Best European Fiction 2010
Hemon (The Lazarus Project) edits the inaugural volume of an anthology of European short fiction, and while the maiden outing has many fine moments, there's room for improvement in upcoming years. The mix of authors—35 writers from 30 countries—is excellent and includes better knowns with unknowns, though each piece is allotted an average of 10 pages, leading several of the more promising works to feel truncated. Other pieces (such as Giulio Mozzi's story, originally written as part of an art exhibit) don't seem like the best work to represent an author. Still, there is much excellent work. Christine Montalbetti's surreal and enigmatic Hotel Komaba Eminence (with Haruki Murakami) plays on the author's obsession with the Japanese writer. In Igor Stiks's terse but well-managed At the Sarajevo Market, the discovery of a watch at a Bosnian marketplace triggers a crisis between war-fatigued lovers. Victor Pelevin's acidic satire Friedmann Space evolves into a Borgesian tale of Russian scientists sending lucrenauts past the Schwarzenegger threshold to report back on the black hole–like domain of the megarich. This is a good start—one hopes that next year's volume will be a more consistent collection.(Jan.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.