Until recently, very little Luxembourg literature had come to my attention. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where I’ve encountered less enthusiasm among locals for their own writing. And then of course there are the language barriers: I can’t pretend I currently have sufficient mastery of French, German and Luxembourgish to read literature in them, and not much has been translated. As for literature from here written in English, I had no idea such a thing existed.
A couple of years back though, I was introduced to Writers Who Talk (WWT), a local English-language creative writing group, and there were among its members several published authors and many more who were writing brilliantly in one medium or another. From there I branched out and, with excitement, started to discover the literature – the English-language literature – of this place I call home.
And yet, since early on in this journey of discovery, one thing that has particularly struck me is how little Luxembourg is featured in this literature. Months of WWT meetings can go by without any mention of Luxembourg in any of the texts presented. Across the four anthologies of Luxembourg writing that I’ve read, I count 151 individual pieces, and just 16 of them make at least some minimal reference to the country. The most recent of those anthologies, Life – A Series of (Un)Eventful Events: Young Voices from Luxembourg, is the most extreme case, containing, as far as I can make out, not a single indication that any of its writers have any connection to the place mentioned in its title.
I don’t know if I lament this exactly, and I definitely don’t mean to criticise any of these writers or tell them they should write about Luxembourg. It’s interesting though, and perhaps worrying in some way. What’s going on here? And what of the pieces that do engage with the Luxembourg context? Are there limitations, for instance, in how they do?
To give a bit of context: my research suggests that an English-language creative writing scene in Luxembourg can be traced back to at least 1968, when New World Theatre Club was established. From the very start, NWTC performed not only the classics but also new work written by its members. Over the decades, the scene has expanded as more and more anglophones have arrived here, setting up other theatre groups, plus magazines, radio shows and creative writing and comedy clubs. Such organisations were never the preserve of expats though, and, especially since the mid-90s, native Luxembourgers have played an increasingly important role on the scene, with the country’s major literary institutions – from its prize and grant-awarding bodies to its publishers, festivals and archives – pretty much all coming to an accommodation with English in the same period. In 2017, Black Fountain Press, Luxembourg’s first dedicated English-language publisher, was founded – by four native Luxembourgers, one of whom has since become the director of the Centre national de littérature (CNL). In its first anthology, 2018’s Fresh from the Fountain, Black Fountain defined itself as a platform for those who’ve ‘made Luxembourg their home or English their language’.
Now, if the neglect of Luxembourg is also a feature of the English-language writing of native Luxembourgers – and I have the impression it is – presumably the reasons for that tend to be somewhat different from those for which it’s a feature of expat writing. There are some fairly obvious dynamics in the case of the expats.
For instance, sometimes their writing is a vehicle for homesickness and nostalgia about their pre-Luxembourg lives. This is perhaps especially the case for pieces that are written to be read aloud – or even rehearsed and performed – in expat groups, where such sentimental journeys can be enjoyed together. Certainly this is one strand I recognise in English-language writing here, and not only in the pieces that don’t feature Luxembourg.
In Terry Adams’s poem ‘Drive through Time’, one of the first pieces in Fresh from the Fountain, a drive east towards the Moselle takes the writer back to holiday drives during his childhood in Ireland, and he concludes by wondering how much of the present he’d trade for one bottle of P. and H. Egan’s red lemonade – that drink having been a staple of those childhood holidays.
Such nostalgia and homesickness are not simply a matter of missing other settings though. There is, of course, a deep kind of familiarity that is developed in youth, and it’s difficult to match that depth of familiarity with things or places we encounter later in life. Relatedly, there’s a natural intensity to our feelings in youth, when we’re experiencing things for the first time. Both of these points were made to me by John-Paul Gomez, whose collection The Idiot of St Benedict and Other Stories won the Concours littéraire national in 2022. One story in that collection sees an alien race conquer our planet and demand endless public re-enactments of particularly intense past moments. Two others, both set in Gomez’s native US, feature men haunted by episodes from their teenage years, such that their thinking and actions continue to be driven by those episodes many years later, when they’ve moved on to different places, different lives – moved on, we might think, to metaphorical Luxembourg.
