One of the great things about my annual “read a book I’ve owned for over a year” goal is that it’s a fantastic way to trick myself into doing something I want to do but have put off because I don’t believe that I deserve nice things or fun or whatever else.
Hell yeah, Puritanical background radiation!
Suddenly this slim collection of Dutch flash fiction by A. L. Snijders went from “lovely gift from a friend that I haven’t yet earned the right to enjoy” to “necessary step in completing this arbitrary goal I set for myself.” Snijders’ zeer korte verhalen (“very short stories,” usually abbreviated to zkv) were also just the thing my melted brain needed. According to the people who count these things, most of the stories in this collection are no longer than 300 words. One paragraph, maybe two; rarely longer than one of the (small) pages of this paperback edition. Their brevity, their focus on nature, the element of the unexpected that permeates so many of them all make for a very ready comparison to haiku and I’m not sure why this doesn’t come up more often in descriptions of his work. Snijders wrote thousands of zkvs over the course of his life; Night Train has collected maybe 90 or so. If you want a taste, the translator John Irons has a few up on his blog. I’ll link to one that I’m pretty sure wasn’t in Night Train: “Barefoot.”
The other half of Night Train is the translator’s foreword? introduction? by the peerless Lydia Davis. It’s a bit like reading her translation diary, if she keeps one: detailing her thought process behind translating this or that word or expression, noting successes as well as failures. It occurs to me now that I would love for her to translate Marie NDiaye, just for comparison’s sake. At the very least, I would love to read her review of it.
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