Best European Fiction 2010Editor: Aleksandar Hemon |
 |
|---|
Reviewed by Adam Gallari
In his introduction to Best European Fiction 2010, Aleksandar Hemon writes, “The American reader seems to be largely disengaged from literatures in other languages, which many see as yet another symptom of culturally catastrophic American isolationism.” Such a statement is not out of character for a writer who seems to have a love/hate relationship with his adopted country, and Hemon has gotten much mileage out of the pithy, often spot-on critiques offered by his alter-ego narrators who, being outsiders, keenly deconstruct the world around them. However, it is not only the American reading public that Hemon chastises in his “Introduction.” He also takes aim at the American publishing industry, which, he argues, finds only translations that will work well for “books clubs” (He specifically cites Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.) and refuses to honor the short story, which Hemon believes is “the pinnacle of literary art.” Even the lowly MFA student is not spared Hemon’s jeremiad: “Thousands upon thousands of ambitious young writers in American writing programs are churning out half-dead stories, creating suffocating hyperinflation, all in the hope that one day they’ll be skillful enough to write a death-defying novel.” Yet, despite his harsh tone, Hemon’s “Introduction” is less a castigation than it is a call to literary arms, aptly ending with the command, “Now, start reading.”
The writers Hemon includes are as varied as the landscapes of their homelands, which range from Portugal to Latvia. Other than sheer quality, there is no uniformity to the thirty stories and novel excerpts included in Best European Fiction 2010, which range in style from traditional narratives to experiments in postmodern construction. Still, it is not long before one can begin to see the similarities in styles that dominate specific regions of Europe. Despite individual writers attempting to work both independent of and within the constraints of their cultural milieu, the ghosts of their forbearers haunt and influence even the most experimental of the works herein. For instance, hints of Hamsun are reflected in the writings of the quartet of Scandinavian authors included by Hemon, most notably in Jon Fosse, whose language in “Waves of Stone” is as sparse and beautiful as the austere landscape in which his story is set:
I look again at the shoreline, the evening is still, it’s white, it’s blue, it’s the colors of the sea, the evening is peaceful, but it might as well be gusting and storming, since I’m protected by a cliff that stretches itself high over the inlet. The water around me is calm…it is evening, the sun is going down, but it’s not quite dark at this time of year, not dark like it should be. I sit and look at the water. Everything is still. It’s still like only an ocean can be.
Elsewhere in the book, Fernando Pessoa’s unique legacy of magical noir-ish prose hovers over the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal is represented by Valter Hugo Mae, while its neighbor Spain showcases writers Josep M. Fonalleras and Julian Rios, working in both Catalan and Castilian. As is to be expected, one cannot speak of the writers of Central and Eastern Europe without Kafka and Gogol entering into one’s consciousness. But to pigeonhole these writers as mere descendants of tradition is to cheapen their art, to direct the eye to the plinth rather than to the sculpture atop it.
Roughly half of the thirty stories are culled from Eastern Europe. Perhaps it is his own heritage that makes him partial to this corner of Europe, blanketed first by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later by the USSR, both of which managed to swallow the multitude of ethnicities and traditions prevalent there and suffocate them. If the American reader is, as Hemon claims, lacking in his knowledge of any literature beyond his own borders, then that which has been produced in this part of the world is truly cloaked in darkness. These stories alone are worth the price of the book. Contrary to what one might initially expect, these writers are funny, though their comedy does not come at the expense of their storytelling, nor is it a cute, tongue-in-cheek pandering to the reader.
At the outset of “Three Hundred Cups,” Cosmin Manolache of Romania muses, “If you find yourself hoping for something exceptional from a wholly ordinary day, wanting much more, that is, than you would ordinarily, had your expectations been at their usual modest and patient level, then it’s probably a good idea to forget the precise meaning of the word ‘exceptional.’” He then proceeds to lead the reader around a museum with the goal of finding some greater understanding and communion with Dumitru Dorin Prunariu, Romania’s lone great Cosmonaut, before going home to compose a list of three-hundred toasts that might have been offered by Prunariu and his Russian compatriots in space. What follows is a listing (three and a half pages worth) of toast topics ranging from the regal and proper to the utterly base and completely absurd.
