Maja Hrgovic - Zlatka

I've long felt that happiness is the great unexplored territory of literature. That exhileration as well as strife, comfortable warmth as well as harsh uncertainty, could make for an interesting and fresh way of approaching fiction. There are notable examples of good writing about happiness - Dave Eggers does it for a few pages in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I assume there are many authors that I haven't yet discovered that have also done it well - but for the majority of authors it seems anathema to their creative process. The same, it must be said, goes for readers for whom the idea of a book about happiness is about as interesting a prospect as a novel about the process of making cheese.

But I remain convinced that there is space there for an author to come along and do something exhilerating in this field. I have today been reading a sneak preview of the forthcoming Granta 115 which is entitled The F Word and is all about feminism in the 21st Century. Not a subject that one would necesarily consider natural ground for writing about happiness. But I came accross a wonderful piece by a Croatian author, Maja Hrgovic, which confirmed again for me the belief that writing about the positives in life can, when done well, be a transcendent experience. There is a passage, when the narrator is with a new friend at a club, which particularly stood out.

"The people around us were just a moving background, extras in a movie starring Zlatka and me. I got carried away. At moments I felt rapture, thick and saturated, clotting in me, somewhere in my lungs, in my oesophagus – I had to open my mouth wide and yell into the noise, anything, just to let it, this something, come out of me."

Fantastic prose. It's a fantastic piece that I enjoyed thoroughly. I look forward to reading more from Maja Hrgovic in the near future.