![]() Ireland gets another brief look-in in Borivoje Adasevic’s searing condemnation of Serbia in For a Foreign Master: “Our whole multicoloured country was becoming for me a kind of Ireland in the eyes of an Irishman leaving it forever,” writes his protagonist, raging against the cruelties of his country. Mike McCormack’s story is more down to earth, featuring a Calvin and Hobbes-style eight-year-old boy who is convinced he is on the road to psychosis. Mac Síomóin’s story is a deft piece about a man who hears an unearthly orchestra at inopportune moments. The Irish representatives here are Tomás Mac Síomóin and Mike McCormack. John Banville offers an interesting preface that concentrates on the technical demands of translation. Ray French’s story of of an ageing father and his upset son is moving and neat. Similarly, Mirana Likar Bajzelj’s story, Nada’s Tablecloth, about a bride heading up the aisle with stone-cold feet and a heart empty of love, is elegantly cut. What makes Byatt’s story stand out is the simple human heartbreak that drives it. These are paragraphs pared to the bone without distending their intent it’s a masterful turn amid impressive company. It twists and turns, with quietly violent betrayal, in a setup distilled through bland domesticity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, AS Byatt’s short story is one of the finest in the collection. The daughter works in a cabaret, where her job is “frying the hearts and other body parts of her male audience over a low flame”. Amid the well-executed confusion, there is some terrific prose. Similarly, Kristiina Ehin’s story is thrillingly chaotic from the get-go: a man attempts to woo a surrealist’s enigmatic daughter, and she promptly turns into a stork. We hardly saw one another, he was fantastically busy. Who would do such a thing? As his wife admits, the devil can be very convincing – and after the transformation “things went well for my husband. Rumen Balabanov’s The Ragiad is a terrific tale of a man voluntarily transformed into a rag by the devil. This being Europe, there’s also a strong, surreal stable of stories among the herd. There’s a similar sense of lost, dark wonder in Ieva Toleikyte’s The Eye of the Maples, a childhood story that resists explanation and leaves its thumbprints on the protaganist’s life and the reader’s mind. In Dulce Maria Cardoso’s Angels on the Inside, a country walk home shifts into a moment of searing drama, with everyday details transformed into curios of geometry and science by its young narrator. “It is not the giggling of ridicule,” he writes, “but the innocent giggling of a child pleased by a prank that had been successful beyond his expectations.” The 35 stories and their subject matter are too diverse in their heritage and execution to allow any effective categorisation.ĭaniel Batliner’s contribution is not the best in the collection, but his description of a laughing boy lingers long. The book is loosely corralled under headings, such as space, women, body and Americans, but this is little more than an optimistic attempt at drawing a few boundaries. Those looking for a guide to the grand themes in current European literature will be disappointed, as it’s hard to cut any clear paths through the chaos of such a lively literary continent. Essentially, Hemon says, it’s not going to be easy it’s going to be worth it.įor the first quarter of the book or so, it really isn’t easy, and it is not until Kirill Kobrin’s Last Summer in Marienbad, a wonderful slice of historical drama with Franz Kafka at its core – the man rather than his writing style – that this collection starts to hit its stride. Now he says he has given up the sermonising, and writes apologetically that this collection is “proudly difficult and imperfectly translated”. In his introduction to Best European Fiction 2013, Aleksandar Hemon, who has edited the anthology each year since its inception, in 2010, describes himself as a kind of literary evangelist, who spends his time trying to convince people to read difficult and/or translated works of literature. FICTIONBest European Fiction 2013, Edited by Aleksandar Hemon, Dalkey Archive Press, 502pp, £11.99
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