You Do Understand

by Andrej Blatnik, Tamara M. Soban (Translator)

Overview

This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching, and yet always generous short-short fictions addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understand what we want and need. Demonstrating that language and intimacy are as much barriers between human beings as ways of connecting them, Andrej Blatnik here provides us with a guided tour of the slips, misunderstandings, and blind alleys we each manage to fall foul of on a daily basis—no closer to understanding the motives of our families, friends, lovers, or coworkers than we are those of a complete stranger . . . or, indeed, our own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564786234
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	09/07/2010
Series:	Slovenian Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	174 KB

About the Author

Andrej Blatnik was born in Ljubljana in 1963. In addition to writing fiction and criticism, he serves on the jury of the Vilenica Central European Literary Award, and has translated the work of Paul Bowles and others. His collection Skinswaps was translated into English in 1998.

Tamara M. Soban was born in Ljubljana in 1962, and received her BA in English from the University of Ljubljana. Among other works, she is the translator of Andrej Blatnik’s Skinswaps and You Do Understand. Since 2002 she has worked as a translator and editor for the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.

Editorial Reviews

Fifty brief, knotty thrusts at life's conundrums make up this hip collection. Themes of failure--particularly in love--dominate, as in the compendium of excuses the narrator of "And Since I Couldn't Sleep" makes the morning after she's left the apartment of a man she's finally slept with. In "An Almost Perfect Evening," the buttoned-down narrator wishes his equally well-brought-up date would reveal a drastic fault. A humorous mixup occurs in "Words Matter," when a lonely man in a hotel room calls the number on a card offered by the desk clerk, though he has misunderstood the card's purpose ("So, you're not..." "No, I'm not"). And what to make of a world in which a person can go to bed a bank mogul and wake up a rickshaw driver? Each of these short bursts (most are barely a page long) bubbles with a droll, dry humor handily captured by Soban's dead-on, deadpan translation. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Slovenian author Blatnik (Skinswaps) collects short short stories—some as brief as one sentence—that are "concentrated moments of time" that insist readers take an active role in their creation. As when viewing a Kertész photograph, readers are drawn to the shadow, toward the mystery formed by the nameless characters in their familiar yet foreign surroundings. These stories hold your attention long after you've closed the book. In "Voyeur," for instance, Blatnik's spare description of a tabletop and a woman's simple confession provides enough information for an engaged reader to echo the narrator by thinking, "What an appealing story!" The final story, "Marks," gives the greatest clue as to what Blatnik intends his stories to be. Like the piece's bookmarks, his stories are demonstrations of the infinitely possible. Reading a fully conceived story, says the narrator, is pointless. VERDICT These stories are mostly about misunderstanding and dissatisfaction. As imperfect as language is, Blatnik suggests, it's our best hope for connecting with people. The title—expressed as a question in one of the stories, it clearly implores hope—declares that true human connection is within our capacity. Readers who actively participate in Blatnik's imaginative process will be richly rewarded.—K.H. Cumiskey, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, NC

Library Journal