What's European About European Fiction?

We’ve just published Lauren Elkin’s review of Best European Fiction 2010. In the piece, Lauren expends a lot of words considering how this collection works as European writing. The result is quite interesting:

Indeed, some of the stories Hemon has selected seem to be valued more for their cross-cultural subject matter rather than their literary merit, and decenteredness seems to be the watchword: the French story takes place in Tokyo, the Spanish and Serbian stories take place in France, the Croatian contribution is set in a Chinese restaurant in Budapest, and the Polish story is about a transgendered Slovakian hooker out on the cruel streets of Vienna. In other words, this vision of Europe looks more like a melting pot of disparate cultures than the “salad bowl” of staid Old Europe. In this way, Hemon avoids turning the anthology into the literary equivalent of “It’s a Small World.”

And then after considering this larger question, Lauren gets down to the stories themselves:

As for the stories themselves—well, judging from the bulk of them, things are pretty bleak in Europe: dirty and dark, as in the Finnish flash fictions, shot through with an overwhelming nihilistic violence, as in the stories by Peter Terrin (Belgian/Dutch) or Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark). (These I found frankly repellant, which some might suggest is an indication they’re doing something right.) Many have a kind of pseduo-surreal quality to them; some succeed better than others at making this work. All, at least, have commanding voices, which dare you to look away or to turn the page. (That’s the great thing about anthologies: you can always turn the page.) These stories possess a certain kind of dark knowingness that seems to pass for “European” here, but it is unmitigated by the kind of absurd levity you find in more successful “dark” European fiction (I’m thinking of Dostoyevsky, or Kafka, or Beckett).

Read the whole thing.

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