Chinese Letter (Eastern European Literature) by Svetislav Basara

Chinese Letter (Eastern European Literature) Reviews

• 
  L.S. Popovich

  Hear me out.
  I realize Dalkey publishes challenging, subversive, and often experimental titles. I collect them. But I will be donating this one. I am sure many others will get more out of it than I. I've listed some observations for your deeper consideration:
  
  Basara's existential experiment may appeal to some. The amount of assumptions a reader could draw from the text might take up more pages than the text itself. Unearthing authorial intent is not the only way enjoyment is gained from reading though. In summation, Beckett and Gombrowicz engaged in more engaging experiments, wrote with far more lucidity on similar subjects, and constructed more artful expressions of their solitudinous mental wanderings.
  
  A few pluses and minuses for your consideration:
  
  The author, narrator, character or whoever says: "I could write about my trousers for hours." The existence of this book proves that fact. At least once he says "I don't know what I'm writing." There are many versions of: "I don't know what to write. I have to write, I am writing [this], [that], and [the other]." Repetition, static tone, absurd humor, signs of automatic writing, directionless wandering, etc. all visit and linger upon the page, staking claims, but ultimately, floundering amid drivel and quick, cryptic pseudo-scenes.
  
  In a sense, Fritz's writing is a pathetic attempt to ward off death. A ghost hovers over him. It plagues him. The self-referential text is purposely structured and detailed in a sloppy, unaesthetic way. He writes like a man stumbling through the darkness of his own mind. The central conceit institutes a challenge to the narrator, to utilize 100 pages to free associate. The motivating factors are so random that one can only apply dream-logic to justify their propulsive force.
  
  Though occasionally amusing results are yielded, it appears to me to be a fairly purposeless experiment, an incantation against emptiness.
  
  The absence of narrative, plot, realistic characters, common sense, the subtraction of purpose, outline, moral. That's what it comes down to. The writer is writing to validate his own existence. The consciousness is in a state of constant existential crisis. The suicidal thoughts are not comical in my opinion, though there are many attempts at quirky humor. Much of which elicited a distasteful frown from me.
  
  His life reflects the randomness of his thoughts, and absurdist paranoia. Also notice an obnoxious tendency to disregard what he has just written, to dismiss it at every turn, shirking responsibility for writing it, claiming he was forced to produce it.
  
  At one point he is paranoid that he is only dreaming he is writing, and not in actuality fulfilling his commitment to fill 100 pages. There is no real explanation for his behavior except for a panicky writing compulsion, which most serious writers should probably feel at some point.
  
  While endlessly fretting about what he should write he invents his own false backstory, progressing in reverse chronological order till he reaches the stage of a spermatozoa and encounters a previous reincarnation. Nice touch, but too little, too late.
  
  Many other things happen, or threaten to occur at various stages of this metaphysical struggle. I am at a loss to explain most of them, except from a Dadaist perspective. If you are a fan of David Markson or Beckett's drier stuff, I'm sure your rating will differ from mine.
• 
  Chris Oleson

  In this entertaining Serbian novel by Svetislav Basara from 1984, our narrator/protagonist, Fritz, might just be crazy. Perhaps he is pulling our legs, or maybe he is merely struggling to communicate in an upside-chaotic world. Or maybe all three. Fritz warns us himself that we can’t even know his name. Today it is Fritz. No guarantee that he will be Fritz tomorrow. Fritz has strange notions about reading:
  “What I like reading most are books in Finnish or Norwegian, because I don’t know these languages and because they provide me with so many new sounds.” He is obsessed with death and its inevitability: “But I repeat: I will die sooner or later and there is nothing I can do to prevent this. Except hang myself.”
  