The latter two Gomez stories also suggest another important dimension that homesickness can have. Sometimes writers feel they have unfinished business in the places they come from, and a need to somehow address that in their writing. Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian-born British Nobel laureate, has argued that diasporic writers constantly write about their places of origin to expiate the guilt they feel for having left, or at least honour the bonds that they’ve lost any more immediate, concrete way of honouring. I sometimes see flashes of this kind of motivation in English-language writing being done here. I think of some particularly moving stories John Brigg, a long-time NWTC director and organiser of its associated summer school, has written about trips back to South Africa to see his aging family members there. I think also of American writer Wendy Winn’s poem ‘Presentations and prayers’ – published in Black Fountain’s High Five! women writers anthology – about her son having to give a presentation in French class on the Parkland school shooting, and ‘the guilt and sorrow of that, / the poignancy and unfairness of standing here / in Europe doing homework / as children are being buried in Florida, / Of their lives being reduced to a presentation / for a grade, for French.’
When I spoke to Winn, she pointed out another related dynamic, sharing with me a passage from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in which he says he found himself able to write about Michigan when in Paris. Living abroad, we sometimes get particularly compelling angles on our homelands, was what Winn was implying – whether because of some kind of distillation in memory, or the ever-present contrast, or the frequent prompts from others to put into words these background realities that now set us apart. This dynamic was particularly illustrated for me recently by James Leader’s new novel Into Babel, about an English teacher deployed to one of Luxembourg’s European Schools a year before the Brexit vote. It reads as, among other things, a study of England and Englishness from a perspective that was sadly missing in the Brexit debate. Also, a more specific detail that seems worth highlighting here: almost anything the main character says or does that aligns vaguely with English/British stereotypes is immediately put down to his nationality by those around him – combine that kind of recurring experience with the intriguing vista that opens up on the homeland, and it can hardly be a surprise that many expats develop a heightened sense of their national background, and that that comes out in the writing they do.
These are all, we might say, pull factors in other places’ continued domination of the storytelling attention of many English-language writers here – are there any push factors? Might some of the writers’ lives here be too constrained within expat institutions like the European Schools to really experience the country? Might they – not sufficiently understanding the languages or knowing the history or following the local news – just not feel qualified to engage with it in their writing? A few of the writers I’ve spoken to have indeed said things like this. And, again, such dynamics can have an impact even in pieces that do feature Luxembourg. John-Paul Gomez writes, as well as his short stories, the Luxembourg Wurst satirical news article series for RTL Today. I’m a big fan, but I’m struck by how nice the Wurst is to Luxembourg, how it really doesn’t go for the jugular. When I asked Gomez about this, he told me he feels he doesn’t know enough and, though he’s been here 17 years, like he’s in some way still a guest in the country, with the consequent obligations.
Where Wurst articles do get more pointed, their targets tend to be fellow expats. I asked Gomez why he doesn’t write short stories about his expat life here. He answered that he thinks it’s the phase of life he’s been in here – a phase of stability and domesticity, married, bringing up children. The real drama of his life came before. When I mentioned this answer to other writers, they tended to agree: their lives here have also been comfortable, domestic, middle-aged, uneventful – what’s there to write about? Of course it hasn’t always been like that for all the English-language writers here. Take the few Luxembourg-themed stories in the 2004 anthology Writing from a Small Country, by members of the Creative Writing Club (CWC), which was set up in the late 90s and existed for about a decade.
