But you mustn't forget that some of the books that are see-through for you are mirage-rich for others. Taste.

However, with the gate so strait for foreign fiction, I hoped the reading would be more satisfying. I was wrong. The same phenomenon of mediocrity lurks in translation. There were one or two stinkers. I'd like to highlight Jacques Roubaud's The Loop as a splendid portion of puréed nonsense. Not only because it's drivel, but because it's drivel that couldn't possibly interest anyone but gullible Americans in out-of-the-way universities who haven't got the message that Paris is no longer the literary capital of the world and who don't understand that just because you belong to Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which is roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature"), doesn't mean you have any talent or that the incomprehensible poppycock you churn out is avant-garde (in itself a rather quaint, amusing, old-fashioned notion like the penny-farthing). It's curious how the hotness hops about. 

You rarely get outstanding writers in isolation, they do tend to come in packs, and periods of glory never last that long for one nation. Virgil-Horace-Ovid, Shakespeare-Marlowe-Jonson-Bacon, Dostoevsky-Tolstoy-Chekhov-Turgenev, Céline-Sartre-Camus-Beckett.

So how have the nations fared? On the strength of my reading for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, as well as the Best European Fiction 2010 that I had to review, there are now two nationalities I will avoid at all costs: the Norwegians and the Austrians.

The Norwegian entries aren't that disgraceful, in fact you will find some cracking passages in the vast, steppe-like expanses of novels such as The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad or The Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen. The problem is that they are 30 or 40 pages away from each other. Condemn me as a shameless hedonist, but I rather like something worth reading on every page. If these novels were cut in length by half, or even two-thirds they'd be remarkable, but editing is the writer's job, not the reader's. Let me make special mention of Ketil Bjornstad whose To Music, to his credit, eschews the gigantism of his compatriots and whose descriptions of piano competitions are superb (he's a concert pianist). However, I have to be honest: the trauma of Kjaerstad and Christensen has been such that if I see the words Norway or Norwegian on a book jacket in the future, I won't pick it up. My apologies to the more succinct writers in Oslo.

The Austrians' output seems so feeble and sickly that I feel concerned and I have the urge to send them a food parcel with hearty vittles (and I do know that Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize). Anyone who's browsed in a French bookshop over the last decade will have also noticed how, with few exceptions such as the satanic effusions of Michel Houellebecq, the novel has been reduced to emaciated volumes about Parisian divorces and philosophers moving flats, and that many of the younger writers such as Beigbeder pepper their work liberally with English (to the point where those of us who bothered to learn French feel it was a wasted effort).