“He’ll carry the wreath, and Maria and Anna will walk after him. He said it as if he didn’t have any idea what he was supposed to do. Like he’s going to carry the wreath on his back and walk around the house. Cruel. It seems cruel to bother children with that kind of stupidity; introducing them to death through a morbid ritual which has lost any meaning.”
From “All of That” by Ognjen Spahić and translated from Montenegrin by S. D. Curtis.
This story is appearing in English for the first time in B O D Y’s Sunday European Fiction and his story “Raymond is No Longer with Us—Carver is Dead” was in Dalkey Archive Press’s Best European Fiction 2011. His novel Hansen’s Children was published in English by Istros Books in 2011.
A short film of “All of That” recently won the Asterfest’s Gjorgi Abadziev Award and an interview with the film’s director Branislav Milatović will appear in Literalab’s new Afterwords column tomorrow.
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Photo of Ognjen Spahić courtesy of Istros Books
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
