Jeffrey Condran

[REVIEW] Prague Summer, by Jeffrey Condran

Posted on by

Prague

Counterpoint Press

288 pages, $26

 

 

Review by Michelle Elvy

 

Long after I finished reading Jeffrey Condran’s novel Prague Summer, the opening quote by WB Yeats lingers in my mind: “What do we know but that we face one another in this place?” It is the most suitable of quotes to set the scene, and this idea that there’s nothing more important than the space between us creates a haunting mood.

The novel begins twice, really. First with a body falling quite beautifully from the sky:

The body seemed almost to float as it left the protection of the window casement. Against the dark sky, buoyed on a humid night’s air, its pale green skirt billowed like gossamer around thin hips and legs. The passive face of the woman looked toward the heavens, mouth open, a few strands of dark hair caught in the corner of her colored lips. For a moment, the whole—skirt, legs, hips, hair—paused cinematically before remembering its obligation to fall swiftly to the unforgiving cement below.

A strong opening moment, a defenestration to set the mood. A woman falling effortlessly, almost gracefully, toward her eventual and inevitable demise. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Michelle Bailat-Jones

Posted on by

 

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

***

 

Fullscreen capture 882014 90551 AM

 by Michelle Bailat-Jones

 

 

1. At the top of the toes, above the slender metatarsals and those little phalanges, sit three small wedge-shaped bones—the cuneiform bones—that help to create the arch of the foot.

2. Within the larger Kirishima Mountain Range, there is a smaller ridge dotted with several peaks that runs across the center of the island from Mt. Karakuni to Mt. Takachiho. The tops of these peaks rise above the forest with terrains like moonscapes—covered in scrubby plants, pebbles, and dust. Craters dot the ridge line, some dry, others filled with sparkling blue water.

3. In the 15th century, a Venetian traveler named Giosafat Barbaro visits Persia and sends back reports of a strange and indecipherable writing found on clay tablets and on the walls of ancient city sites. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: William Lychack

Posted on by

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

***

East of Vienna: No Small Journey

by William Lychack

As a kind of prologue, I want to say that this story has absolutely nothing to do with my present-day life and work. I want to see this all as just a little detour my twenty-year-old self took to go find Dracula. I need to tell you how this little episode has no practical bearing on who I am today. And yet still, in some ways, I feel those days in Romania have everything to do with my life and work. In many ways, going to that castle defines who I have come to be.

It’s Winter, Vienna, 1986, my junior year abroad, and somehow Reed Thompson and I have gotten it into our heads to visit Dracula’s Castle. A lark, of course, a caper, a forbidden little spree for us, the adventure of Reed and I journeying behind the Iron Curtain, two of us taking the slow train east to Budapest, to Bucharest, to Bra?ov, tracing switchbacks high through the Transylvanian Alps, deep into the green heart of Ceau?escu’s Romania. We grow weary with travel, eat nothing but grim black bread, the constant rocking of the train carrying in our bodies after we step onto the small station platform in the middle of the night in the tiny village of Bran at last. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Andrew Ervin

Posted on by

 

 

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

***

 

Soles-on-the-Ground Time

by Andrew Ervin

 

For years I was obsessed with a place I’ve never been to. Over a decade ago, on our honeymoon, my wife and I took a long walk along the coast of Islay in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. The rain is what I remember the most—there was no fighting it, no staying dry. Through the mist we could make out the next island over, the all but inaccessible Jura, which was where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The fact that he had to get so far from the seats of political power to write about Big Brother remains a source of fascination to me. We were unable to get a ferry across in the limited time we had so we continued our walk along the embankment. I can still smell the peat smoke and see those hills—the so-called Paps of Jura—across the sound.

The not-quite-getting-there sensation of being so close to Jura gnawed at me for years afterward. I began to imagine what life was like there. I would catch myself inventing the people—or cartoonish versions of them, at least—and the houses and the glens I never saw. Those thoughts eventually congealed into a novel, Burning Down George Orwell’s House, which will be published next year. The book begins right there, on that embankment at the ferry port. Like Orwell, my protagonist escaped the bustling city—Chicago, in this case—and got off the grid. Or attempted to. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Elise Levine

Posted on by

 

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

***

Axioms of Euclid Avenue: herself, by herself

by Elise Levine

 

 

My mother in her beaver coat, me in skirts and cut-offs: a swagger never hurts.

The ways of walking never end: or they do: smile, nice ass.

 

*

 

I’m eighteen, crossing Toronto’s Spadina at College on a sweltering August night.

I’ve fought with my mother: earlier that evening, in suburban Willowdale for a visit, having recently moved into the city: a top-floor one-room shared-bath hot-plate no-kitchen on Euclid: twenty bucks a week.

The fight: don’t go, I’m going, so go: who do you think you are you dirty: the ashtray flung: by her, me: no shit: we’ve always fought: always will until her last conscious day, nearly three decades later: the mouth on me, mouth on her. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Stewart O’Nan

Posted on by

 

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

 

***

 

The World That Matters

by Stewart O’Nan

 

 

When I’m writing a novel, I like to do location scouting as if I were shooting a movie.  If possible, at the very beginning, or at least early in the first draft, I go to the actual setting of the book and drive around taking pictures, looking for where I might set scenes.  As Laurie Anderson says, “Let’s put some mountains here so the characters have something to fall off of.”

It rarely happens that I find readymade settings.  Or maybe it’s that the ones in my head are better, more evocative than the ones I run across in real life.  It could also be that I’m a terrible location scout—impatient to get back to my desk and the world of the characters. Continue reading →

Literary Flaneurs: Jeffrey Condran

Posted on by

 

A guest series at PANK Blog, curated by Jeffrey Condran

 

In 2001 Bloomsbury inaugurated a series called The Writer and the City. In the first book, Edmund White wrote about Paris.  The title was The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris.  White provides a helpful definition of flaneur: “A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search for adventure, aesthetic or erotic.”  It is an idea that has always held for me an air of romance and mystery, and puts me immediately in mind of Henry Miller, who in his frequently impoverished state, wandered the Parisian streets in search of diversion and inspiration.   And so writers walking a place and gaining inspiration serves as the theme for the blog posts during the next two weeks at PANK.  Contributors Stewart O’Nan, Elise Levine, Andrew Ervin, Michelle Bailat-Jones, and William Lychack will join me in taking readers on an international tour of places where being a flaneur has had an impact on a particular writing project or on their careers as writers.  We will visit Prague, Paris, Toronto, an island in Scotland, a Japanese village, and Dracula’s castle.  Enjoy the ride! 

 

***

Prague is Silent

by Jeffrey Condran

The moment I emerged from the subway in Wenceslas Square, I understood that Prague was a city meant to be seen on foot.  Perhaps it was the human scale of the place—no breaking your neck looking up at skyscrapers as in New York—what Henry Miller called those “beautiful white prisons.”  No, Prague’s architecture is 500 or 1000 years old, mostly, miraculously, untouched by the 20th century wars that destroyed so much of the rest of Central Europe.  It has a time capsule feeling about it, even now, despite the ravages of two decades of capitalism.  You feel it’s almost possible to take a good running leap and hover just a few stories—a handful at most—off the ground and see everything.  Continue reading →