This week, our team members introduce us to a prize-winning short story collection and take us to a medieval library. From a debut that negotiates the complicated politics of nostalgia to an exhibition in the newly-restored Notre-Dame, read on to find out more!
Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France
To the delight of tourists, historians, and French natives alike, Notre-Dame de Paris reopened its doors to the public last month. The cathedral is obviously celebrated for its religious and symbolic significance – but it has a significant literary history that has gone rather unappreciated, too (and I’m not talking about The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Since the Middle Ages, Notre Dame has been not only a church, but a scriptorium and a library, filled to the brim with science, history, and other secular literature in addition to a wealth of religious texts.
To coincide with the cathedral’s opening, the Musée de Cluny and the Bibliothèque National de France have put together an exhibition featuring over 40 of these manuscripts – just a few of the 300 that are currently housed within the BnF itself. Having just recently had the opportunity to visit the exhibition myself, I can say that it is stunning. Not only are the manuscripts themselves beautiful (and fun to try and decipher, if you can read Old French), but they also provide a fascinating look at the functioning of medieval libraries, the transmission of knowledge, and the links between texts and cultural and religious heritage. The exhibition is open until March 16th.
Notre-Dame isn’t the only one acknowledging the link between literature and heritage – it’s also the theme of the year’s Nuits de la lecture festival, which begins next week! Coming up on its ninth year, the festival hosts events all throughout the country centered on fostering an appreciation for books and their influence. Writing workshops, collective reading nights at various librairies and schools, and lectures on everything from history to architecture in literature are available. This year’s events all focus on heritage and how it is engrained in literature – heritage as history, heritage as knowledge, and heritage as cultural and individual identity. If you’re not in France but want to take part, you can attend some events virtually! The festival is open from January 23rd to 26th.
Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia
“The New!” (Novite!), a North Macedonian award for the best debut prose manuscript, was recently awarded to Eniz Hilmi for her 2024 short story collection, The City Which I didn’t Love at First (Gradot koj ne go zasakav na prva). The Ohrid-born writer finished her university studies in Istanbul and worked in three Macedonian ministries in Skopje for over a decade. She now lives between Ohrid, Skopje, and Berlin. Her semi-fictional, memoiristic short stories, Hilmi says, were inspired by her “frequent and long stays in Berlin,” a “truly open” city which “honors and cultivates diversity.” The jury, made up of authors Natasha Atanasova, Elena Mitreska, and Stefan Alijević, describes her work as “travel prose that oscillates between the ‘utopian’ search for a lost Yugoslav space and a western sense of organizing time and space, that is, life.” They note that her manuscript is saturated with “an entire spectrum of concepts, symbols, objects, sounds, smells, tastes, which herald the possibility of a nostalgic feeling” and that, simultaneously, her yearning for a Yugoslav past is far from “an individual act of overcoming the pain of time and its transience.”
The jury further notes that Hilmi resists the nostalgia-washing that props up so many capitalist narratives by eschewing “the erstwhile romantic disease that becomes a source of real national policies that celebrate individuality, uniqueness, immutability and, of course, each personal advantage and exceptionality over others, those who are different.” Undaunted by flux, Hilmi does not attempt to freeze time via recollection, nor does she sterilize the flaws of bygone days—her Yugo-nostalgia is replete with criticism, humor, and parallels to other historical moments. The jury quotes artist and author Svetlana Boym to illuminate Hilmi’s relationship to the past: that of a writer who “takes responsibility for [her] nostalgic stories”. They also note that Hilmi’s poetics of nostalgia are a utopian discourse, one that retrojects its ideal state. This begs the question whether “any politics of hope in the post-Yugoslav context is necessarily nostalgic, because it is aware of its current futility,” a sentiment that, arguably, extends beyond its specific cultural situation, considering the current political (and literal) climate worldwide.
*****
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