Chernobyl Strawberries (41 page)

I sometimes wonder whether I would have received the same numbers and the same kinds of letters had I instead written a novel or a collection of essays. These forms have often been
employed to tell a story which is essentially autobiographical. Although I could see distinct advantages in those genres in which everything ends exactly the way one wants when I began to write this book they seemed an option for those who had the luxury of time. The fact that I am now working on a novel – very, very slowly – is a reflection both of a renewed sense that I might have enough time for luxuries after all, and of the sheer enjoyment of creating fiction. And, although nothing is certain, I am glad that
Chernobyl Strawberries
may yet turn out to be a step on a writing path rather than its conclusion. I often joke that I enjoy my ‘posthumous life' more than the one I lived before. The fact that a memoir has come to represent a beginning rather than a summing up, appeals to my sense of a life in which so many things have been topsy-turvy.

The challenge I set myself was to write a story which was not linear yet which nonetheless managed to make the reader want to know what happened later, to read on with a sense of curiosity and, if possible, even urgency. Obviously, as is implicit in the memoir as a genre, the heroine does not die – not just yet – but does she live happily ever after? Yes, yes, dear reader, she lives a happy ‘after'. About ‘ever', let's wait and see.

London, December 2005

My eleven favourite books

LAST SPRING
, I was asked to list my favourite books for a literary festival. I found the idea frustrating and kept wanting to change the line-up even when the orders for a special display were dispatched. As soon as I listed my choices, I realised that I had offered eleven rather than the customary ten titles, but couldn't bear to delete one simply for the sake of decimal conventions. I have to admit that I love nothing so much as spying around other people's shelves to check which books are well thumbed and which are still suspiciously pristine. I never feel fully at ease in houses in which the books are hidden or absent. ‘Tell me what you read, and I'll tell you who you are' is something I really believe in.

Dates shown indicate the year of first publication.

Leo Tolstoy,
Anna Karenina
(1877)

When I was a student in Belgrade, in our (often very pretentious) bookish circles the question ‘Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?' was the literary equivalent of ‘The Beatles or the Stones?'. We tended to choose Dostoevsky (and the Stones). At twenty, he somehow seemed more profound, more earth-shattering than Tolstoy. When I returned to
Anna Karenina
in my late thirties, I was bewitched by the complexities of marriage, adultery and parenthood the novel portrayed. Funnily, I found that living in
England has ‘anglicized' my imagination. I kept visualizing Vronsky – the guards officer who abandons the army for a lover and a spot of painting – in brightly coloured corduroy trousers and suede chukka boots, like some Chelsea lizard.

Milos Tsernianski,
Migrations
(1978)

This is quite possibly the greatest Serbian novel, written in 1929. The story of two Isakovich brothers who escape Ottoman Serbia for Austria-Hungary in the eighteenth century, one to become an officer in the Austrian army, the other a wealthy merchant, may sound distant and obscure, but the way Tsernianski writes about love, sex, war, nationhood, and exile grips one by the throat and does not let go. This tale of migration and longing for the safety of Russia and the North – is told in prose so beautiful that I still catch myself reciting the sections of it I have learned at school with a mixture of melancholy and awe.

Robert Dessaix,
Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev
(2004)

In his life and in his writings, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Turgenev was a connoisseur of unusual passions. For forty years he remained devoted to the French opera singer Pauline Viardot. He accompanied her and her husband around Europe, often living next door to them or even in the same house, while his relationship with Pauline remained more or less chaste. I say ‘more or less' because the archaeology of human relationships is an impossible science. We often don't know much about the passions of the people apparently closest to us; is it then possible to be certain about Viardot and Turgenev after more than a century had elapsed, when even the very substance of love might have changed? What I understand by ‘I love you' might be very different from what Turgenev
might have meant. Dessaix's exploration of this unusual affair defies generic boundaries. It is a detective story, a travelogue, a personal memoir, a piece of intellectual history and a fascinating examination of whatever love means.

Eva Hoffman, Lost
in Translation
(1989)

In their judgements on
Chernobyl Strawberries
, readers and reviewers often drew my attention to works which they considered in some way similar. Some comparisons were flattering (Robertson Davies, for example), others puzzling (Tom Sharpe). Eva Hoffman's name cropped up from time to time even while I was still writing the book. ‘She is similar to you,' a friend told me, ‘and your histories are similar. You must read it.' Eva left Poland for Canada when she was twelve, went on to study at top American universities and produce a range of highly respected books: similarities are relative. I hate to admit this, but Eva's book had, for quite some time, languished on my reading pile enthusiastically purchased but as yet unopened, where she was in the company of some of the best writers of our time. I always buy at least three times as many titles as I can possibly read; a greed doubtless rooted in the reading hunger of my East European childhood. One of the first things I did after I submitted the manuscript of
Chernobyl Strawberries
to the publisher – now safe from what Harold Bloom calls ‘the anxiety of influence' – was to read
Lost in Translation
. I enjoyed it so much that I instantly added it to my university course lists. Because this normally means that I have to reread the book again and again, such inclusion is more than a mere compliment.

