SUSAN MIRON
Central and East European
Fiction Chronicle
ON THE SKY'S CLAYEY BOTTOM. By Zdenek Urbanek. Translated
by William Harkins.
Four Walls, Eight Windows. $17.95.
TRUCK STOP RAINBOWS. By Iva Pekarkova. Translated by David
Powelstock.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $20.00.
THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL. By Bohumil
Hrabal. Translated by James Naughton.
Pantheon. $23.00.
COMPULSORY HAPPINESS. By Norman Manea. Translated from the
French by Linda Coverdale.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $22.00.
THE PALACE OF DREAMS. By Ismail Kadare. Translated from the
French by Barbara Bray.
William Morrow. $19.00.
THE ISLAND . By Gustav Herling. Translated by Ronald Strom.
Viking.
$20.00.
ANNIHILATION. By Piotr Szewc. Translated by Ewa Hryniewicz–
Yarbrough.
Dalkey Archive Press. $16.95.
A MASS FOR ARRAS. By Andrej Szczypiorski. Translated by Richard
Lourie.
Grove Atlantic Inc. $18.95.
Who will bear witness to these times? Who will record them?
Certainly none of us: We've lived here too long, we've soaked the
epoch up too well, we're too loyal to it to tell the truth about it. To
tell the truth - at all.
- Bronislaw Maj*
In
Tolstoy's world, no two unhappy families are alike. The same might be
said of modern Eastern European writers, each scarred differently from a
similar juncture of historical time and geographic space. Yet most have
been determined, despite the banning and censorship of their work, and
at risk of imprisonment or exile, to "tell the truth" about their epoch as
they knew it. "A heavy biography," as the exiled Romanian writer
Norman Manea puts it, pithily describes many of their lives.
One soon realizes that little of the recent literature which has
*FroI11
Polish Poets
rif
the Last Two Decades oj Communist Rule: Spoiling Cannibals'
Fun.
Edited and translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and C lare Cavanagh.
Northwestern University Press. $29.95 cloth. $12.95 paper.
