Zagreb’s vibrant cultural scene was home to the Festival of the European Short Story last week: an appropriate end to what has certainly been a great season of culture, music, and activism in Croatia’s small (yet exciting!) capital.
This was the festival’s thirteenth year running, and the festival featured Brazil as its partner country. The festival was delightfully lively and action-packed, featuring not only readings and discussion panels, but also a charitable football game, an introduction to Brazilian fiction, a Portuguese translation workshop, and a cook-off (?). Some of the festival took place in Šibenik, a town on the Croatian coast (a sound decision, as the Croatian culture scene is becoming notoriously monocentric, with virtually all of the events and manifestations happening in Zagreb).
The Simić Bodrožić “literary cartel,” as I’ve come to call them, presided over the festival. Roman Simić Bodrožić (whose short story collection, Nahrani me, was awarded the most important Croatian literary award, Kiklop, and is largely thought to be the best collection to come out in recent years) and his poet sister, Mima Simić, moderated almost all of the events.
Ivana Simić Bodrožić, Roman’s wife and Croatian bestseller on her first try, read from her new collection, 100% pamuk and Marica Bodrožić presented her new book, Das Gedächtnis der Libellen. I’m not actually sure the latter has any familial connection to the Simić Bodrožić clan, her being a German writer with Croatian roots and all.
I was very much looking forward to hearing more about the Brazilian contemporary short story. Brazilian fiction is not something I have had much contact with in the past, and I’ve always found Portuguese to be a beautifully melodic language, so I could not wait to hear some readings in the original. The author who I found to be most intriguing while reading over the program was Ana Paula Maia, described as a contemporary author who “eats Dostoyevsky and spits out Tarantino,” undoubtedly the most interesting description I’ve heard of any author’s work.
Maia described her work as an exploration of violence that happens in lower-middle-class Brazil. She read from her book, De gados e homens, and turned out to be one of the biggest letdowns of the festival, as her story about a gentle slaughterhouse worker was stylistically dull and provided no insight into Brazilian life, or the nature of violence.
João Anzanello Carrascoza, perhaps a more famous name in Brazilian fiction, has a very similar ethos, as he described the locus of his interest to be “inner Brazil,” somewhere between the large city, the favela, and the jungle; his work marked by violence, as well as tenderness.
Our third Brazilian guest, João Paulo Cuenca, was by far my favorite out of the three. He started out as a blogger and a columnist, and still collaborates with Estudio i, a Brazilian television program. His involvement in various media has definitely influenced his writing, as the story he read was half classic narration, half e-mail correspondence paired with Cuenca’s uncanny ability to change perspective and a plot where a character pays a writer to compose a biography he could then live out, making life imitate art in the most literal sense.
The two best stories of the festival, in my humble opinion, were delivered by British authors. Jon McGregor read from This isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone like You. The excerpt had great flow, taking the form of an inner rant from a woman who had just survived a close encounter with a sugar beet that crashed through her windshield. The piece was hilarious and fast moving, but ended on an elliptic dark note, which worked perfectly. Jenni Fagan’s deeply erotic story “Catfish” was even better, as it combined the erotic with the carnivalistic, and was delivered in Jenni Fagan’s Scottish accent, which always helps.
The Croatian author I was very excited to see was Ivana Simić Bodrožić. I am a big fan of her novel, Hotel Zagorje, and she has recently published a collection of short stories called 100% pamuk. The collection comprises fifteen stories about women in the Croatian society of transition. The story that selected for the reading was a piece about a girl visiting her grandmother in the nursing home.
It left me completely cold because it read like a grade school essay on grandmothers; a pinch of tenderness, a spoonful of tradition, a cliché description of an old woman, and a thinly veiled critique of the treatment of women in Croatian society. Still, I am a great fan of Ivana’s work so I still plan to read her new book, hoping that the story she read was an exception.
The Festival included a short story competition, themed “What’s in your pocket,” proving how dedicated the organizers are to promoting the work of young and unknown authors. The numerous submissions included a string of stories written by grade-school children whose teacher apparently decided to treat the competition as a homework assignment, submitting all of the stories, much to the judges’ dismay. None of the children ended up with a prize, but the three stories that were selected were very good nonetheless and can be read in Croatian here.
There were also several very interesting talks held at the festival, giving the authors a chance to promote their work to the Croatian audience, but also to discuss the current state of the short story and the publishing industry in more general terms. The Bogdan Ogrizović Library hosted a fascinating talk about the new Croatian short story, with Maja Hrgović, Zoran Ferić, Edo Popović, Kruno Lokotar, and Roman Simić Bodrožić, a great mix of new and experienced writers and editors.
Listening to Edo Popović and Zoran Ferić talk about the short story versus longer forms was a genuine pleasure. Popović called the short story “the master form,” because, unlike the novel, it allows for no mistakes, which has to be the best description of the genre I have ever heard. Alongside Cortázar’s boxing metaphor, of course, where the novel wins on points and the short story wins by knockout.
Despite Roman’s attempts to lift everyone’s spirits, the panel’s mood was pessimistic. Veterans of contemporary Croatian fiction reminisced about the early nineties, when the audiences actually demanded good fiction and the media was involved in promoting good authors.
Thankfully, Maja Hrgović shed a bit of optimism on an otherwise stark situation in Croatian publishing. She is the founder of Croatia’s biggest internet portal for culture, Arteist. Hrgović has some very interesting perspectives to share, as her portal has become immensely popular, especially with younger, urban demographics. Her hard work and orientation towards new media is a beacon for young Croatian writers who have a chance to be heard. Speaking of young Croatian writers, Hrgović singled out two as the most prominent on the scene: Sven Popović and Pavle Svirac, whose popularity has become a curiosity in a country where writers, especially young ones, are largely ignored. In addition to that, if you place an order for his book, Književna Groupie, the author will deliver it to you personally. On his bicycle, no less.
The Croatian Writers Society and the Simić Bodrožić cartel put on a great literary bash. There were great stories to be heard, in a range of languages, including Portuguese, Italian, German, Latvian, and English, told and discussed by some really remarkable people. If you ever find yourself in Zagreb in June, looking for a good time, have a beer on Tkalča Street and make sure you visit the Festival of the European Short Story.