Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2011

THE AMERICA OF EUROPE

The writers proper destiny is to know where he or she comes from, confront his conscience, draw the borderline, then step beyond it. One of the deepest conundrums, and perhaps beauties, of our time is that so many of us do not know where we come from.

The concept of the global writer is a relatively new one. There has always been the Sri Lankan writer, for example, or the English writer, or the Canadian, or indeed the American. It is only in recent years that a writer like Michael Ondaatjeborn in Sri Lanka, educated in England, a Canadian citizen who wrote his first novel about a black American jazz musicianwas able to comfortably fit the phrase international mongrel into the discourse. We are increasingly familiar with our hybrid sense of nationality: that wherever we are can be coupled with wherever we once were . Writers can carry the weight of a couple of extra countries: if you put the original brick in your pocket, you can still swim the river. Were not shattered by our multiple hyphenations. We can be Irish and Argentinean, or French and Australian, or Chinese and Paraguayan, or perhaps even all of them at once.

The problem comes if youre European. What exactly is a European writer? Is there a contained geography or an accepted history in which she or he exists? Is there some sort of European voice that justifies an anthology? What does it mean, apart from the very nature of fracture, to have a literature of Europe?

Everyone knows what Europe once wasthe very word opens up the charnel houses of the twentieth centurybut we have an imperfect idea of what Europe currently is . It operates as an umbrella word, of course, but the umbrellas are inevitably carried around even when its not threatening to rain. Theres Sweden, theres Turkey, theres Macedonia. Theres France, theres Germany, theres Spain. Theres Luxembourg and Andorra and Vatican City and Catalonia. Some European organisationsits football authorities for instanceinclude Kazakhstan and Israel. (Imagine the Israelis swapping soccer shirts with the Kazakhs at a tournament, say in Sarajevoperhaps Kafka could deal with the strange human algebra of it all.) And then theres Ireland and England, Serbia and Croatia, Georgia and Russia: long wars, short memories.

Try throwing all of these countries into the single factory chute of identity. It seems impossible, yet it has happened, and it continues to happen: the word European has been around a while and it is most certainly here to stay. The difficulty, for the writer at least, is knowing exactly where it begins and ends.

Theres nothing new about European identity crises, of course, fictional or otherwise. Way back in 1904, Leopold Bloom, an Irish-Hungarian Jew, sat in Barney Kiernans pub on Little Britain Street in Dublin, contemplating the idea that a nation is the same people living in the same place. He later revises his answer to those also living in different places. A parliamentary answer, and he gets a biscuit tin thrown at his head for his troubles. The idea is that a nation is a sort of intimate and fluctuating everywhere. Its impossible, of course, to have a nation without literature. The corresponding corollary is that its impossible to have a literature without a nation. On the simplest level it has to come from somewhere.