Only one name finds its way onto the cover of the book, but as the title suggests, The Bastard is the child of more than one creator. Yashmilye’s hero (or alter ego) Ivan Grilenko admits as much in the introduction: ‘My letters have always contained stories. Correspondents have not always cared for this habit, a rule to which there have been three main exceptions, all female, all of whom have taken my weakness for telling stories and thrown it back in my face, with pleasing results. This novel is one result: a collaborative story, constructed through letters’.

One word at least will have set a few alarm bells ringing. That word is collaborative. For the bastard book-child of several parents seldom promises beauty. History has taught us that stories with many parents (excepting folk tales, carried across generations and softened like pebbles by the raging seas of sense) are, more often than not, a poor bunch. Get a group of friends together to forge a story and, fun as it may be, the tale that is conceived will probably be a formless compromise; a cacophony of divergent styles and ideas, a crude and careless mish-mash.

Think, for instance, of the infamous Obo Urlach project (reviewed, in a fashion, here). Fourteen talented writers came together to produce what was, by all accounts, one of the worst novels ever written. It was so bad, indeed, that the vast majority of the copies were destroyed (usually by the authors involved). I doubted for some time that the book even existed. Ironically, it was the reluctance of so many of those involved to mention it that lead me to believe it did.

The Obo Urlach book was a deformed bastard; the difference between it and Yashmilye’s novel is that the latter is fully aware of its bastard status (proved, resoundingly, by its title). Not only aware, indeed, but willing to draw the reader’s attention to it. Collaboration is the subject of the novel, not its shameful weakness. What happens when a story suffers under the hands of several writers (and Yashmilye is quite aware that most stories, his own included, do suffer under these circumstances) – that is the real story of The Bastard.

So how does Yashmilye manage to present his readers with a cruel compromise of a story without losing them? Being aware of the flaws doesn’t make the flaws go away, after all. But drawing yet another story out of them does help one understand them anew, viewing them from a fresh perspective. And this is what Yashmilye does: adding to his letters a commentary, in the shape of footnotes, which glues together the chaos of the collaboration, giving the novel a new and moving shape.

All of which begs the question – would explanatory footnotes have rendered Obo Urlach’s Fires of Wilmeldestran readable?

‘I want to make a book sweat. Oh god yes. I want to make a book’s pores open wide, wide as hell’s mouth: fit for the flushing of all foul impurities. Who cares if the spine collapses – we must let those impurities out! Forget the sweet, fireplace-hugging cushion-noodling reader. My reader is an armed fighter. The book is there to be tortured. The book is a prisoner. The book is your chained-up plaything. So make that damn book sweat, I tell you – make it sweat!’  (Johannes Speyer, in conversation with Georgy Riecke, c.1978).

All true Speyer fans will probably be aware that a toned-down version of this argument appears in the penultimate chapter of what may be his greatest work: Riding the Crest of Culture. But having cast one’s eye over the above, who would ever care to peruse its gentle and pathetic partner?

I don’t know. Maybe there should be a space set aside for less histrionic styles. Speyer probably had good reason for never putting his thoughts forward (in print) in this exact manner.  After all, as he admitted at the time, this particular line of thinking does lean, at times, into somewhat seedy territory. What’s more, the allusion to torture, though understandable in context (and undeniably striking) isn’t exactly managed with tact.

Still, I would stand by the basic message to this very day, without a single word altered. Make that damn book sweat, I tell you – make it sweat!

Before donning bathing caps, flippers and goggles and plunging with energetic elegance into the deep pool of The Bastard, it’s well worth paddling our dainty or not-so-dainty feet in the side-pool of solid facts. Who is this Boris Yashmilye fellow anyway? What else has he written? Does he open doors for all women, or only for the pretty ones?

Yashmilye’s most celebrated novel remains his first, the strangely titled Flashes at Midnight (which I review here); still thought by many - myself included - to be the definitive text on the subject of political streaking (aka ‘Disrobing for Democracy’). A cheeky novel, to be sure, publicised with equal insolence. I recall another critic leaning over a dinner table two or three years ago to share with me the information that ‘in his considered opinion (which knowing him, was not all that considered) Boris Yashmilye was a total arse’. Though these are words I rarely employ myself, I had to agree that all I had seen of the young Bulgarian confirmed his theory. For the truth is that I have met Yashmilye only once, shortly after the publication of Flashes at Midnight, a book he choose to advertise by means of imitating its protagonists. Which is to say that Boris, mistaking me for a bloodless bookhound, bore his bare backside at me.