In Dana Rufolo’s ‘Time in Haha’, the mother of a young girl struggles with the basic task of getting ingredients for the lunch she must make for her child and work-stressed husband in a country – perhaps sardonically referred to as Haha – whose ways are subtly alien to her, and whose people are unaccommodating. In a similar vein, Indian-born Sultana Raza’s ‘Sens Unique’ features an English woman who’s excited to be visiting Luxembourg because of its ‘quaint places’ and ‘people from all over the world’, though the latter apparently prefer to ‘stay hidden in their banks and the European Institutions’ and she has trouble finding tourist spots too. She starts off following a sign reading ‘Sens Unique’, mistaking this for the promise of a unique experience. Duly frustrated, she then gives up on sightseeing and decides to go shopping, as ‘Luxembourg was supposed to be high on the list of countries where the inhabitants possessed the most […] consumer goods or some such thing’. Unfortunately, what she takes to be a clothes shop turns out to be a dry cleaner. Driving away in embarrassment, she’s then stopped by the gendarmerie, which she thinks must be the army or the secret police, and fined for, as she eventually understands, driving the wrong way on a one-way street. She has enormous difficulty understanding others and making herself understood throughout, and becomes increasingly over-sensitive and paranoid, eventually almost seeing the country as a conspiracy against her.
In another of Rufolo’s stories, ‘La Demonstration des Pacifistes’, an American man who regards Luxembourg as ‘now his home in all but passport and ease of language’ comes across a large demonstration in the city centre against the War on Terror, and, dismissing the warning he’s been emailed by the US Embassy of anti-American sentiment potentially taking a violent form in this context, he joins in. Over the course of the demonstration, he has various positive thoughts about his adopted homeland, but is slightly troubled by what he sees as its lax attitude to health & safety. Buoyed by the solidaristic march though, he inclines towards a positive view of even somewhat throwing caution to the wind. On his way home, he starts to cross a road, confident that a black Mercedes he’s just seen another protester get into will stop for him, only it doesn’t – it hits and kills him.
In Mary Carey’s ‘A Picture of Heaven’, a woman from Toronto with a degree in Medieval Studies and Art History has married a Luxembourger she met in London: ‘The first trip to Luxembourg had been like inhabiting the pages of one of her beloved history books. His parents seemed so quaint; the towns so picturesque. Her love of history had isolated her as a child, but here she could luxuriate in the midst of it. But it didn’t take long for the walls to close in on her, for everything to become sterile and old patterns to emerge victorious: lunch every Sunday at the in-laws, dinners with people Luc had known since he was three, everyone marking the days until his or her next resort holiday. She wasn’t doing anything, a serious person trapped in a silly world. Luc was interested in making money and spending money, and his pretty wife was his possession, too. She was the foreigner. It was her job to adjust.’ Meanwhile, the fellow expat she takes as a lover won’t commit to her because he’s ‘not willing to jeopardise his nice transient life in a foreign country? Making a lot of money. Not knowing which country to move to next – the spoiled twentieth century man’s dilemma.’
In Winn’s ‘Do Not Come This Christmas’, an American woman living here reflects on her changing relationship with an old friend back home, over a period of years in which first the one and then the other has got divorced. Our narrator seems to have felt her own divorce especially intensely in consequence of it having happened in a foreign land, and she describes how, when her old friend visited in its aftermath, ‘I could cry in public without looking like a lunatic. Someone was there to put an arm around my shoulder, to talk to in my own language, to make me laugh. I stood taller, just knowing I knew people who would make that effort to help me through a rough time’.
Such stories were a bit of a revelation for me. First, just the detailed, heartfelt depictions of personal lives here in Luxembourg – in more than two years of attending WWT meetings and in all my other reading, I’d not come across anything quite like this. Also the sheer difficulty of those lives, the extent of the alienation… It was certainly a level or two up from anything I’d experienced here, and I think it gave me a lot of insight into what some immigrants in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations went through.
Rufolo, who was president of the CWC at the time of the anthology’s release, told me that the group was made up largely of ‘trailing spouses’, women who’d come to Luxembourg when their husbands had got jobs here. Those women struggled to find community, purpose and validation; they struggled also with everyday practicalities, as they’d had largely monolingual upbringings and English was a lot less widely spoken then, plus, in plenty of other ways, the country was of course less cosmopolitan and developed. Also featured in the collection is a talk Diana Button gave to the group the day after 9/11, in which she exhorted on how, for our darkest emotions, the arts can be alternative outlets to physical destruction.
