Fairground Magician

by Jelena Lengold

The collection 'Fariground Magician' brings together stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and values that are perceptible only at exceptional moments. The narration moves from apparent realism to other genres, such as crime fiction, the thriller and erotic prose. Memories, intimations and premonitions are infused in these stories with a tranquillity that accepts what fate brings, even when, as in the stories Pockets Full of Stones or Nosedive, efforts are made to change it. Lengold uses eroticism as a natural ingredient of human life, as an integrated tension consisting of two inseparable aspects - body and soul - energising stories like Love Me Tender, Fairground Magician, Zugzwang, Wanderings, and Aurora Borealis. In Fairground Magician, Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts. In stories like It Could Have Been Me, Shadow, or Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery, she manages to leap over the wall between the bodily surface and the human interior in a very distinctive way. No matter how common are the situations she depicts - whether it be broken marriages, unfulfilled expectations or the motives of forlorn lovers - Lengold is constantly searching for the authentic, finding it within the sophisticated irony which is a trademark of her fiction. "Fairground Magician is a wonderful collection of short stories. Sensuous, charming, witty and urbane, Jelena Lengold's stories of complex relationships and passions are both highly literary and highly readable. This collection has already won a number of European prizes: it deserves to be discovered and treasured by the British readers." Vesna Goldsworthy, author of 'Chernobyl Strawberries' and 'Inventing Ruritania'

Genres: Short Stories, Serbian Literature

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Born on 15 July 1959 in Kruševac, Serbia. She has published eleven books which include six books of poetry, four books of stories and a novel. She is represented in a number of anthologies of poetry and stories, and her works have also been translated into a number of foreign languages. Jelena Lengold has worked as a journalist and an editor in the culture desk at Radio Belgrade. She has afterwards worked as a project coordinator of Nansenskolen Humanistic Academy in Lillehammer, Norway for the subject Conflict Theory. Since September 2011 she has been a freelance artist, dedicated solely to writing as her only profession. For the collection of stories The Fairground Magician she received the following awards: Biljana Jovanović, Žensko pero, Zlatni Hit liber, as well as the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011.

Reviews

[Neva · Rating 1 out of 5]

Чудесно оформление и страхотен превод, който оправдава четенето. За съжаление самото съдържание не го оправдава: тези разкази са изсмукани от пръстите, като в работилница по творческо писане, която дава твърде къси срокове за предаване на следващото домашно. И всичко с един такъв многознаен тон... Забравя се до минути след прочитане.

[Vishy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Jelena Lengold's 'Fairground Magician' by pure accident. It was in the list of titles mentioned in the back of another book, with a brief description. I like discovering new books like this and as this was a collection of short stories, I thought I'll give it a try. I'm glad I did.

'Fairground Magician' has thirteen short stories. There are different kinds of short stories in it – there are stories about love, loss, family. There is also fantasy and science fiction. There are a couple of erotic stories. There is also one story about a cat which is very beautiful. Most of the stories have brilliant first paragraphs which pull you into the story and never let you go. There were beautiful passages in every story, even in stories which were not necessarily my favourites. In one story called 'Nosedive' there is a description of domestic intimacy which is one of the most beautiful descriptions I've ever read. It even made me smile. In another story 'Wanderings', which is a cat story, there is a beautiful description about the narrator and her cat. These were two of my favourite passages from the book. I'm sharing them below. Do tell me if you like them. I enjoyed reading most of the stories in the book. One of the erotic stories didn't work for me, but readers who enjoy literary erotic stories might love it. It was beautifully written with just one long sentence. Atleast half of the stories were absolute favourites for me – they gave me pleasure and joy from the first sentence, and gave me lots of goosebumps till the end. One of the stories 'Senka' even made me happy at the end and I'm thankful to the author for that.

I loved Jelena Lengold's short story collection. It is one of my favourites of the year. One of the great things about the past one-and-a-half months has been discovering great short story writers from the ex-Yugoslavia region, most of them women. First it was Asja Bakić, and then it was Miljenko Jergović, and then it was Alma Lazarevska. And now I've discovered Jelena Jengold, and I am amazed by the richness of these short stories. Alma Lazarevska said in an interview that she prefers writing and reading short stories. I'm wondering whether the writing part is true for many of the writers from the region. It appears that the concentration of short story talent here is mind boggling. I've never discovered so many favourite short story writers in such a short span of time. Short stories are a tricky literary form and pulling it off with one great short story after another (like Jelena Lengold has done in this collection and others have done in the other collections I've read) is extremely hard. But these writers seem to have pulled off the impossible.

