From Europe with Love

Try this: Name five contemporary European writers, not counting Irish or British. If you're having trouble, there's a good reason — you probably haven't encountered many. Translations of foreign-language works make up a mere 3% to 5% of the books published in the U.S. annually, and that includes new editions of classics like Anna Karenina. Except for a few recent breakouts — Roberto Bolaño, Stieg Larsson, Per Petterson — translated authors tend to deliver anemic sales, which makes mainstream American publishers loath to gamble on them. And Bolaño and Larsson were dead (both prematurely, at the age of 50) by the time their books hit big in the States. This is not a great incentive to break into the marketplace.

With the new anthology Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive Press; 421 pages), edited by Chicago-based writer Aleksandar Hemon, our literary world just got wider. Hemon, an award-winning author who was born in Sarajevo and did not begin writing in English until he was in his early 30s, is an excellent guide to the European sensibility. And Best European is an exhilarating read. With stories from 35 nations and regions from Albania to Wales, it's like a Eurail pass that lets you tour a continent's worth of psychological landscapes. Trying to take in all of them in one sitting can induce the armchair equivalent of museum fatigue; this is a volume built for browsing. You can get halfway through a story, put it down, pick it back up again and ask, Where was I? Oh, right — Denmark. (See the top 10 fiction books of 2009.)

And there's powerful stuff going on in Denmark. "Bulbjerg," by Naja Marie Aidt, tells of a family outing derailed by an accident, then by the revelation of betrayal. Before things started going south, the father had planned to show his son a bit of Danish history, a German bunker from World War II. "We were supposed to have had a nice little talk about the Occupation," he notes. The emotions unleashed in this tale couldn't be contained in any nice little talk. They are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov's portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce's struggling Dubliners to Jhumpa Lahiri's uprooted Bengalis. People are the same everywhere; it's the places that define them that are different. (See the 100 best novels of all time.)

The writers in Best European seem a more adventurous bunch than their American counterparts. They experiment freely with structure and venture more often down the path of metafiction, debating the direction of a story even as their characters are entangled in it. ("The Basilica in Lyon," by Serbian writer David Albahari, is a mesmerizing dream chase along those lines.) Hemon says this is a reflection partly of his own editorial taste but also of the European publishing environment, which doesn't follow the American blockbuster model. "There's a lot of American fiction on the fringes that is very daring," he says. "But it is judged not by courage or the risks that it takes but by its success." By contrast, he says, "European literatures are not so market-driven. An Estonian writer is not striving to write a best seller, because what would be a best seller in Estonia?"

Dalkey Archive Press hopes the 2010 edition will be the first in an annual series. That sounds good to Hemon, who says readership of foreign fiction needs to be cultivated over time. But the hunger for it is there: "There's a tradition of exceptionalism and insularity in America, but there's also a tradition of openness and interest in other parts of the world." In the book's preface, Zadie Smith writes, "I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day." Best European Fiction puts in 35 new windows. You don't have to love all the views, but it's certainly nice to have them.

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