Looking into the mirror is an experience that is unavoidable though not necessarily always agreeable. Yet it can often be more revealing than one might expect, since looking into the mirror allows us to see ourselves, for a moment, from the outside – the way others see us. Families, communities, nations and cultures also need a chance to see themselves in the mirror, that is to say, through the eyes of others. We asked twenty European authors from twenty European countries to choose another country on the continent and sketch its portrait, creating a kind of literary mobility scheme, a writers’ Erasmus exchange. Each of the texts produced as part of the Mirrors of Europe project reflects a different country.
This volume offers the first set of essays, with mirrors reflecting half the countries of Europe. Portuguese writer Gonçalo Manuel Tavares discovers what Europe is made of as he flies above Istanbul; the Italian Andrea Bajani walks around Bucharest in the company of stray dogs; Slovakia’s Jana Beňová looks for Fernando Pessoa in the Bertrand bookshop in Lisbon’s Chiado; and Vitalie Ciobanu from Moldova explores Amsterdam by bike, stopping at Anne Frank’s house and admiring van Gogh’s paintings. Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić travels the length of Italy, from a moribund Venice to the island of Lampedusa, throbbing with immigrant voices, in which she discerns the melody of a future Europe. Ukraine’s Andrey Kurkov has spent the past twenty-five years trying to work out the puzzle known as Great Britain while Poland’s Andrzej Stasiuk roams Moldova in the scorching heat of summer. In Oslo, Romanian Ioana Pârvulescu feels like a Viking in a boat, while Jochen Schmidt sneaks onto the roof of his Berlin tenement night after night to inflate his spaceship and fly to Budapest.
French author Marie Darrieussecq feels ambivalent about her visit to Slovakia, describing it as “Europe of the small countries and undoubtedly the future of Europe: a Europe that works, that mows its lawns, piles up its logs, builds its bridges, and is not too fond of Gypsies”. And on a final, sombre note, Radka Denemarková takes a hard look at her native Czech Republic, despairing over a country that has had to rehabilitate Franz Kafka.