  One day two rather vague, ineffectual officials have commanded that he write a statement of about 100 pages. On what? Anything? Why? Why not? Deadline? We’ll get back to you. He begins to obsess about the style of his prose, what to include, how to fill so many pages. Surreal events and possibilities impinge on his writing time, distracting him away from the daunting construction of his 100-page statement. In a bar he meets a beautiful young woman who promises that they will meet him again after he finishes his statement. His recently married (and even more recently divorced) sister bursts into the house and wails that their 90-year-oldmother has been kidnapped by slave pirates. Fritz/Not Fritz admits that “I’ll have to do something about this as soon as possible.”
  Fritz has an unconventional approach to writing:
  
  “. . . I keep on writing because I need hope, and you can find hope only in unwritten words and sentences. . . . I have to write so that I won’t die and I have to keep repeating this so that I won’t forget.”
  
  This book explores identity, the friction between “I” and nothing, and consciousness. It is saturated with surrealism and dead-pan humor. Echoes of Beckett, Ionesco, Brautigan, Barthelme. Here’s hoping I can find more work by Svetislav Basara without exceeding my wife’s credit card limit.
• 
  Fredrik

   "I have one problem: I exist."
  
  “This coffee is conspiring against me! I have a box of coffee on which it says FRANCK KAKA. Quite an ordinary box. But this is a perfidious anagram: FRANCK KAFA. It means—‘The Trial.’ Why quotes? It’s enough to say the trial. I hope it’s clear to me what I wanted to say.” 
  
  "I woke up in the city dump. This was to be expected."
  
  “I lay down on the bed, without taking my coat off, and decided to read. I read backwards the whole of Don Quixote because this seemed a more human way of reading this book. First Don Quixote dies, and then Sancho Panza’s adventures follow, and then people in the book read the chapters that are coming… and only at the very end he is reading the dusty books that inspired him to perform heroic deeds for which he died a long time ago.”
• 
  Sean

  A brief novel probing the inexorable anxiety which forestalls the creative act of writing and gives way to an anxiety, a slippage, of the self.
  
  To the numerous points of reference mentioned by other reviewers—most notably Beckett, Kafka, and Gombrowicz—I would like to add Thomas Bernhard's "Concrete", to which Basara's darkly-humorous digressions are clearly indebted, and Raymond Federman's "Double or Nothing", the self-pondering narration and ideogrammatic "concrete prose" of which are echoed throughout.
• 
  Katarzyna Bartoszynska

  It's definitely derivative of Beckett, Gombrowicz, Witkacy, Dostoevsky's Underground Man, and generally that whole experimental fiction crowd, which might tempt you to dismiss it, but it's still an enjoyable little book.
• 
  Jen

  This was interesting...a man is forced to write a 100-page letter or something bad will happen. His review of the mundane while under threat is novel.
• 
  Brady Dale

  It probably merits more than one reading.
  Calling it "hilarious" is too strong. It is quite weird.
  I'm not really sure what the hell it is to be honest, but maybe a meditation on autocrats. But that has to be way, way, way too simple.
  The language is its own thing.
  I have no idea what happened in it.
  But, anyway... if you're curious? It's very short.
• 
  Jen Chen

  3.5/5
• 
  Stacia

  Chinese Letter made me think of a lighter form of Kafka (esp. The Trial), perhaps? I saw a reference that compared this author's work to Samuel Beckett's works, but I've never read Beckett so I can't compare. (Guess I need to add Beckett to my to-read list.) Chinese Letter is a mix of thought-provoking, banal, slightly surreal, contemporary, somewhat philosophical, & sometimes oddly funny musings in an unclear setting/sphere of action. Different, fairly interesting, & quick to read.
• 
  Steven Felicelli

  Highest praise and greatest condemnation: it's like a lost Beckett/Kafka novel. Protagonist is a cross between Molloy, Gregor Samsa/K., and Mersault. Thoroughly enjoyed this book, but not sure Basara established Basara (nor that establishing one's own voice is important/possible any more).
• 
  reading woman

  Absurdly brilliant.
• 
  Jennifer J.

  ...huh.