Sven Birkerts Explains to MeWhat I Like about European Novels

He says:

On our shores whole generations have chased after the fata morgana of the Great American Novel ... The European writer is driven to put a frame around a catastrophe, to explain the complete collapse of a refined and confident civilization. If no one ever rhapsodizes about the Great European Novel, it may be because the adjective "great" does not stick easily to a subject matter sop emphatically somber. ... [T]he interrogation goes on. Indeed, after forty years the rise of fascism and the war are still the dominant subjets of Europen fiction. Perhaps an epithet would just trivialize things.

--Sven Birkerts, An Artificial Wilderness:
Essays on 20th Century Literature 63-4 (1987)

From a review of Gregor von Rezzori, The Death of my Brother Abel (1985). Okay, so that's 22, 24 years ago, but look at his selection: Musil, Walser, (Joseph) Roth, Frisch--also Yourcenar, (Primo) Levi, Benjamin, Montale--to stick to my own favorites. Can America match this list?

[In passing, a critic whose taste covers a lot of the same turf is Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, but I'll leave that for another day.]