IT is tempting to suggest that the European novel, if such an entity ever truly existed, died with the passing of Henry James in 1916. The American master approached the subject of Europe and Europeanness with the deliberation of an archaeologist exploring the history of a hidden tomb, assisted by a diffidence towards Europe rarely displayed by Europeans.
Europe for James and his New World characters:" is a sophisticated, cultural and cultured territory, a foreign land vastly beyond and outside the experience of the non European - invariably privileged, naive Americans, best typified by Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.
The difficulty with attempting to define the European novel - that is, the novel which seeks to explain or discover the essence of Europe, as Claudio Magris attempted in his superlative cultural travelogue, Danube (1986, English 1989) - rather than merely examining the novel as written in Europe, is that each European writer has largely been preoccupied by the history and identity of his own country, whereas North American novelists, for instance, have been increasingly concerned not so, much with the search for their nation's identity as seeking the country itself. It has proven a vast, inexhaustible subject. Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) set out to capture America, and his literary successors have been working on the project since then.
Nationalism, not Europe as a concept, has shaped the European novel. The most consistently exciting fiction from Europe since the second World War has come from Eastern and Central Europe. This literature of protest, which has its mirror image in the African, Indian and Latin American novel, took as its cue political oppression and the battle of the individual faced with totalitarianism, as early as the work of Franz Kafka.
With the collapse of the Soviet empire, more than ever before the writers of the former Soviet countries will be focusing on individualism. It is interesting to note their awareness of the potential impact of the death of communism on their work. Speaking in Dublin at the International Writers' Conference in 1991, the Russian writer Andrei Bitov, conscious of the political changes, asked: "What will we (the writers of Eastern Europe) write about now?"
Despite the fact that many Soviet writers were banned, illegal editions of their work were circulated in the samizdat or underground press, which also provided a route to the West and an eager audience. In his masterful Pushkin House (1978, English 1987), which exposes the intelligentsia as ineffectual ditherers, Bitov announces: "You talk endlessly about the death of Russian culture. On the contrary! It has just emerged. The Revolution won't destroy the past, she'll stop it at her back. All has perished - and in this very hour the great Russian culture has been born, this time forever, because it will not develop in its sequel."
The contemporary Russian novel, such as Evgeny Popov's hilariously irreverent The Soul of a Patriot (Moscow 1989, English 1994), has continued in the satiric, parodic tone pioneered by Bulgakov (1891-1940), most memorably in The Master and Margarita (Moscow, 1938; English 1967), itself in the tradition of Gogol (1809-52) and Gorky (1869-1936). There are exceptions. Chingiz Aitmatov's The Place of the Skull (1989) is set in Soviet Central Asia, and highlights the stupidity of the antics of rural Communist Party officials. But it is also a metaphysical reflection on good and evil. Aitmatov's melancholic style is matched by Yuri Nagibin's limpidly, beautiful Arise and Walk (Moscow 1987, English 1990), a son's memoir of a father's suffering in a labour camp Leonid Borodin (born 1938) argued that Russia is Russia herself alone, especially convincingly in Partings (1981, Eglish 1989); he is yet another writer whose work testifies to the energy, life and subversiveness of the Russian novel.
Czech writers such as Ivan Klima (born 1931) and the self exiled Milan Kundera (born 1929) moved away from political satire towards personal themes. Klima's Judge on Trial (1991), one of Europe's finest postwar novels, is the story of one man's struggle to figure out himself, his parents, his unstable wife and increasingly stressed mistress, admittedly against the backdrop of the period after the Prague Spring. In Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994), Klima confronted the dilemma of living in a new world of supposedly unlimited and confusing freedoms. Kundera has entered an artistic isolation of sorts and, living in France since 1975, has with works such as Immortality (1991) and Slowness (1996) - written in French - become increasingly European, in that he has embraced the traditionally European concept of the novel of ideas. Narrative has yielded to self indulgent abstraction in his recent novels, and he has lost touch with superior earlier work such The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Kundera's countryman, Josef Skvorecky resident in Canada since 1968, whose finest work remains The Engineer of Human Souls (Czech 1977; English 1984), has continued to mine recent Czech history and autobiography for his themes.
Twentieth century French fiction has became increasingly cerebral with the inventive and highly original Georges Perec (1936-82). Author of the singular Life A User's Manual (1978; English 1987), Perec combined the peculiarly French penchant for intellectualised literary trickery with a genuine compassion. Dedicated to an earlier French pioneer, Raymond Queneau, Perec's bizarre masterpiece represents clever French fiction at its finest and most humane. Interestingly, Perec, for all his games was also immersed in the prevailing theme of the novel in Europe: the legacy of the second World War.
Yet French fiction, in common with that of Italy, is currently dormant (the death of Italo Calvino in 1985 emphasised the dearth of interesting fiction coming from Italy). It could be argued that the most exciting of French novels to emerge in recent years is the belated publication in October 1995 of Albert Camus's last, unfinished novel, The First Man, the manuscript of which was in the car he died in 1960. Also impressive and traditional in form are Jean Rouaud's autobiographical novels, Prix Goncourt winning Fields of Glory (1990) and Of Illustrious Men (1993), both family memoirs - the former, shaped by the first World War, the latter by the second.
Gert Hofmann (1932-93), author of Our Conquest, The Parable of the Blind, Before the Rainy Season and The Film Explainer, is one of Europe's most interesting postwar writers. Giinter Grass's influence as a cautionary fabulist has extended far beyond Europe and he remains a potent force in German fiction. Thomas Strittmatter's Raven (1990, English 1993) is as much a hymn to Grass as Martin Amis's Money (1984) is to Saul Bellow. In common with contemporary Russian fiction, the German novel is often satiric in tone and its writers are now revisiting their own history.
Serbian novelist and essayist Danilo Kis (1935-89) viewed nationalism as collective paranoia. And it is true that while novelists in Europe have looked to their respective histories and cultures, the fate of the individual has been their central preoccupation. However, there is one unifying theme in the fiction of Europe war. Even the determinedly insular British novel has continued to explore this theme, most recently and brilliantly through Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy which culminated in her 1995 Booker Prize winning The Ghost Road.
The 19th century novel in Europe grew from a powerfully narrative driven tradition. Mood, tone and emphasis have changed. Story has yielded to protest. So the search for the quintessential European novel continues - or does it? Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom's elegiac meditation, The Following Story (1991, English 1993) in which the narrator pondeix his own messy non life through an erudite meditation extending back to Ovid's Metamorphoses, is perhaps the closest tee contemporary novel in Europe comes to being definitely European.
Still, the question remains: what is European? And for that matter, what exactly is the novel?