I'm sharing three of my favourite excerpts from the book below. Hope you like them.

From 'Nosedive'

"My husband insisted on having his own towel. I do not know whether this fact explains anything. Sometimes I would try to substitute my own towel, by using various little subterfuges. For instance, I would say that I had washed all the towels and there was only one left. Or that we were just about to go away and there was no point in dirtying so much clean laundry. Sometimes I would even hang my towel, which I had only used once, on the hook where he usually put his. But none of that helped. Quietly, without a word of protest, without expressing his wishes or displeasure out loud, he would find a clean towel and when I followed him into the bathroom later I would always find that same, definitive sign of the separation of our bodies. I was not able to understand this. There are countless places on our bodies where we touch one another, kiss and lick, but after all of that we went to wash it all off ourselves, he would always need to prevent one single dead cell from my skin from crossing onto his. I do not know exactly how to say at what moment, after so many years of shared life, I began to believe that I would fall in love, irrevocably and headlong, with the first person who would want to rub himself dry with my towel. The towel that had just wiped my stomach and my arse; that had been drawn between my legs and, possibly, still had a moist hair on it. Someone for whom something like that would be quite natural."

From 'Wanderings'

"...she looked back at Lola, who was now lying perfectly peacefully on his shabby blanket, blinking at her with his yellow eyes. She knew he would soon fall asleep and that he would then sleep for hours. That is how it always was. People never sleep so tranquilly, she thought with a hint of envy. Not even as children. Even then, all kinds of monsters come to them in their sleep. But Lola slept without a care in the world. You could just make out his breathing, the rhythmic rising and falling of his stomach. Sometimes an ear would twitch, at a fly or bug. Sometimes, without opening his eyes, he would get up, stretch his back, change his position and carry on sleeping. And that was all. He had no worries. He did not think about what had happened the previous day, he had no plans of any kind, he was not tormented by envy, he had no ambitions, he did not know anxiety. But who knows, she thought, perhaps I am wrong; perhaps he too has his feline worries? But still, this idea seemed hardly likely. Lola, asleep like this, seemed the very picture of absolute tranquillity. Sated, washed and carefree. Perfectly safe in his garden. She wondered whether he had any conception of what safety was. Or did he know only fear, the moment he felt it. Watching the cat always soothed her in some strange way. She liked sitting beside him, sleeping beside him, watching a film beside him, eating when he ate, reading a book while he dozed with his head on her slippers, in a word – she liked it when the cat was here, in her field of vision."

From 'Aurora Borealis'

"...with his elbows on the table, he tried to think what would be more sensible: to have a shower or make a coffee. The coffee was essential to give him the energy for a shower, but equally, a shower was an essential precondition for making coffee. How can I decide, he wondered. What if I never decide and stay forever at the table, immobilised by my dilemma? What if I never do summon up the energy to do either of these two things? Then he thought that it wasn’t all that important, after all. He had already made all the important wrong decisions. He had made them with incredible ease. With an absolute lack of awareness that every detail, even the slightest, had its own weight."

Have you read 'Fairground Magician'? What do you think about it?

[Giota]

«Ο μάγος του Λούνα Παρκ» και άλλες ιστορίες…
Η νέα συλλογή διηγήματων της Γελένα Λένγκολντ κυκλοφόρησε πρόσφατα σε μετάφραση Γιώργου Γκούμα από τις εκδόσεις Βακχικόν.
Το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο εκδόθηκε με την υποστήριξη του Υπουργείου Πολιτισμού και Τύπου της Σερβίας και κέρδισε το Βραβείο Λογοτεχνίας Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης 2011.
«Άραγε έχετε σκεφτεί τί θα γινόταν αν γεννιόμασταν ένα λεπτό πριν ή μετα»;
Πρόκειται για 13 ιστορίες καθημερινής ζωής, αλλά και αγάπης και συγκρούσεων. Στις σελίδες του, ο αναγνώστης συναντά ποικίλες μορφές αφήγησης, αλλά διαφορετικά είδη ιστοριών, από ερωτικά έως θρίλερ και φαντασίας.
«Είναι δυνατόν η αγάπη να μετατραπεί σε κάτι άλλο»;
Ευχάριστο, συγκινητικό, με εξομολογητική διάθεση θα σάς κρατήσει καλή παρέα…

https://www.clevernews.gr/o-magos-toy...

