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In America, the word “European” carries a whiff of elegance and history, but it rarely applies to the fiction that Americans read. In a country that is famously self-involved, we tend to think of European fiction as a set of classics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We’re more inclined to make a literary bestseller out of something from Africa, India, or Asia than a novel from the continent. This might explain why translations from Europe have such modest sales, why Philip Roth will never win the Nobel Prize, and why European leaders don’t seem too sympathetic to our foreign policy.
Here to save the day are Aleksandar Hemon and Dalkey Archive Press. Best European Fiction 2010 is the first volume in an ongoing series that packs an EU’s worth of fiction into a single book, so that we self-involved Americans can acquaint ourselves with new work from the Old World. Hemon says these stories “have not been selected for any kind of thematic continuity,” and that he is “more interested in providing a detailed snapshot of the contemporary European literatures than establishing a fresh canon of instant classics.”
The best stories in the collection are often the most outlandish. Jean-Philippe Toussaint (Belgium) delivers a brief essay, complete with footnotes, about the deeper meaning of Zinedine Zidane’s shocking headbutt at the World Cup. Christine Montalbetti (France) imagines sitting at a breakfast table with the writer Haruki Murakami, while the foliage outside her window attempts to break through the walls and kill them both. Stories like these manage to feel complete and recognizable, even as they break with conventional modes of short fiction.
But the real secret of this anthology is how much exciting new fiction is being written in smaller, less-explored European countries like Albania, Denmark, Lithuania, and Macedonia. The contributions from these countries easily measure up to—and in some cases exceed—the latest work from Spain, Italy, and the UK. In this respect, the collection resembles its editor, Aleksandar Hemon, whose work introduces Americans to his home country of Bosnia. Best European Fiction 2010 shines a light on some brave new voices from the dark corners of the continent.
Cosmin Manolache (Romania) sends his narrator to the Military Museum in Bucharest. There, the story evolves from a careful examination of a space capsule that carried Romania’s only cosmonaut to an exhaustive, four-page list of 300 imaginary toasts that might have been proposed aboard the space shuttle as the cosmonauts were swilling their contraband vodka. By commenting directly on Romania’s history and by letting his narrative break into pieces, Manolache seems to liberate his story, allowing it to become, unapologetically, whatever a contemporary Romanian story needs to be.
Other entries take a similarly relaxed approach to the conventions of the short story. David Albahari (Serbia) opens by describing his story’s various components—how many men and women it contains, how many policemen, its cameras and bicycles and soccer balls—and allows the story to morph into its protagonist:
At one moment, even before it began, the story was out on the edge of town. It stood there for a while, until rain began to fall. It brushed away the drops that were coursing down its face and stuck out its thumb. Two women were in the car that stopped. Both were chewing gum. “You can sit in the back,” said the woman who was driving, “or here between us, as you like.”
Best European Fiction 2010 should remind Americans of the exciting work being done across the Atlantic, especially by writers who are experimenting with the short story on the fringes of the EU. “The short story still has the flavor of a report from the front lines of history and existence,” says Hemon. “We simply have to keep in continuous touch, translation has to be a ceaseless process.” On top of everything else, the book includes an appendix listing magazines and web sites that promote new fiction in various European countries. Make room on the shelves. Those eighteenth and nineteenth century novels are about to have some company.
(January, 2010)
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