Best European Fiction 2011

Contrary to efforts in Brussels, Europe, as Otto von Bismarck once said, remains largely "a geographical expression." For bureaucrats and businesspeople, this may prove frustrating, but it's what makes Best European Fiction 2011 all the more interesting.

Efforts to find some sort of single thread running through European fiction in any given year are largely fruitless; after all, life in Belarus and Luxembourg have almost nothing in common. Rather than something deserving obfuscation, the work of European writers is an opportunity to celebrate the Continent's diversity, as this book does in a thoroughly engrossing manner.

Editor Aleksandar Hemon is himself a talented writer (multiple nominations for the U.S. National Book Award and a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship) with a unique life story: Born in Sarajevo, he was on a visit to Chicago when the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s broke out, leading him to stay on in his now adopted country. These factors no doubt influence the selections in the book, but who can say how much.

One can't help but note that Hemon originates from a state that many consider to be on Europe's periphery and that he now looks at the Continent through an outsiders' lens. If the editor were someone who had spent their life living in Berlin, Paris, Helsinki or Antwerp, this would no doubt be a very different book, but it is difficult to foresee it being better or more European.

There is much to be said about the context of this collection, and there are entire schools of academic thought dedicated to debating what it means to be "European," but much more important to the merits of Best European Fiction 2011 are the texts themselves, which are for the most part both exceptional and exceptionally varied.

Welshman William Owen Roberts' "The Professionals" has a thoroughly contemporary air, with bank failures, economic crises and psychiatrists all playing central roles.

In contrast, Slovenia's entry, by Drago Jančar, has the esoteric title of "The Prophesy" but has a plot largely driven by the discovery of a limerick inside a bathroom stall that alludes to a very specific type of embrace between former Yugoslav strongman Tito and a domesticated beast of burden involving a certain posterior orifice.

The story centers on men completing mandatory service in the Yugoslav Army, and while its overtones see characters coping with the crippling fear that they could be blamed and punished for writing the aforementioned graffiti, its subtext also captures a certain nostalgia common in the former Yugoslavia.

This story, like several of the East European entries in the collection, has a slightly stereotypical "haunted by history" atmosphere to it, but stereotypes do come from somewhere - perhaps literature.

In Victor Martinovich's "Taboo," from Belarus, a pair of young lovers on a walk in a public park feel compelled to engage in the most forbidden of acts: picking a flower. A foot chase involving state security services ensues. In the end, the coquettish couple is executed. The temporal setting of the story is unclear and that seems to be at least one of the points. In the context of this collection, it is a stark reminder of the different emotional and political moods across Europe, and it would be hard, for example, for a similar story to come from an author who lives in say, Switzerland or Liechtenstein.

With the exception of a few details about the physical setting, Ognjen Spahić's selection from Montenegro about a young married couple awaiting their first child could have happened almost anywhere on the globe. The husband goes to visit a friend, as almost anyone in any country might do. The friends end up discussing Raymond Carver, an American writer widely recognized as a master of the short story. Spahić's tale is little more than a slice of everyday life, but it is nonetheless remarkable in the manner it keeps the reader turning pages. 

The collection includes authors well known - the United Kingdom's Hilary Mantel and Germany's Ingo Schulze, for example - and myriad others who have never had work published in English. The offering of these lesser-known wordsmiths, often from smaller countries, may be the single greatest attribute of this book, which has many. A collection of author biographies near the end of the text offers background information on all creatures (i.e. writers and translators) great and small.

Whether there is any such thing as a single Europe, or ever will be, one can and should be thankful the Continent's artists and writers seem to move in very different currents. This collection allows readers to dip their toes into any number of those streams and will likely prompt deeper plunges into one or two of them for any discerning literati.

This book is for anyone interested in good stories, the human condition and learning more than can be offered in any tour package, business conference or classroom about Europe's diverse peoples.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com