[SKRIVA] Om novellskrivande på Rumänska kultturinstitutet
- From: Ahrvid <ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <skriva@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2014 01:23:31 +0100
(Skriver på engelska då det är tänkt att senare gå på internationella fora. Tar
gärna synpunkter. --AE)
I have at different times the last decade attended cultural events in Stockholm
sponsored by the governments of Finland, Germany, Spain (their Goethe and
Cervantes institutes are back to back, physically), Italy, France, Britain,
even Greece (they have a small Greek culture house in Stockholm), Lithuania,
but not Russia (do they care about anything but the new Olympics in
corruption?) and not the US (I've been to the US embassy for IT/tech
presentations but no culture at all).
But the country that beats them all, at least in Stockholm, is ROMANIA. They
have just over twice the Swedish population and is situated far away, somewhere
in Southeastern Europe. Who should care about Romania? Well, anyone interested
in an old, dynamic cultural life should! The Romanian Culture Institute in
Stockholm, smack in the middle of the medieval Old Town, has for many years
earned itself a reputation for being a true Cultural Hotspot of the Swedish
capital. Members of the Swedish Academy (the Nobel Prize) frequently go there
for instance. During the autumn and spring seasons they host 1-2 events/week:
literature, poetry, history, art, music, film, etc. All lead by the Super Hero
of Romanian culture on Sweden, Dan Shafran (boss of the institute, the big
Gothenburg book fair recently having Romania as theme was his doing to a high
degree), and his deputy Eva Leonte who made the author intros - in very good
Swedish - to the 4th of February program which I will tell you about.
4th of February the institute invited us to a discussion about short stories
and a new Romanian anthology just published in Sweden, Skräpliv ("´Crap life",
by the new publisher 2244 aimed at literature from the Black Sea region). It
was the Swedish editor Ingmar Nilsson, authors Lucian Dan Teodorovic, Gabriela
Adamesteaunu, Dan Lungu, all knit together well by interpretor Ariana
Stoenescu. (Apart from intial presentations and Nilsson's questions everything
was in Romanian, fluently interpreted into Swedish).
They talked for over two hours, but here are some highlights and opinions:
Short stories have earlier been very important in Romania, but there's a drop
of interest in the last few years. People want long novels and follow soap
operas on TV. It seems people want "long stories" as some sort of replacement
for life. Teodorovic noted that books (novels) used to be 200 pages but are
now 500 pages. Novels become longer, at the same time as short stories become
shorter.
One exponent for the latter is that Vodaphone recently had a short-short
story competition (of questionable litrerary quality, some said) in Romania.
There's a big interest in short stories because of so called Social Media.
Panelists said the recession for short stories may be temporary, and shorter
tales may come back. (Ahrvid's note: short stories disappeared in Sweden after
a golden age in the 1940/50's. But there are now signs that interest is coming
back, eg with new short-story-only publishers like Novellix and Mix Förlag.)
You don't start with "Shall I write a short story or a novel?". You begin
with what kind of story you want to tell, and you pick the length and form
depending on what is needed. There is a misconception that short stories are
only a starting point for "learning to write novels". Short stories are usually
more difficult to write! You have to be on your toes all the time in a short
story.
There are new posibilities for the short story thanks to the Internet. There
are lots of new writers from the Facebook etc generation and they write short.
But what this will lead to in the longer run is hard to tell
From the audience floor I asked a question about the creative process. Lungu
answered with saying that it was all a very concentrated and "anti-social"
thing for him. When his family noticed he was getting into writing mode, they'd
better keep a distance. He doesn't want to speak with anyone. (During the
after-mingling I talked with him a little, he knows workable English. He takes
"a few days" to write a short story. The same for me: I'll spend about one day
doing a first draft, and then several days editing it, fixing it, re-writing
the stuff.)
Teodorovic who is also a publisher noted that while everyone likes short
stories, they sell about 1/3 of novels. That is a problem. Maybe short stories
are mostly for "high-brow" literary types?
Adamesteaunu was pessimistic about the future for the short story. The short
story is often seen as a an excercise before writing a novel, but this is all
wrong - the short story is much more *difficult* to write that the novel. Our
times promote "long stories" in the form of TV tales (soap operas) without
endings. Lungu still believed in the future of short fiction, like by
Hemingway. People remember The Old Man and the Sea much better than Farewell to
Arms.
Someone from the audience asked about the future of electronic publishing.
The reply was that it was yet to early to tell. It has only been a Big Thing in
Romania the last two years but according to eg Teodorovic the literary quality
is as yet leaving some things to desire.
We also discussed their contributions in the anthology, which was the reason
for us to gather. Here we can find some "vibes" of what I'd call - and some
others also - "social sf".
Adamesteaunu's story was about a guy who had a mistress and fled to the West
before the fall of the Wall - and then couldn't marry her. She made a sort of
dystopian presentation of the pre-fall Romanian society. Teodorovic wrote about
- it is supposed to be based on a true story - a prisoner of the communist
system. After being tortured and hit in the head with a hammer, he loses his
memories, and his torturers decide to turn his now blank head into the New
Human. He told an amazing (and sad) story of a Romanian who took part in
torturing "enemies of the state" in communist times, a guy who himself *had
been a survivor of Auschwitz*. How can someone first be tortured and then do
the same? Lungus contribution in the collection was by himself called a sort of
thought experiment, like playing around with geometry. He wrote about a man who
was married to a woman - at a distance! He was some sort of stalker who also
worked for the city registrate'ss office, and being obsessed with observing a
certain woman, he promptly entered a marriage certificate for the two of them
into the files, without them even having met...
Lungu also noted that if you live in Romania, you don't have to invent
incredible stories. They turn up from life and history itself, as opposed to
Sweden where - ha said - you'd really have to make an effort to find strange
stories. I think he refers to that Sweden has been a very quiet corner of
Europe with no wars for the past *200 years*. Sweden will celebrate or
commemorate its last war - when the Swedes invaded Norway (but forgot about the
oil) - in 2014.
Romania has had a much more different, voitile history, and this perhaps
leads to a moreinteresting background for storytelling.
--Ahrvid
Ps. My notes above covers only maybe 25% of what was said. I took what I
thought was most interesting and i may very well have misinterpreted things.
--
ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx / Follow @SFJournalen on Twitter for the latest news in
short form! / Gå med i SKRIVA - för författande, sf, fantasy, kultur
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www.skriva.bravewriting.com / Om Ahrvids novellsamling Mord på månen:
http://zenzat.wordpress.com/bocker C Fuglesang: "stor förnöjelse...jättebra
historier i mycket sannolik framtidsmiljö"! /Nu som ljudbok:
http://elib.se/ebook_detail.asp?id_type=ISBN&id=9186081462 / Läs även AE i nya
E-antologin Sista resan http://www.welaforlag.se/ebok.htm#sistaresan /
YXSKAFTBUD, GE VÅR WCZONMÖ IQ-HJÄLP! (DN NoN 00.02.07)
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