So times have certainly changed, but if Luxembourg is now so much more comfortable for most people, might that mean that it’s just a bit dull? Compared to other settings? Is that part of the problem? In fact, a couple of stories in Fresh from the Fountain seem to make this exact complaint: In Jodie Dalgleish’s ‘The Day the River Came’, the protagonist ‘was glad when the [Moselle] flooded because she was just so bored. She was bored with the way everything was always more of the same, past the post office and railway station along a concrete avenue, over the valley of an old town’s fort, past the cobbled nesting of boutiques at which she would never shop. It seemed as if her bus number sat just behind her eyes while she waited for it to arrive. Her one-bedroom apartment tucked into rows of others, was unremarkable like the rise and fall of her breath.’
Even more brutal, perhaps: in Jess Bauldry’s ‘Old Town’, a young man, having made friends with a Luxembourger called Jean at university in the US, is visiting this friend in Luxembourg and they’re cycling through the countryside and decide to get a bite to eat in a large and impressive retirement village – it eventually emerges that this young man is in fact a delusional old man, who’s been tricked into returning to the retirement village he now lives in but had escaped.
For the record, when I suggested to writers here that they don’t write much about Luxembourg because it’s kind of dull, they generally did not agree. And indeed there’s a pleasingly stark counter-example in the case of Olivia Katrandjian, a successful journalist with the New York Times, who moved here for research on her novel The Ghost Soldier, a runner-up in the Concours littéraire national in 2019, and has since stayed. She is now working on a novel about Melusina getting in with the country’s political far-right. So there are Anglosphere writers very eager to tell Luxembourg stories!
Andrea Murphy, lead editor of the upcoming WWT anthology, told me she thinks she herself doesn’t write much about Luxembourg not because it’s boring, but because it feels unreal. She said it’s like the normal laws of social life are suspended here because of the money, and you have to cross the border to get back to the real world. Also in Fresh from the Fountain, there are stories of Luxembourg as gravity-defying money-making racket, or that can be interpreted that way.
In Jeff Schinker’s ‘The Soundtrack of their Lives’, a wealthy, retired banker in his 40s, who in the past co-engineered and profited massively from financial collapse and offshoring, hires a struggling prog rock musician to write the soundtrack of the lives he and his wife are living and then a bunch of other creatives to turn their lives into full-on scripted and directed real-life films.
In Tullio Forgiarini’s ‘Daddy’s Girl’, the daughter of ‘a great man’ who is just about to die tells us all about this philanthropist and captain of finance and industry who ‘everyone knows […] destroyed dozens of lives to reach the top […] thousands of lives actually, if you count those who worked like slaves in the so-called emerging nations’ and yet who is also universally admired ‘as if ruthlessness were the condito sine qua non of his wealth and at the same time the wealth of the small nation that will mourn him’.
Neither of these stories explicitly take place in Luxembourg though. In fact, they could be effortlessly transposed to London or New York. And yet I do feel that they could be richer with a bit of Luxembourg detail. Both Schinker and Forgiarini are native Luxembourgers and both have also written stories in the local languages that are very explicitly set in Luxembourg, so maybe something about using English causes them to shy away from representing the country.
Neil Cocker, who’s sold over 13 000 copies of his two self-published novels set in cities he previously lived in and who’s now working on one set in Luxembourg, his home since 2009, responded to my question about why English-language writing here generally makes so little reference to the country by first sending me a passage from Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings,novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”
I found myself thinking of the native Luxembourger Percy Lallemang‘s recent collection Nightscapes, which comprises three stories – one that delights in the setting of Edinburgh, another that delights in the setting of London, and another that is really a Luxembourg story, I think, but contains no specific geo-cultural references. One obvious reason Luxembourg might lack imaginative currency even for many of its inhabitants is that it perhaps doesn’t feature much in the creative media they themselves tend to engage with. Cocker, thinking of parallels with his native Scotland before its literary boom of the 80s and 90s, suggested to me that other factors might be a lack of a certain kind of collective self-confidence, and a tendency for writers here not to feel they have a responsibility to the country, a role in its self-reflection and self-invention. Nathalie Jacoby, director of the CNL, told me that Luxembourg writers rarely feature at all on the country’s school curricula, and several writers I spoke to bemoaned the limitations of the local publishing industry and book market, while others did mention not really feeling part of a larger national community here and an ever-dangling question of whether/when to leave. Still, as Cocker urged, a writer can also consciously take a stand against these forces of disengagement.
