Fellow Three Monkeys blog, Our Man in Gda?sk, recently commented on the state of Polish literature, focusing on the genre of “dirty realism” exemplified by the writings of Marek Nowakowski. This literary preoccupation with nostalgie de la boue is also evident in one of the more interesting recent collections of short fiction from an Irish writer, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse, by Waterford-born Philip � Ceallaigh.

Unusually, the stories about failures, the depressed, and the just plain alcoholic are largely set (apart from occasional, rather derisive interludes in the United States) in Romania, specifically Bucharest, where � Ceallaigh lives. One of the features his characters share with others who populate the genre is that the ones we’re supposed to sympathise with read, say, Celine or Plato, as well as drink vodka straight from the bottle. Characters who are not simply losers, but enlightened losers.

Thus they given to misanthropic philosophizing, delivering aper�us such as “If you want to see how a city is doing, he thought, you have to see the edge of it. The centre will tell you everything is fine. The periphery tells the rest.” Needless to say, the periphery as described in the collection’s centrepiece, the 60+-page “In the Neighbourhood” reveals everything is far from fine.

The end product is less “dirty realism” than “morose realism.” And yet for readers perversely attracted to stories in which characters sit around squalid, moist flats while declaiming with liquored-up elegance on the human condition (I fall into that category–of reader, that is), � Ceallaigh’s stories provide an ideal venue for slumming it.