[Artemisia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jelena Lengold è alla sua prima pubblicazione per la Zandonai, casa editrice che abbiamo imparato a riconoscere come punto di riferimento per le letterature balcaniche, ma ha già alle spalle una serie consistente di opere e diverse traduzioni all’estero. La raccolta di short stories con la quale è arrivata in Italia, impreziosita dalla traduzione di Alice Parmeggiani, le è valsa l’European Prize for Literature 2013 per il suo paese, la Serbia.
Le occasioni che danno a Jelena Lengold il la per comporre le sue brevi storie sono estremamente quotidiane, a tratti quasi banali - un viaggio in aereo, una vacanza di pochi giorni, separazioni e attese di cui facciamo esperienza ogni giorno, ma il tratto con cui vengono raccontate colpisce per l’estrema originalità e la forza della sua personalità. La sua scrittura è familiare, quasi domestica, ben collocata nella realtà, coadiuvata da un tono diretto e semplice, a volte anche ironico, come nel racconto Love me tender dove la protagonista scivola senza speranza nelle sue fantasticherie per un finto Elvis. Per alcuni versi potrebbe quasi somigliare a una versione più spregiudicata e fresca della scrittrice giapponese Banana Yoshimoto: la scrittura della Lengold è forte e garbata al contempo, e i suoi protagonisti si raccontano attraverso di lei, confidando alla pagina non solo frustrazioni e malinconie, ma soprattutto il loro accorgersi di una realtà altra intravista dallo spiraglio della loro solitudine.
In un’intervista rilasciata a Lucilla Parisi, la scrittrice si sofferma più attentamente proprio sul concetto di solitudine, che a una prima lettura sembra essere l’elemento comune a tutte le sue storie:

“questo libro parla sì di solitudine, ma intesa come destino di ogni persona. Essere soli non significa necessariamente non avere nessuna persona intorno: ritengo invece che sia più uno stato mentale, una sorta di raggiunta consapevolezza per cui ogni individuo è solo indipendentemente dal numero di persone che lo circondano.”

Il mix di prospettive differenti svela un sistema di simboli di non così immediata comprensione: nonostante la semplicità del discorso, dietro le parole dei personaggi si cela sempre una dimensione sospesa e sensuale, uno spazio limite in cui fermenta l’epifania. Così una raccolta di racconti d’ispirazione quotidiana che avrebbe tranquillamente potuto passare inosservata si impone invece come un’affascinante serie di momenti fatali e irripetibili. Per il fascino dello stile sembra quasi che sia la stessa Lengold “il mago della fiera”, molto più che un fenomeno da baraccone i cui trucchi sono facili da scoprire. Nella sua sensibilità non c’è l’inganno di una quotidianità posticcia e trita, ma piuttosto l’incanto quieto e malinconico che subivamo quando durante una fiera, da bambini, restavamo a bocca aperta di fronte all’ennesima magia acquistata per qualche soldo.

[Marko Lapcevic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting collection of short stories.
The stories are about love, missed opportunities, loss, etc.
While reading some of these stories I felt sad and melancholic.

[Piotr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oj, dobra ta książka. I bardziej bym ją jednak polecał czytelnikom niż czytelniczkom.
Bo to jest jednak inny sposób patrzenia, czy wyrażania emocji, niż ten najbardziej powszechny, najczęściej spotykany w zdominowanym jednak przez pisarzy, literackim mainstreamie. I Literaturę mam na myśli a nie 'czytadła'.
(Żeby tak autor "Rozwiązłej" i "Wiwarium" potrafił pisać...)

[Jai Lau · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always enjoyed Lengold's style of writing and when she has good subject matter, the end result is constantly entertaining and thoroughly humorous. In "Fairground Musician", the subject matter carries its weight about half the time. She seems to write best when she's not in the mood for writing and the contempt blows through her work. Short stories such as, "Get thee to a nunnery" and "Nosedive" are hilarious in their prose and although the ending is a bit telegraphed, "Aurora Borealis" brings the emotional weight, yet other stories such as, "Love me tender", "Fairground magician" and "Under the guise of highbrow literature" bring little to the party. Generally, the collection does not really have many stories that will stay with you but are mostly enjoyable.

[Potterboater]

Sorry but NO.

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a delightful collection of well-written stories.

[Vanja Mihelič · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought to give it 3 stars, but actually the book has that something, so I decided for 4.