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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The funniest story in Best European Fiction 2012

Really enjoyed Duncan Bush's story Bigamy in Aleksandar Hemon's anthology "Best European Fiction 2012); Bush is Welsh, writing in English - is there a reason why by and large I've liked the English-language stories in this collection the best? Certainly part of it may be that they're writing from the same literary tradition I'm steeped in - but then again one reason to even pick up an anthology like this one is to get some news from other cultures, other tongues. I'm wondering if in part it's that the selection pool for English-language stories is so much deeper: for the stories from other languages, the anthologists had to wait for the story to appear in translation. Perhaps many of the very best are not translated into English, ever? Anyway, Bush's story is probably the funniest in the collection: a bunch of (construction?) workers on a break read and discuss a news item about a bigamist who's been outed - a truck driver with two families, two lives, in two towns in Wales - and they discuss how this could be possible, all the possible slip-ups and difficulties, and the story then ends with one of the characters, the narrator, reflecting on how his long-time girlfriend can tell in seconds if he's been out at a bar or pub flirting with another woman. It's just the right haunting and serious note on which to end this story of boisterous jabber about a seemingly innocuous or curious incident in the news.

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