This would suggest something of a brutish character, which isn’t entirely true, though it would be fair to say that youthful extravagances got the better of Yashmilye following his early success. Both his second (The Musala Affair, a faintly pornographic spy thriller) and third (Nuts, Nuts, Nuts, a decent book ruined by the overuse of the word ‘metaphysical’) novels received a deserved critical pounding for a writer of his obvious talents. Rather like an older version of the Norwegian firebrand Edmund Ek, it looked as though Yashmilye had burnt himself out: that he was a one-trick pony, a single-swindle stallion, an lone-dupe donkey.

Then came Out Damned, a glorious fourth outing (reviewed here). The irreverance  remained – it is, after all, the story of a fantastical expedition by a team of very small people across the face of an unfortunate acne-strewn teenager – but it was, on the whole, a much more consistent work than its limp predecessors. Yashmilye, at his best, combines sheer silliness with passages of a strangely moving power. That he manages to get away with this, particularly in Out Damned, might have something to do with the increasingly autobiographical nature of his work. Flashes at Midnight was clearly based on aspects of his own life, admittedly, but it was the facts rather than the emotions that fuelled the fiction. In Out Damned – and his new novel, The Bastard - we find Yashmilye facing up to the less immediately amusing sides of his own personality. Not only does he face up, but he sees the the examination through. Any fool of a writer can come up with a good idea: Yashmilye has turned himself into a man capable of seeing these good ideas through. This is what makes him one of our best contemporary novelists – a judgment which the publication of The Bastard seems unlikely to overturn.

As for the third question mooted above, I have it on vaguely good authority that, for all his bottom-baring, Yashmilye is a ‘gentleman’ – and will gladly open a door for any girl, whether she looks like Helen of Troy, or the loneliest warthog at the savannah school disco.

Is Wdj Szesz our most prolific contemporary European novelist? To be honest, I’ve never stopped to count all the words that flow like fierce lava from his volcanic writing hand. All I know is that he is one of those writers who does little else but write. The process of putting words down onto paper is, for him, much like breathing in and out. He does little else.

Much the same has been said of that great nineteenth century storysmith, Honore de Balzac. Prolific barely covers it: Balzac’s way of working shames us all. Flooding his heavy body with thick black coffee, he would often write for ten or more hours at a time, producing several novels a year.

On top of this he was also a keen letter writer. In the words of Aldous Huxley: ‘Ladies were constantly writing to him; and he, with that ardent and romantic boyishness which went hand in hand with his rather cynical knowingness, responded enthusiastically‘. More’s the pity, thought Huxley, for that time might have been better spent writing more serious prose. Long letters to Madame Hanska were a drain on his creativity, if not his life; the moral of the story being that any aspiring writer ought to keep correspondence with female admirers ‘as brief and as formal as courtesy will permit’.

Or should they? Not if Boris Yashmilye has anything to do with it. For him, writing letters is just as, if not more interesting than writing novels. ‘A letter,’ he has written, ‘is the perfect story. One writer, one reader: the ultimate set-up’. Note that he says ’story’; for like many writers, Yashmilye doesn’t approach his correspondence in any casual spirit. Writing is writing: one doesn’t let up on the quality, however many people may be reading the results. You may use the same skills, the same methods, the same variety of approaches in a letter as might do in a novel. Why not?

Letters are in themselves stories, but – like stories – they also contain stories. Which brings us to The Bastard, Yashmilye’s new novel; a collection of stories which are, in fact, letters. Missives masquerading as narratives; tales pretending to be epistles. The letter and the novel come together in gloriously messy harmony. Has Yashmilye taken time out from ’serious work’ to scribble lengthy messages to female admirers? Certainly. And was that time wasted? Not on this evidence it wasn’t…

Perusing a menu in a small eatery earlier this week, I came across the following item: ‘Paella, possibly with prawns’.
Putting aside the potentially promising proliferation of the letter ‘p’, let us consider instead the remarkable hesitancy of the statement, reminiscent as it is of a famous fictional food file.

I refer, of course, Marcin Woo’s ‘Maybe Menu’ – the prime draw of the ’Hotel Vague’, a four storey hotel in Gdansk, the setting of more than several subplots in Wdj Szesz’s epic and as yet unending novel Gdansk Haunting.

