed in the ensuing crash. In another, the protagonist is thrown off the bus, and as he chases after it, a crowd of strangers joins him in the pursuit.As the book unfolds, the protagonist, his lovers, and the people he meets become increasingly vivid and complex figures in the crowded Bucharest cityscape. Themes, conflicts, and characters interweave and overlap, creating a book that is at once chaotic and perfectly composed.

In this contemporary retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Estonian writer Mati Unt offers a playful yet unsettling mixture of fact and fiction, combining pieces of Estonian political history—in particular the figure of Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), widely regarded as the first Estonian woman to express an Estonian longing for independence—with portraits of life in contemporary Estonia, all set against a backdrop of vampirism and the Gothic novel.