Graham Swift,
The Light of Day
(2003)

I had noticed
The Light of Day
in the bookshops when it came out and read some good reviews, but decided that it was
probably not my sort of book. The story of a private detective who follows an unfaithful husband around a relatively small patch of south-west London, and develops a strange bond with his client, the jealous wife, seemed too understated for my taste. Now I wonder if my background (let's call it Continental) simply conditioned me to be attracted to books laced with more obvious literary fireworks? I heard Graham Swift read from
The Light of Day
last June. Something about the way he performed the text, in an amazing double-act of the writer and his character, alerted me to the possibility that there was nothing simple and very little that is parochial about this story. Anyway, I have now read it and changed my mind. It is absolutely my kind of story.

Rebecca West,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(1942)

This is my favourite travel book. It is half a million words long and deals with a country that doesn't exist any more. I realise that many people might take a look at it and say: ‘Well, it is about Yugoslavia, and it is broadly sympathetic towards the Serbs, so Vesna would say that, wouldn't she?' I plead ‘not guilty'. It is true, the fact that it was about Yugoslavia initially led me to it, but what West loved most about Yugoslavia are its southern and western parts, rather than the north-eastern area I came from. The historian A. J. P. Taylor called it a work of genius, and the American travel writer Robert Kaplan said it was the greatest travel book of the twentieth century. Rebecca West discovered Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War because – in the growing certainty of the apocalypse which was facing Europe – she wanted to write a book about a small country and its relationship with the great empires. Finland was an early, rejected choice. Written against the sound of bombs raining over London, this book is as much a memoir of
one of the last century's most remarkable British women as it is an account of Yugoslavia.

Edmund Gosse,
Father and Son
(1907)

While I was undergoing treatment for cancer,
Father and Son
offered unexpected solace. First published anonymously in 1907, this book tells the story of Edmund Gosse's strange and solitary Victorian childhood. His parents were deeply religious members of the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse's mother, Emily, who died of breast cancer when Edmund was eight, authored a number of religious pamphlets. The account of Emily's cancer treatment in mid-nineteenth century London made my own treatment in early twenty-first century London seem luxurious, notwithstanding the spartan hospital wards and shared bathrooms, and all the problems familiar to any fellow user of our National Health Service. What Emily had, however, and I could not have, is an unwavering belief in God. I can certainly see the advantage of belief in such extreme situations, if not otherwise. I read her story as told by her son with enormous curiosity. It is a very unusual and very courageous book.

John Buchan,
Greenmantle
(1916)

‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark': the story of
Greenmantle
, which sweeps through London and Constantinople, via places such as Baghdad, Berlin and Belgrade, is my favourite adventure novel. I like Buchan's central character, Richard Hannay, the South African mining engineer and war hero, but his Sandy Arbuthnot is my favourite officer-and-gentleman: ‘Tallish, with a lean, high-boned face and a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl's . . . He rode through Yemen, which no white man ever did before . . . He's blood-brother to every kind of Albanian
bandit. He used to take a hand in Turkish politics, and got a huge reputation . . .'
Greenmantle
is deadpan, a bit camp, full of imperial swagger, superbly plotted and absolutely irresistible.

George Eliot,
Middlemarch
(1871–2)

I hate to admit this, but although I might prefer a comparison to a broad range of
femmes fatales
of East European fiction, if anyone asked me to which literary character I think myself most similar, I would have to say that it was George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. When I was younger I shared her idealism and her bookishness and I even had one or two crushes on highly unsuitable elderly Casaubons at the time when I still believed that it was possible to write the
Key to All Mythologies
. At twenty I used to think book-writing much more important, and even more sexy, than running a bank or a country.

C. D. Wright,
Steal Away: Selected and New Poems
(2002)

I discovered C. D. Wright's work while I was writing
Chernobyl Strawberries
. I felt a renewed thirst for poetry. I enjoyed those ten or twenty minute journeys elsewhere that the best poems offer and I didn't feel like engaging with stories or novels, perhaps because my own story preoccupied me so much at that time. A close friend recommended C. D. Wright, an Arkansas poet. Her poems are like words on fire, direct, often erotic, told in an unmistakably Southern voice. I've revisited this book so often that I now half-remember most of it. Strangely enough, the descriptions of Arkansas made me think of my own childhood. I remembered cycling furiously along narrow paths cut through maize fields, gripping the handlebars with fingers sticky and purple from picking wild mulberries. My sister and I spent sweltering evenings on our balcony, gossiping in the shelter of mosquito nets. We watched moths as big as eggs dive
unsuccessfully towards the tiny holes. They flew towards the light, hitting the fine wire again and again. We were poor in almost everything else but rich in time.

Danilo Kis,
Garden, Ashes
(1965)

Kis's Jewish-Hungarian father died in Auschwitz. His own life was saved by the fact that his Montenegrin mother had him baptised to the Orthodox Christian faith in 1939, when he was four. In 1947 she took Danilo and his sister to Cetinje, the tiny former capital of the kingdom of Montenegro. Hidden in a nest of rocky mountain peaks, Cetinje is a picturesque town of Mediterranean stone houses incongruously mixed with the palaces and ornate embassies of the Great Powers, but Danilo's literary imagination remained deeply marked by the former Austro-Hungarian towns of his early childhood. From Cetinje, he went to Belgrade to study and then finally to France. He died in Paris in 1989, at the age of fifty-four. Although it employs a fictional form,
Garden, Ashes
is a journey around Danilo's father. It is a short, atmospheric and poignant book. I can't think of many others in which poetry and novel-writing come so close together.

London, December 2005