James Leader told me that in his first novel, The Mysteries of Gogos, he substituted Luxembourg for Brussels, as he couldn’t at the time see how to make Luxembourg interesting to readers. 10 years on, that has changed, thankfully. He also told me that, in his private writing group, they now make a special effort to feature Luxembourg in their work, in part because they feel that improves their chances in the Concours littéraire national. It’s striking, by the way, how much this competition, with its big-money prizes and extensive media coverage, mobilises English-language writers here. Set up by the government in ’78, it’s been open to English-language texts since ’96, and they’ve come to be such a large proportion of those honoured and even of those submitted that they could almost be said to dominate it now. So maybe a bit of top-down nudging can help too.
In any case, Leader’s question of how to make Luxembourg interesting to readers of course begs the further question of who those readers are. If they’re people in the US or the UK or indeed anywhere bar Luxembourg, there may be a more basic challenge than making the country interesting to them – namely, making it comprehensible to them. The fact is Luxembourg is an unusual little place, and many of its quirks would take some explaining. Can the writer do this without jeopardising the flow of the story? And, at the same time, without boring any Luxembourg readers? And then what about the languages? Are they going to write in all of them? And/or give translations? How do they render those characteristically French/German/Luxembourgish/Portuguese tones in English? Intuiting such technical challenges may already be enough to stop many local English-language writers setting their stories here.
Then again, maybe these technical challenges only need arise if you want to tell certain types of story… Those wonderfully detailed Writing from a Small Country stories largely get round the problem of explaining Luxembourg’s complexity because incomprehension and isolation are part of their premise. Into Babel largely gets round it by focusing so intently on the European School. Another novel I read recently, Susan Alexander’s Listening to Joseph, does so by mostly focusing on an inner-city group of well-off cosmopolitans. Chris Pavone’s The Expats, perhaps the most widely read Luxembourg-set novel in any language, does much the same. A Luxembourg setting, in other words, need not be a major theme – it can be more like incidental decoration.
Florence Sunnen, whose book The Hook was published by the respected UK indie press Nightjar, told me that, for her, writing in English implies writing for everyone, and, as, for most people, Luxembourg is an obscure concept, she’d feel, if she mentioned it, that she had to say something about what it is – and that would normally be a diversion from the story she wants to tell, and borderline impossible anyway. (‘What is Luxembourg?? I don’t know!’) She added that writing her stories in English – transposing them into a kind of universalism, cutting out the different languages and other local specifics – can sometimes feel like a way of getting a bit of clarity and some respite from the messiness of life here.
Similarly, Anne-Marie Reuter, one of the founders of Black Fountain, told me that she’s most interested in the core human story. The borders, the national contexts, even the languages are, she said, not so important in the end as the enormous amount we have in common – great stories are often translated, read by people on the other side of the planet and work just as well for them. So why fuss so much about language and setting? Just tell a great human story. She also told me that one Luxembourgish trait she’s proud of is being particularly welcoming to other peoples and cultures, and the use of non-Luxembourgish and universalist settings in the stories of its writers can be understood as an expression of that.
To all of these reasons for this storytelling neglect of Luxembourg, I’m inclined to say, ‘well, OK, fair enough’. Combined, they are perhaps formidable. Then again, I’m sure we could often, if we looked in the right way, find much of Luxembourg in the stories of Luxembourg writers irrespective of where they’re set.
I do find myself longing though for a kind of avowedly Luxembourg story that I haven’t so far found – a kind that would intricately capture the extremes of globalisation we experience here. And I think that kind of story is difficult to tell precisely because they are extremes, unprecedented, and so capturing them also requires the breaking of new storytelling ground. Hopefully the other language literatures are fairing better on this front!