Customer Reviews

Best European Fiction 2010 (Best European Fiction)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Would gently disagree with my fellow reader. The stories aren't "difficult"; they merely require the reader be present for them. This is all writers ask of us.

Also, My Fellow Americans: This is not a travel guide.

If you're interested in picking out a lovely spot for your next vacation I would suggest you find a Fodor's instead. I'm up to Serbia so far and have yet to be overwhelmed with a desire to reserve a shuttle to the airport. Iceland has this young bickering couple screaming at each other by a lake. There's a psychotically grumpy, work-injured father out and about in Latvia. To top it off, there's a Dutch future coming wherein citizens are allowed to murder--within rules.

And yet, what a wonderful, luminous, and maybe even life-changing read this book is. You won't view things the same way once you're done with it.

I left each story with something of value, some human insight. Would say the most exquisite piece so far has to be "Zidane's Melancholy" by Belgium's Jean-Philippe Toussaint. His take on the football (soccer) star's head-butt of an opponent in the 2006 World Cup final is perfection. The genius of the writing is in Monsieur Toussant's bravery; a less confident writer would have tossed the reader a coy wink now and again. Instead, he has the courage to stick to this serious, philosophical, surgical tone.

Other gems include Christine Montalbetti's (France) story of a writer having a sort of invisible but nonetheless extraordinary panic attack while in the company of Japanese writer Haruki Murukami, and a day in the life of a down and out transgendered street hustler from (Poland's Michal Witkowski); if the latter story does not make one sympathetic to people at the edge then surely nothing will.

Ireland's Julian Gough provides much needed humor; his "The Orphan and the Mob" is a riduculous and hilarious mishmash of every stereotype about the Old Sod in a few laugh out loud pages.

Romania's Cosmin Manolache's story ("Three Hundred Cups") started out in an interesting if conventional way but ends as a prayerful meditation on nothing less than what it means to be human.

Unless you happen to have the same taste as the editor, the best one can usually hope for from a literary anthology is a couple of semi-precious gems buried in a lot of dirt. By that standard, this book is better than most. Out of 35 stories, I'd put 7 or 8 in the A/A- category, about the same in the B+/B category, 14 C+/C's and 6 C-/D. No A+'s, but nothing so repulsive as to flunk, either. If the "short story" in the title leads you to expect stories with memorable characters and a beginning, middle & end, though, you may be disappointed (or pleasantly amazed): relatively few of the selections follow this structure. A good many are concatenations of short episodes a page or so in length, and relatively few build characters whom one can identify with or care about. Some were very enjoyable despite these departures from older conventions.

My A/A- list included Albania (about relations between the sexes: fatalistic version), France (paranoid breakfast with a mild Japanese author), Ireland/English (downfall of a school for orphans: very funny, though ending a little contrived), Netherlands (an old-fashioned but nicely told story about the narrator's high school chess teachers), Poland (an unexpectedly sympathetic story about a gay hustler, which other reviewers have also commended), Russia (my favorite: a very funny story by Victor Pelevin about the physics of the rich), Slovenia (relations between the sexes: wry version), and UK/Scotland (a narrative seafaring poem by the famous Alasdair Gray). My lowest grade went to a pretentious attempt to echo Samuel Beckett, from Norway. The most exotic piece for me was a good-natured story about the (rather tame) nightlife in Liechtenstein: I think the time spent reading it accounts for more than half of my cumulative lifetime attention to that country. Your rankings might be different, but there's enough decent material that it's likely you'll find something you can enjoy.

What is fiction like in Europe today? That was my purchasing purpose. This is a fascinating book, so many voices, such a plunge into younger modern minds. From the perspective of a reader with decades of perusing the printed word, I can say this book absolutely delighted me with the creative variety.
Not sure I really enjoyed all of the stories but I am delighted to have read them and my grey cells are left chewing over concepts and phrases.
In some the lack of punctuation and capitalization reminded me of Archie and Mehitabel.

Reading this book was to me much like my experience with watching some of the great foreign movies that are out there--it's like discovering a hidden treasure that few others know about, and for their pure novelty in style, setting, and tone, really snap me out of my world-weary state and hold my attention. I didn't like all the stories, in fact I didn't even finish several (and these are short stories) because I just didn't get them or thought they were plain poorly written, but the majority were good, and some very good. I find myself turning over many of these stories in my head for a few days afterwards, some continue to enter my consciousness for weeks afterward because they were just so poignant and unique. I plan to purchase last year's edition once I finish this one (about 3/4 of the way through now). I usually just read classics, so reading these unknown authors was a stretch for me. Try it, I think you'll like it :)

Best European Fiction 2010 provides a good overview, not of all European fiction as the title suggests, but rather strictly of fiction written in the modern/post-modern mode. Reading this book without any familiarity with the vast array of writers currently at work in Europe, one might conclude that the modern/post-modern story is the only kind being written by Europeans, when in fact that is far from the case.