Marcin Woo, the half-Polish, half-Chinese proprietor of the Hotel Vague has, rather like his creator, a deep fear of solid facts. He will not be tied down. And thus he runs his hotel ‘according to a set of everchanging rules’, making sure that almost nothing is set in stone; that nothing runs true to popularly conceived form.

This applies, in particular, to the hotel restaurant, whose eighteen page menu offers a large range of products that may or not actually appear on the customer’s plate. One can order, for instance, ‘duck, or chicken, or possibly coot, with a sauce made from ingredients that may or may not include saffron, basil and liquorice’. Having ordered this, there is every chance that one may receive a bowl of baked beans instead. Or maybe you’ll get roughly what you asked for. Who knows. There is really no way of knowing. That’s the way the Hotel Vague goes. You receive the key to Room 204, but you’ll probably find yourself sleeping in Room 43. You take the elevator to the second floor, but you might end up in the basement. And maybe you’ll like it down there. Maybe not.

In a novel renowned for a frightening attention to detail – and seeming obsession with sordid social issues, the slightly surreal Hotel Vague is a never less than a breath of fresh air: a magical lantern sitting on a shelf alongside a load of lightbulbs. But it is also, as noted, a pretty fair symbol of Szesz’s ambitions; his simultaneous desire to grasp life by the scruff of the neck, whilst admitting that it is, at bottom, unknowable; that the novel can no more pin life down than any menu can adequately describe the culinary delights it may contain.

Read Adrian der Linger’s review of the novel here.

A small man in a luminous yellow and bold red jacket pushed a well-packaged parcel containing a proof copy of Boris Yasmilye’s new novel, The Bastard, through my letterbox this morning. I will begin to read it tomorrow, Bulgarian dictionary in hand, and will return to this blog sometime late next week to water its barren soil with a few fertilising thoughts.

Before I do that, let me toss into the empty field a couple of earthy clods, registering my disappointment at a choice made by Yashmilye’s publishing house regarding the book cover. For those who haven’t seen it, it features a well-known painting by my third favourite Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, showing the back of a man with well-combed hair looking into a mirror showing the back of a man with well-combed hair.

Across the oceans and seas we sigh. A Rene Magritte painting on the cover of an obscure European novel? One could not be less original if one tried. The fact is, book covers of obscure European novelists have been haunted by Magritte’s oh-so-mysterious images since somewhere near the beginning of time. All it takes is for the narrative to give at least a hint of a story within a story, or a cavalier approach to common novelistic trends, and some pigeon-brained sandbag at the publishing house art department drags another Magritte painting from his dangerously full drawer of well-worn ideas. Move on, say I! There must be something better with which to adorn Yashmilye’s carefully ordered collection of words? Surely?

More on this later.

The last we heard of Eva Holubk’s missing book, The Marmalade Jar, it had been seen in Fiji, Mexico City and Gloucestershire. Then, for a couple months, nothing. Until last week, when I received, in a light blue envelope, a missive claiming to have encountered the latest work by Estonia’s favourite female poet in a hotel room in Texas, tucked within the pages of the customary Bible. This was followed, last night, by an e-mail which weaved its way through various electronic channels with the news that three copies of Holubk’s collection have turned up at a bookshop in Durban, South Africa, priced at 12 rand each. I am awaiting photographic proof.

What does this tell us? A lot, which doesn’t amount to very much in particular. The story of this book is not an easy one to follow, though the possibility of someone having a grand old giggle at our expense is, I am afraid to say, increasingly likely.

In other news, a ghost has taken up residence in my computer and spooked out all the common sense. Until the latter can be persuaded to return, I will be writing less.

More on less later.

I’ve never been partial to them myself, but there’s no denying the popular appeal of a murder mystery story. For those who find the genre a little too clinical, however, allow me to suggest an alternative: Absurder Mystery.

It was R. G. Spendock who coined the phrase, back in 1957. Tired of stories that ‘present a mystery, in all its glorious strangeness, and then go on to solve it, with cold aplomb’, he sought instead tales which only ever set up situations. ‘I will never condescend to a solution’, he once wrote. And so it was. His stories were all incredibly open-ended; rife with gossip, swimming with potentials: possibilities perpetually lording it over probabilities. Everything was left in the air. Even the penguins.

