Before the Feast

by Sasa Stanisic, Anthea Bell (Translator)

Overview

It’s the night before the feast in the village of Fu¨rstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman—he’s dead. And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells—the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking. 

Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941040409
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	316
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Saša Stanišic was born in Višegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into thirty-one languages; Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Anthea Bell is the recipient of the Schlegel Tieck Prize for translation from German, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 2002 for the translation of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and the 2003 Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation. She lives in Cambridge, England.

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2016
Stanisic’s novel is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a fictional German village named Furstenfelde on the eve of an annual celebratory feast. Narrated collectively by the villagers, the story dips into each of their lives in poignant ways while also contributing short anecdotes from the village’s past, transcripts of which were previously locked away in an archive that has now been broken into. Readers meet a large cast of characters including a vixen in search of eggs for her cubs; the local bell ringer, who no longer wants to ring the bell; two young men who speak exclusively in rhyme; a former soldier from the National People’s Army who now aims to take his own life; and the men who drink at local bartender Ulli’s garage, where he serves them cheap beer and lets them “sit and tell tall tales.” The act of storytelling is at the heart of the novel. While the action in the present day sometimes lacks direction, the complex layering of older stories paints a larger and more cohesive picture of the village’s history, much like a canvas being painted throughout the course of the novel by Ana Kranz, a woman who since 1945 has been “painting exclusively Furstenfelde and its surroundings.” Serious subjects are raised throughout this impressive and sweeping portrait, including our relationship to history and the responsibility of remembering the past, but this comic novel never takes itself too seriously. The end result is both redemptive and hilarious. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Stanišic’s work is seamless, rhythmic, and captivating. Anthea Bell makes for a dream translator, perfectly capturing his whimsy and idiosyncrasies. This is not a book to consume once and leave on the shelf to collect dust. Like your favorite fairy tales, Before the Feast is a story to experience again and again, whose charms will enchant you every time it is read."

Rachel Kaplan

"We are glad. We are ecstatic, actually. We have an honest-to-God wordsmith in Saša Stanišic'. Only seldom does a work of literature embody the lyrical and the realistic simultaneously, the specific and the universal simultaneously, the body and the soul of the world, simultaneously. Stanišic's prose captures the official narrative and the myth, the dream and the rumor, the hearsay, all of it. It captures how we humans see what we later dare to call reality. I love it."

Ismet Pric

"Before the Feast is a big book in every sense: it's vibrant, compassionate, and knowing. Stanišic channels an almost reckless energy into a novel that's at once sprawling and controlled."

Stephen Sparks

"A village fully in the present, yet rife with legends. In Before The Feast, this villagetells its own story—a novel as compelling multi-voiced chorale put in prose."

Leipzig Book Fair Jury Prize

"A book like few others. Politically well-versed and stylistically a work of art."

DIE ZEIT

★ 2016-03-16
In his sophomore novel, Bosnian-born writer Stanišic (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2008) meditates on history, real and counterfactual. Fürstenfelde is a sleepy little burg somewhere down along the German-Polish border, territory whose cultural conflicts have proved such fertile ground for Günter Grass. Not much happens there; the wolves stir and the woodpeckers peck, while a diligent vixen sniffs her way through one henhouse after another to feed her kits. Not much happens, that is, until the ferryman goes missing right before the Feast of Saint Anne, a high point on the local calendar. "Big hairy terrorist-type beard, fingernails and all that," mutters the narrator, who marvels all the same at the way the ferry provides a little light at night. Readers with a sense of classical mythology will be alert to the possibilities when death, or at least the oarsman across the River Styx, takes a holiday. When time stands still, history becomes a jumble; one of the townspeople finds her nicely done hairdo squashed by a Pickelhaube, or spiked helmet, of a century past, while another, bound up in the doings of the old East German police state, is given to saying portentous things such as (this time concerning the vixen) "if a chicken is fearless, that doesn't make it brave." Another principal is introduced with a near-Homeric epithet each time he appears: "Herr Schramm, former Lieutenant-Colonel in the National People's Army, then a forester, now a pensioner." In the face of a neo-Nazi rally in town, first-generation Nazis are still in view, and when the town archive is broken into, stories from other times and voices come tumbling out. Stanišic's yarn is a sprawling mess at first glance, but as it unfolds, it's clear that he has given great thought to structure, to repeated and echoed motifs and themes, and in the end each element in the storyline ties up more or less neatly, if sometimes with a little confusion in getting there. A brilliant, quirky entertainment.

Kirkus Reviews