Best European Fiction 2015

by West Camel (Editor), Enrique Vila-Matas (Preface)

For the past five years, this anthology has stirred reactions around the globe, exciting readers, critics, and publishers alike. Bringing new names and work of European writers to an international audience has shown the vitality of writing from Europe at a time when the number of translations has dramatically shrunk in the United States and England, thereby depriving readers of access to some of the best writing being done in the world today. As in past volumes, special attention is paid to writers from the smaller countries who are usually overlooked (Albania, the Ukraine, Belarus, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and many others) in favor of the major languages. This tradition continues with the present volume. With a preface by the internationally known Enrique Vila-Matas, "Best European Fiction 2015" takes it place among the first five volumes in bringing important voices to the English-speaking world.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 2014

Reviews

[Elaine Aldred · Rating 5 out of 5]

This anthology contains a breathtaking range both of genre and writing style and yet still incorporates intimate portraits of people and place. Science fiction, fantasy, folk tales and a host of cross-genre stories have made their way into the anthology, as well as stories in a vernacular dialect, or complex word essays that bring a whole new dimension to the reading experience. Some stories are very abstract, while others are rooted in reality, although the reader soon acquires an expectation that anything could happen in the next paragraph.
Despite presenting a flavour of different European countries, or at least the world through the eyes of a particular culture, it becomes apparent that, no matter where a writer comes from, people are very much alike. Much of the book is dense with layers and ideas, which ensures that this will not be a book to put to one side, but one that will stand many enjoyable reads.

[Anetq · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read:
Who wants to be a millionaire? / Armen of Armenia. (Armenia)
- the game show where you win love or hire a hitman?
It's me! / Ekaterina Togonidze. (Georgia)
- Plastic surgery or the vessel vs the wine.
A dog's fate or The diversion of Armin P / Simon Deckert. (Liechtenstein)
- From insomnia to sudden death in a few short chapters.
Diary notes / Matjaž Brulc. (Slovenia)
- The diary of setting shit free?!
The fire / Birutė Jonuškaitė. (Lithuania)
- watching from the tower and carving a mother - and a father!

Maybe:
Three stories / Iban Zaldua. (Spain: Basque)
Out-of-tune piano, accordion / Sofia Andrukhovych. (Ukraine)

[Tonymess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m going to drag out the Enrique Vila-Matas theme for at least another day!!! One of the collections I have recently acquired is the Dalkey Archive Press “Best European Fiction 2015” work, an anthology of twenty-seven writers from generally smaller “overlooked” countries such as Albania, the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, but more on that later...the 2015 edition of this work, which commenced with 2010 and has been released yearly, has an introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas himself. In his preface he looks at “translation as a language”.

Now where I am normally gripped by his style, his meanderings, side notes and references to the everyday process of writing, this introduction left me a little flat. Unlike other writings by Vila-Matas, the language seemed a little jarring, the flow stilted, could this be the translator?


5
Yesterday I went back to the alleyway that I had never come across before. And I noted again the frozen, glacial gust. At some point, I thought, someone will certainly end up asking me for a light, or will try to assault me, or will make me believe they are going to shoot me, and finally will shoot me and kill me.
Behind lowered blinds I seemed to hear a voice that said the alleyway did not appear on any map. I imagined running across pimps, small-time conmen, exceptionally lascivious hookers, vagabonds who smiled at me ominously.
The sordid climate of the alleyway did not keep me from meditating, though my thinking, it is true, showed itself increasingly incapable of escaping the sordid climate created by what I was imagining about that very place.
I was coming to understand that we are afraid.
It is the fear of Europe.

The translator was Adrian West, whereas the books I’ve read by Vila-Matas have been translated by Anne McLean, Anna Milsom and Rosalind Harvey. This could simply be a case of different translator, different end result, which of course gets me thinking. I could well have dismissed whole works by writers purely based on the translation. I could be biased towards a certain style of translation, not necessarily a certain language, it may be that some languages (Italian and French for example) become, for me, more accessible once moved into English. But surely a too broad a statement, how on earth am I going to pick the wheat from the chaff? I can’t simply have a listing of translators where the work I’ve read I did not enjoy and then avoid them in future, it may have been the original text. Then again, I can’t write off a writer based on a single work, it could well have been a poor translation. What a conundrum??

However I digress, the preface may have just come from Vila-Matas on an ordinary day, a day where his red notebook was bulging with other ideas and the concept of introducing a “Best of European Literature” collection was too much of a chore. In summary, it is my least favourite work of his, and of course this won’t put me off his books, I will be approaching other books by him, as well as reading other works translated by Adrian West (if they come my way). But I will have a keen eye for another mismatch.

Onto the work itself and to Dalkey’s credit there is a decent female representation in this collection. The fact that they published ZERO works by women last year has not influenced this collection with eleven of the twenty-seven works being written by women.

For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/20...

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love unique translated fiction and wanted to add more diversity to my reading in 2015, so this collection of European fiction was the perfect first read of the year. This collection includes stories by authors from many different European countries, most of it translated and most stand-alone short stories. The few excerpts from longer works were also enjoyable and easily stood on their own.