Though he struggled to reach a wide audience with these fantastically aggravating narratives, he did succeed in placing a few of them in some of the leading literary journals of the day. It has taken fifty years or so, nonetheless, for someone to collect them all into one volume. We must give thanks, therefore, for the efforts of Spendock’s grandson, Nicholas, without whom Just No Stories: The Collected Prose of R. G. Spendock would not have been possible.

No word on the publishing date just yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

As noted earlier in the year, 2009 always looked as if it would be a good one for contemporary European literature. At least half a dozen of the authors who featured on my 2005 list promised us new titles, from Hamish Wishart (whose short story collection, Sore Chasm, was published at the beginning of April) to Dinos Tierotis (whose second novel, The Golden Bomber Jacket, hit the bookshelves, albeit lightly, in May). If I have failed to mention these two works before now, it is not because I haven’t given them any attention; merely that other books (Turgidovsky’s Delicious Air, for instance) have taken precedence. What is more, as you will know, I am not one to be rushed into thrusting forth my critical opinion. One takes the cake out of the oven only when it is cooked. Then one consumes the cake. Thus is one becrumbed (which is an entirely different matter, to be considered on another day).

The summer, meanwhile, was set to provide a fitting climax to the literary riches of the spring, symbolised by the possible appearance of the long-awaited Poppies: Book Two, by Jaymer Veers. Ah, what more could a fan of obscure European literature ask for than the sequel to Poppies: Book One? Does not the very thought of it make your earlobes tingle and small toes twitch?

Forgive me, then, for dumping on your eager shoulders the dank and despondent news that Poppies: Book Two will not, in fact, be published this summer – nor, indeed, this year. Why? It’s a mystery. Some argue that there are ’small teething problems’, whilst others claim that there is ‘no book at all’. Veers himself has been conspicuously quiet.
More on this later, perhaps.

In the meantime I am pleased, nay relieved, to be able to counter this saddening announcement with the information that Boris Yashmilye’s new novel is due at the end of July. There is a tendency amongst many of the writers I admire, as you may have noticed, to toss out books at the rate of one or two a decade, if that. Yashmilye is a blessed exception. His last novel, Out, Damned, was only published a couple of years ago (though it never found an English publisher, translations are readily available – or you may choose to read it in the original Bulgarian if you so desire). Hot on the heels of this, now, comes The Bastard, which, if the the frantic wasp of rumour is to be believed, is set to confirm Yashmilye’s triumphant return to form (his second and third novels, you may recall, were largely disappointing).

More on this when more there is.

Talk of Hieronymous Bosch has, as hinted in a post below, dominated my kitchen table of late, due in the main to a recent trip to Madrid, where many of the great Netherlandish painter’s works may be seen. It was there, indeed, that my wife decided she would turn away from her beautifully oblique verse and ape the efforts of the much maligned story-spinner, Dan Brown, whose trite art historical thrillers loom large, like elephant turds, in the cesspit of popular literary culture.

Surely, you scream, someone has already tried to pour Bosch’s rich imagination through the sad plastic funnel of a please-film-me page-turner? No doubt they have, but I’ve yet to hear about it. Nor has my wife, which explains her desire to do this dirty task herself.

Which is not to say that her book won’t have a handful of good ideas hidden within its lurid covers. Even the very worst books contain a sprinkling of originality, after all. And her theory that Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is all about syphilis has definite qualities. Definite qualities. This is more than I can say, unfortunately, for some of the subplots. Still, if I can get her to accept my own belief that the key to the painting lies in the relationship between Eve and the giraffe, contentment will be my cuddling-companion (even though we both know, at heart, that Hieronymous Bosch and the Holy Bottom Conspiracy will never actually be written).

Those who know the painting in question will know that one of its most interesting features is the presence of several oversized animals. These include, in the central panel: a mallard, a couple of types of fish, a green woodpecker, several types of owl, a kingfisher, a jay, a butterfly, a hoopoe and a goldfinch.

What these bring to your mind, I cannot say. Perhaps you’re already thinking back to that bird-themed fancy-dress party you went to in 1997. My mind, meanwhile, finds itself flying in a different direction – to the only modern European novel I know to feature an oversized goldfinch. I refer, of course, to Pierre Manniac’s Death: A Way of Life – not my favourite semi-fictional blood-splattered memoir of the last two decades, but a good stab at what is, all things considered, a tough genre in which to make a killing. You may read a review of the work here. I don’t think it mentions the goldfinch, but there’s plenty to hold the interest nonetheless.