Croatia

 

I'm back from Croatia, and suffering an immense emotional hangover. That was one of the most intense, action-packed and enjoyable weeks I've ever had. I feel as though, since June 1st, I've lived an entire short, vivid life at high speed.

I was there for the International Festival of the Short Story, which took place this year in Zagreb and Dubrovnik. I cannot praise the festival highly enough. Best festival I've ever taken part in. And of course, as always, the quality comes down to the people. Charismatic organisers, magnificent volunteers, excellent translators, and great rattling crates full of terrific writers.

I'll post again on this, but right now I'm still too full of sights and sounds and memories I haven't processed.

Also, I can feel a lot of what happened in Zagreb and Dubrovnik already beginning the mysterious alchemical transformation into fiction. (Examples - I wrote a poem I really like, in the quarantine buildings outside the walls of Dubrovnik, and  got the entire plot for a damn good film while walking through the Square of the Loggia. And there's more on the way, I can tell by the tingle... It's extraordinary to think that in 1991, the year I was enjoying a hit single in Ireland with Toasted Heretic, this city was being hit by artillery shells and guided missiles.)

So, anyway, I can't really blog about the most intense or interesting stuff, because it would interfere with the fermentation process.

 But damn, I laughed, I cried, I swam, I ran, I nearly died.

Jude: Level 1 in Greek

I know that some reviewers felt that Jude: Level 1 was all Greek to them. Well, now Jude: Level 1 can be all Greek to EVERYBODY. It's being published next week by Topos Books of Athens, in a translation by George Betsos. George and I have exchanged many profound, cultured and erudite emails over the past year, as we tried to work out the best way to translate "Ardcrony ballocks" into Greek, so I know that he has done as fine and conscientious a job as could be humanly achieved. (And what a fecker of a book to translate, the man is a hero.)

One of the great, odd pleasures of being translated lies in checking out who you're now being published alongside. It's a bit like joining a very, very peculiar football team. Like the players signed by a football manager, the writers signed to a publisher's list do tend to share some indefinable attitude.  Some publishers are attack-minded (lots of odd books, young writers, high-risk experimental fiction narrated by a squid). Some are defensive (rather obvious mainstream contemporary stuff and a lot of the more tedious classics).

If Topos were a football team, it would be very entertaining to watch. I was delighted to see that I now share a list with Philip K. Dick's Ubik (a book I bought for the second time, and reread with pleasure, earlier this year. Indeed, I've raved about Dick elsewhere on the blog).  An impetuous, unreliable, unpredictable and possibly drug-crazed star striker of a novel, very likely to score the winner with a spectacular bicycle kick in the dying seconds of extra time. Also, unfortunately, quite likely to get arrested just before the match.

And, though I have no idea what position it would play in,  I am deeply intrigued by a book called The Insane President and Female Pleasure by the Greek writer Pepi Rigopoulou. Freud, Bosch, Goya, Ovid, Duchamp... definitely my kind of book. Good to see, too, that Topos have an experienced midfield general in Fidel Castro, whose memoirs they publish in the autumn. Though Alain Robbe-Grillet may have trouble passing a late fitness test after dying earlier this year.

Anyway, Jude: Level 1, in Greek.

Tell all your Greek friends. You don't have Greek friends? Shame on you. Go to Greece at once, make some friends, and tell them.