Best European Fiction 2011

This bumper book of stories by writers from across Europe, with its brash look-at-me cover, was paid for before I even noticed how bulky it was to lug around. Five hundred pages = a lot of bits of fiction (forty, in this case). Once home, however, I found it hard to get started. It took me a couple of goes to realise why.

In a collection whose selling point is writing translated into English, or as the cover says taking ‘modern storytelling to places English-language readers have never gone before‘, the decision to position two stories written in English at the start of the book seems truly odd. Once I decided to leave these for later and begin with the third piece, I felt I’d landed in the book proper.

Ersan Uldes’ ‘Professional Behaviour’ is a about a fiction translator who runs amok with his authors’ characters, changing them until they better meet his own criteria, or keeping alive characters that should have been killed off. The interfering translator has a surprisng amount of fun (and success) before anybody notices. You can read bits of this work (not quite the same bits, though) here. Like some of the other pieces in this book, it is an extract from a novel.

As the book includes forty pieces of prose (about 32 of which are short fiction) I cannot mention them all, and indeed have not yet read every last one, but the standard seems high.

Another story that caught my eye was the amusing ‘Raymond is no longer with us – Carver is dead’ by Ognjen Spahic of Montenegro which leaves us with a classic Carver-style seesaw ending (has something changed, or not?) of the kind that you may find if you look around on Carversite. You can also find Spahic’s story here. Compare and contrast!

But it can be hard work reading online, so do your eyes – and the cause of European literature – a favour, and buy the book instead. This wide ranging and exuberant collection, published in style by Dalkey Archive, is well worth £15. If you’re in London on 21 April, you can catch editor Aleksandar Hemon talking with three of the contributing authors at the book’s London launch:

• Merce Ibarz – Spain (Catalonia)
• Goncalo Tavares – Portugal
• Olga Tokarczuk – Poland

Tickets from the South Bank.

More about new translated Fiction – the 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Possibly of more interest if you are looking for full-length translated works to read, shortlisted for the hotly contested 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize are:

• Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. from German by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books)
• Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras, trans. from Spanish by Frank Wynne (Atlantic Books)
• The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, trans. from Turkish by Maureen Freely (Faber and Faber)
• I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson, trans. from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund with Per Petterson (Harvill Secker)
• Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo, trans. from Spanish by Edith Grossman (Atlantic Books)
• The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, trans. from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (MacLehose Press)

More info about the prize and the longlist titles here.