Andrej Blatnik

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This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching miniatures addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understand what we want and need. Demonstrating that language and intimacy are as much barriers between human beings as ways of connecting them, Andrej Blatnik here provides us with a guided tour of the slips, misunderstandings, and blind alleys we each manage to fall foul of on a daily basis—no closer to understanding the motives of our families, friends, lovers, or coworkers than we are those of a complete stranger . . . or, indeed, our own. Partly parables, partly fairy tales, partly sketches for novels that will never be written, You Do Understand is a perfect comedy of errors—the errors of a species of talkers who've never learned how to listen.

 

SAVE YOUR KISSES FOR ME

Sometimes the curtain doesn't even rise, he thought, a moment before stepping onto the stage. And sometimes it rises, but there's not a single girl out there and you don't even have to go up to the mike. And sometimes they start booing before you even start singing and then it’s like you’ve won the race by default, you don’t even have to show how much you don’t know, you just spread your arms and walk away. But sometimes, sometimes there’s a lot of them on the other side, clapping and cheering enthusiastically as though they can’t wait for you to start singing off-key, and that’s when you’re in trouble, that’s when you have to take your guitar and sing the way that you can’t, that’s when you can’t take a step back and say "I knew it," to yourself and the world. It can’t be one of those nights that some girl shows up, can it?

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