Best European Fiction 2013

For the past few years, Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction anthology has been one of the most exciting events in the publishing calendar. Welding Dalkey's commitment to making challenging foreign fiction available to English audiences with Aleksandar Hemon's uncompromising editorship, it doesn't so much introduce a breath of fresh air into the slightly stuffy world of English language fiction as kick in the doors and roar through like a hurricane. The fun starts with the twin introductions by John Banville and Hemon. After Banville's elegant, unabashedly intellectual defence of translation itself, Hemon weighs in with a pugnacious broadside, divided into numbered sections like a manifesto, in which he refuses flat out to apologise for the difficulty of what's about to follow. Translation, and the reading of translated literature, isn't a cosy liberal exercise in multicultural mutual (self-) congratulation, he says: it's a messy, noisy, challenging and imperfect business, and if you aren't prepared to risk some disorientation, some discomfort, some intellectual bruising, then this book is not for you.

Accordingly, the fiction that's in here is too maddeningly various, too weird and downright different, to be summed up in an ordinary-sized review. There are clever, poised, china-fragile pieces from Norway and Iceland: Ari Behn's tale of a possibly imaginary Norwegian traveller in Timbuktu, and Girdir Eliasson's music shop which sells only recordings of performances that could never possibly have happened, both indulge in a playful postmodern melancholy. Rumen Balabanov's The Ragiad resuscitates the spirit of Gogol in a miserable modern Bulgaria, where Satan slouches around in a tracksuit smoking Kents and buying up souls. Russia's Kirill Kobrin reimagines Kafka as a sclerotic middle-aged failure in an alternate-universe Europe; a story from Slovakia depicts the despair of failing relationships as a literal presence metastasizing behind the TV. There are more realist efforts, too: Vitalie Ciobanu's tale of escaping Communist Moldova though a cultural trip in a folk orchestra, Miklos Vajda's heartbreaking portrait of a dead mother and a terrible Hungarian century, and Semezdin Mehmedinovic's eerily fascinating (and fascinated) first-person account of a heart attack are all immensely powerful pieces of writing in which the sheer unassimilable strangeness of reality needs no assistance from the writer.

Is there a single best story in here? It's hard to say: there are too many moments that make you leap out of your chair in surprise and delight. But for what it's worth, two stories made me jump higher and farther than the rest. Ieva Toleikyte's The Eye of the Maples is a chilly surrealist fable of childhood, illness and imprisonment from Lithuania; and Tania Malyarchuk, from Ukraine, contributes a hilarious story of a small girl, her cow, and the dead and dying inhabitants of her rural village which crackles and fizzes with manic energy and sinister invention. You'll probably disagree with this assessment: good. If this swaggering, bursting brawler of a collection doesn't cause arguments, one suspects that its editor will be very disappointed indeed.