What is here is good, and in some cases very good. Just be prepared for a lot of stories that end abruptly without resolution; for characters who recognize themselves as characters in a piece of fiction; and of course for writers who cast themselves as characters in their own stories. Despite the assertion of many of the writers presented here that traditional storytelling is passe, it is interesting to note that sooner or later most of these stories fall back on that tradition to one extent or another. I guess when you come right down to it, there are few better ways to say "she entered the room, turned on the light, and closed the door behind her," than to simply come right out an say it. Even Steinar Bragi (Iceland), who in the preface we are told is bored to tears by the likes of Dickens, offers up several pages of well-crafted, straight-forward sentences of a kind that might well have been written in the Victorian era by, say, the likes of Dickens, and all in the service of a fairly traditional story.

Be that as it may, my only real complaint with this book (which accounts for the 3 stars) is the sheer number of stories presented here--30 spread out over 360 pages, which works out to a meager average of 12 pages per a story. The intent here, as far as I can tell, seems to have been to include as many European countries as possible within the pages allowed by the publisher. Is it really possible that a book that professes to offer the very best of European fiction contains not a single instance of two "best" stories coming from the same country (excluding of course those cases where the intent was clearly to include two stories written in different languages from the same country--Ireland, for example, which is represented by stories written in both English and Irish). One can't help but wonder how many of these stories might have been truncated to meet the demands of space; or just as bad, how many better stories may have been passed over simply because they ran 50 or 60 pages in length and might therefore have displaced other countries with their presence. If I seem a little too focused on this aspect of the book, it's only because the editor, Aleksandar Hemon, bemoans in his introduction the limited access we Americans have to good present-day European fiction. The fact is, this book, which could have helped overcome that limited access, instead accomplishes too little by trying to do too much.

I have always loved National Geographic, European travel and am a fan of Rick Steves. This book is a great tour around the minds, concerns, perspectives and anxieties of modern European life. Not all of the fiction is 'stories', some are just imaginings or insights. This is not American fiction, these are the products of people who have known Soviet occupation, World Wars, Kafka, and more recently, the faceless bureaucracy of the new Europe. Read it with curiousity and enjoy all the different voices from different countries. Some aspects of the texts are, of course, lost in translation, but what remains deserves to be read. I find it hard to stop reading all the stories, which are organized alphabetically by country.

When I saw that Zadie Smith had written the preface, I thought these stories should be great. With the exception of just a few, these short stories are terrible. Most are just plain boring and a few are flat-out unintelligible. But Europeans shouldn't fret - American short stories are just as bad, if not worse. I do not know what has happened to the short story in the last 50 years. Where are all the Poes, the Hawthornes, the Hemingways, the Twains, the Lardners, the Bierces (just to name a few)? A good short story should grab and hold your interest from the get-go. With very few exceptions these stories do not.

Yes I read just about all newly released foreign translation novels or short stories that I can find. In the introduction to this collection the editor bemoans "the culturally catstrophic Amerian isolationism." I have to beg to differ. I love novels from all
cultures.

The problem with this collection is the boring and trite imaginations of 90% of the writers that were selected to be in this first edition. The only short story that succeded on all levels was "Camino," by the Irish writer Orna Ni Choileain. If the other selections had been of the same quality as hers, then this book would be invaluable.

However, I couldn't help wondering, is what a great series of short stories this collection would have made if the editor had told the true stories of how these writers were the ones who were selected.

The main problem with the selections is that none of the stories (except Camino) had a true sense of humanity in the characters.
True,Michal Witkowski's "Didi" did weigh in with the second best selection of the bunch. But I wondered aloud why on Earth did the Editor choose "Didi," when the short story from his "Lovetown" novel, entitled "The Date" was by far the most hilarious of the book?

If the Editor really wanted to do justice to the next "Best European Fiction 2011," I would hope that he would convene a panel of this year's writers and ask them to present jury prizes for their own selections of their own favorite contemporary short-story writers. The number of entries could then be only the award winning ones.

I guaged my critique of these European Writers by the standard of the American Writer John Grisham's new compilation of short stories entitled,
"Ford County."

A gift for a writer, but it's so different from the short fiction I'm used to. It's darker, wanders more, has less shape and a lot less narrative tension. Not sure if it's really a difference in how Europeans think or write, or if it's the particular authors they included. I wouldn't buy it again another year.