Though still routinely referred to as Germans, Austrian novelists have experienced a recent run of critical and commercial success. The “difficult” prose of the past has been replaced by a focus on story-telling, with women writers producing no less interesting work in the genre than the new male “narrative miracles”. Yet experimentalism is by no means out: darkly humorous and self-referential “writer’s novels” are also booming. In the latest essay in Eurozine’s series “Literary Perpsectives”, critic Daniela Strigl .

There’s a lot to digest here, and a lot to check out.

While the Great Estonian Novel has yet to be written, writes poet and critic Märt Väljataga, the range of fiction in Estonian is sufficiently wide to serve as an indicator of the hopes and fears, anxieties and obsessions, of post-communist Estonia. From the autobiographical to the historical realist and allegorical, Estonian novelists have successfully developed a variety of styles to respond to post-Cold War experience (though try telling that to the local librarian).

The problem that arises in all these countries is: when you have bought a company that makes two or three per cent you want it to make ten or twelve per cent. Hachette wants ten per cent; Editis wants fifteen, as does Bertelsmann. The consequences can be felt at every level, beginning with the choice of books to be published, the print-runs required and, in the end, redundancies. For the first time in Western Europe, ideas are being evaluated, not in terms of their importance, but in terms of their profitability.

Of course with everything there is opportunity. Open Letter hopes to live in this space:

This is a very serious kind of censorship and one that is very difficult to bypass. Nevertheless there is, in all of this, a note of optimism. . .This is the setting up, all over the place, of small publishing companies that welcome books which, for ideological reasons, have been refused by major publishers.

In fact, during some periods and in some places, the discussion of foreign literature was so extensive and lively that it turned into a problem for the publishing business. In 1953, Åke Runnquist, editor of BLM, one of Sweden’s most influential literary journals, grumbled about the daily newspapers writing too much and too early about foreign language books. Many books were being reviewed on the very day they appeared in the original language, wrote Runnquist. The downside to this alertness, he continued, was that when these books appeared in translation – and most did! – public discussion about them had already subsided and as a result the translations did not sell as well as they could or should have.

Two years later, in 1955, Runnquist repeated his lamentation – but not without a certain amount of satisfaction that some of the bigger newspapers had started to face up to their responsibility and review important foreign language books twice: when they were first published in the original language and again when the translation appeared.

No major postwar German novel dealt with the Allied bombing of German cities in World War II: during the Cold War, the echo of the bombs was muffled by the anticipated blast of “the bomb”. Nevertheless, argues Volker Hage, wartime experiences pervade the work of all authors who were in the cellars during the air raids. The issue became contemporary only when bombs again fell on European – Yugoslavian – cities: the Kosovan war and the debate about W.G. Sebald’s critique of the taboo on the bombing raids sharpened the focus. However, though more and more is being written on the subject, no German author of stature has revised the question of guilt.