In “The Prompter,” excerpted from the novel of the same name, Slovakia’s Peter Kristufek offers his reader a comic tour of the preparations being made by a provincial town suddenly honored with hosting some summit of Kafkaesque ambiguity. Yet the actual event takes a back seat to the run-up, a “monumental effort so that the city now contained numerous phantom doors that led nowhere and false windows that could not be opened. However, the important thing was the final impression made: the city should fit the modern view of historical style, and come as close as possible to resembling the photographs the drunken mayor once discovered in a family album of holiday snapshots.” Kristufek’s world is one of totalitarian kitsch, a scathing critique of Communist aesthetic delivered in a flippant yet pointed manner that is at the same time delightful and bizarre.
For most American readers, the work of these Eastern Bloc writers will come as a welcome surprise, for these artists understand that they are burdened not only with storytelling but with narrating their nations back into consciousness, with preserving the essence of peoples who endured a forced assimilation into the black hole of the USSR. There is an urgency to these stories, even if, as is the case in Bosnian Igor Stiks’ “At the Sarajevo Market,” the entirety of the action revolves around nothing more than a man and a women in a Sarajevo market musing over an antique locket and some worn books.
Still, not all of the Eastern Bloc writers take the Soviet Union or the idea of “the state” as their comic target. In particular, Estonian Elo Viiding’s “Foreign Women” almost feels as though it is directed at the readership now discovering her, as she uses the ideas of “family” and “home” as the vehicle into her narrative. For Viiding, the daughter of the late Juhan Viiding, a giant in Estonian poetry, the home is a place dominated by men—in this case male poets—to whom the foreign women come as translators, and who bring with them feminist ideals and the powerful idealism and individuality so rampant in the West:
The foreign women thought all this {subservience} was completely unhinged; as often as not, they would leave their middle-aged friends with the gentler sorts of sex toys available back in their countries, like those innocent pink furry handcuffs, which…were meant to be used on the stronger party i.e. the woman, on the weaker, i.e. the man; or else bestselling sex manuals would emerge from the depths of their Blackberry suitcases...
Viiding’s world is one where the foreigner comes to save, to liberate, yet however well intentioned their endeavors, these foreign women who, despite their altruism “were never able to pay attention to anyone else’s problems for more than a few minutes at a time,” and who seemed unable “to respect anyone for too long,” are horribly unaware that their ideal might not dovetail with the more pertinent need for self-preservation. “Various pink Taiwanese sex toys were, in any case, often given to the children to play with, while the sex manuals, intended to enlighten and embolden, were usually used to light the stove.” Both the beauty and pain in reading Viiding and the others collected here is that the reader, for the first time, is the other, the outsider, not necessarily the intended audience but the necessary audience nonetheless: An audience no longer capable of “catastrophic cultural isolationism.”
Moreover, the greatest success of this anthology is exactly what Hemon opines: Americans do not know who these authors are, and because of this, they are not beholden to us. They are free from the constraints that have jilted and stripped much American fiction of passion in the last years. Here there is no need to write stories that “sell.” Instead, Hemon presents the reader with stories that resonate and rebound within one’s consciousness, that make the reader uncomfortable and that forces the reader to think.
Before he brings his introduction to a close, Hemon boldly announces, “This anthology is, then, not putting up a fight in that battles that to many seem lost, it is indeed declaring victory,” and what follows serves only to prove him correct. In Best European Fiction 2010 fiction is alive and well, the short story is alive and well, is even necessary, a must for all of those “American students,” and for their professors as well. This is proof that quality art is not beholden to the marketplace.