Almost every collection of short stories will be hit or miss, but I think this collection will be downright divisive. I either loved or completely did not understand almost every story. Some of my favorites were those which were written in novel, creative formats. I was particularly blown away by a story in a format based on the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. This story was told through four different answers to each question, with each question having one answer from each perspective and all four telling a connected narrative. If you like experimental literature, I'd recommend picking up this collection for that story alone.

Other stories I loved for the feeling they gave me. For example, one rather strange little story about a woman who periodically coughed up living birds really resonated with me. The ending spoke to me of leaving your every day life and achieving an almost magical freedom. Other equally strange stories didn't resonate with me and I ended them wondering what on earth I'd just read. I suspect all the stories in this collection will leave people feeling that they connected to the story and feeling very confused, depending on the readers own personal experiences. A final group that stood out to me in this collection were those which seemed to have slightly heavy-handed morals, such as one about plastic surgery and inner beauty. Overall, the feel of this collection is somewhat dark, but I enjoyed that, particularly with an introduction that connected the feel of the stories to the current European ethos.

This collection was over-the-top creative and nearly every story was unlike anything else I've ever read. I'd particularly recommend this to anyone who reads translated fiction because it breaks convention.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

In honour of the book's brevity in showing the world (specifically, the USA, who if they got their fingers out their arses could fund and produce a whole host of other books in translation and, y'know, actually learn there's a real-life, spherical planet out there), I have chosen to submit this review based mostly on one-word summaries of the tales.
Opening – awkward
England – cliché
Armenia – pompous
Estonia – old-fashioned modernist
Bulgaria – not awful
Denmark – slow-building, surreal
Switz – dialect, so fun
Croatia – decent
Romania – overlong sentences
Belgium – surreal fun
Georgia – very good
Poland – rural and good
Latvia – ok
Lithuania – decent
Macedonia – abrupt
Castilian Spain – quick, vampiric
French – Borgesian
Irish – very weird
Montenegro – odd sci-fi
Slovenia – shit
Finnish – decent, self-righteous
Basque – sci-fi scene; great; ok
Ukraine – fairy poor
Russia – low on plot
Liechtenstein – crap
Portugal – interesting
Austria – pretentious bollocks
Ireland – PVS POV, ok
Wales – cybersex
Italy – intriguing
Norway – yawnsome

As you can see, then, a very mixed bag. It's a silly construct of a book, too, when you see the original stories have been released anything up to and over a dozen years ago, but we have to be grateful they have been translated at last. The sheer newness of all the names means we will probably struggle to see much more from them in English, but this book can only help. It's great in showing just how the modern short story relies on genre works – almost half had something of the sci-fi, or fantasy, or surreally unusual, or even horror, about them. It's also great at foregrounding the female voice, as a lot of the representatives are ladies, even if the results aren't specifically feminine or feminist. Some of the works I could well have done without, but some were fine – so a Eurovision-styled "douze points" would be fought over by the Swiss, Georgian, French and Portuguese.

[Marcheto Marcheto · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
In this anthology of thirty stories from twenty-eight countries (Spain and Ireland have two stories each) you will find all kind of genres: realism, science fiction, humor, magical realism, folk tales, surrealism… I don’t think anyone will like all of them, but I’m quite sure that everybody will find a few ones that will make the book worth reading.
In my particular case, around a third of the stories were not my thing at all, about half of the stories were good enough to enjoy them, and a handful of them were so brilliant that I loved them. My favorite ones were those written by the Portuguese Manuel Jorge Marmelo and the Spanish Iban Zaldua (“Three Stories”, which in fact were published as three independent stories in one of his collections, and which I had already read in Spanish as I’m a great fan of Zaldua’s short stories), and most of all the stories by Balša Brković from Montenegro and Diego Marani from Italy, two writers I didn’t know and of whom now I’d like to read more. And even at the risk of seeming a chauvinist, I’d also like to recommend the other Spanish story, by Aixa de la Cruz, a young writer I had never heard about before who is represented here with and original and creepy story.
So, although as I said I could have done without quite a few of these stories, the opportunity of reading such a diverse collection of authors and stories and finding a few gems among them was rewarding enough for me.

[Chris]

Best European Fiction 2015
In the preface, if I understand correctly, Enrique Vila-Matas writes of a Europe that is, perhaps, dead. Or thought to be dead. This selection of stories, he says, proves a reawakening, a rebirth, a new, common, translatable Europe.
The stories here, if they speak of a new Europe, speak of isolation, loneliness, sex without real connection, and death, observed, even by the deceased, as a social mishap, there is a disembodied physicality to these stories. There is, if not loneliness, then individualism, a curmudgeonly insistence on one way being the only right way. (These were some of my favorite stories). There is a future, but it is one of fantasy, not entirely convincing. There are foreigners, and strangeness, and prejudices but they seem to be generated in Europe itself, (Croatia seems to generate a lot of "otherness").
Pedro Lenz's story and it's translation by Donal McLaughlin lived up to Vila -Matas' hope for that common European language: translation.
For the past several years, I have looked forward to this annual collection, featuring short stories from countries, I otherwise, would not have opportunity to read. I look forward to BEF 2016.