Learning Cyrillic: Stories

by David Albahari, Ellen Elias-Bursac (Translator)

Overview

"Learning Cyrillic" presents a selection of fiction by Serbian master David Albahari written since his departure from Europe. In these twenty short stories, written and published in their original language over the past twenty years, Albahari addresses immigrant life—the need to fit into one's adopted homeland—as well as the joys and terrors of refusing to give up one's essential "strangeness" in the face of an alien culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628970906
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	12/23/2014
Series:	Serbian Literature
Pages:	189
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

DAVID ALBAHARI was born in Serbia and emigrated to Canada in 1994. He is the author of eleven novels and nine collections of short stories. His novel Gotz and Meyer won the ALTA TranslationAward and was a Barnesand Noble Discover selection.

DAVID ALBAHARI was born in Serbia and emigrated to Canada in 1994. He is the author of eleven novels and nine collections of short stories. His novel Gotz and Meyer won the ALTA Translation Award and was a Barnes and Noble Discover selection.

Editorial Reviews

"A Kafka for our times..." — Neue Zurcher Zeitung

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

An entire collection... that speaks to the complexity of identity... Beautiful.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette

Albahari's successful stories and ambition alone, make for worthwhile reading.

Cleaver Magazine

A Kafka for our times.

Neue Zurcher Zeitung

2014-10-15
Expats, lovers and writers from Belgrade to Calgary wrestle with distance and loss in this pensive, postmodern story collection from the veteran Serbian author.Albahari's prior works in English translation (Götz and Meyer, 2005, etc.) emphasized the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi rule. The 27 stories here are relatively gentle, more interior tales, though World War II remains on Albahari's mind. In "Hitler in Chicago," a writer meets a woman on a plane who claims to have met the dictator, delivering a final line that suggests his ghost isn't leaving soon: "Everyone must see Hitler once in their life." In "Tito in Zurich," a woman takes practically orgasmic joy in a poster in her room of the Yugoslavian strongman, evoking a tension between security and surveillance. More typical, though, is the title story, in which a man teaching Cyrillic to Serbian children in a cold North American town befriends Thunder Cloud, a Blackfoot Indian; Thunder Cloud's folk tales intermingle with the church's and the narrator's own Serbian background to make for a somber study of displacement. Metafictional gamesmanship abounds: Pieces like "The Basilica in Lyon" and "A Story With No Way Out" are stories about storytelling and the futility of applying order to our messy lives. ("I don't know why I began this story, nor why my wife and I turned up in it.") Though not exactly flash fiction, these stories tend to be brief, introducing a relationship and abstracted complication, and Albahari's habitually open-ended conclusions can be unsatisfying. But sometimes the approach produces gems like the two-page "Squirrel, Peanut, Hat," in which a squirrel at the narrator's front door sparks a memory of his father's stint in a Nazi camp. Albahari lives in a lively, quirky present, but a dark past is never far away. Considered, sometimes-stiff experiments enlivened by Albahari's wordplay.

Kirkus Reviews