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.
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