Beneath Black Stars: contemporary Austrian fiction Ed. Martin Chalmers Serpent's Tail, 256pp, £9 ISBN 185242379X

''Whatever I have written, whether published by me during my lifetime or as part of my literary papers still existing after my death, shall not be performed, printed or even recited for the duration of legal copyright within the borders of Austria, however this state identifies itself." The will of Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989, remains a testament of the uneasy relationship between Austria and its writers. (Naturally, Bernhard was denounced in Austria, by Kurt Waldheim, no less, as "an insult to the nation".) Bernhard is one of the great postwar European writers, and his comic misanthropy, Nietzschean extremism, ironic self-positioning and long, paragraphless sentences have influenced British writers as diverse as Tim Parks, Geoff Dyer and Lucy Ellmann, as well as George Steiner and the late W G Sebald.

In an exemplary introduction, Martin Chalmers reminds us that a "disproportionately large number of exceptional writers" have emerged from Austria in recent times. The best are represented here. There are the more familiar names such as Bernhard himself; Peter Handke, who was idiosyncratically pro-Serb during the recent Balkan wars, and who contributes a sequence of mini-Balkan meditations that have the precision of still-life paintings; and Lilian Faschinger, author of the racy international bestseller Magdalena the Sinner. The more unfamiliar, to this reviewer at least, include the remarkable Sabine Scholl, whose experimental "Sex - The Other Homeland" is a compelling study of disturbed sexual awakening, in which the peculiarity of her sentences are mimetic of a wider physical and spiritual unease (the story is expertly translated by Chalmers).

Should we be surprised that Austria has such a rich contemporary literature? Perhaps not - after all, Austria remains one of the most fascinating countries in Europe, with a disturbed past and a politically riven present, a country haunted by its lost imperial influence, by the obliteration of its Jewish heritage, and yet determined, for all the defensive nationalism of the intermittently popular Freedom Party, to forge a new identity as a dynamic, prosperous small nation.

A familiar criticism of Austria, as laid out by Hella Pick, for instance, in her recent book Guilty Victim: Austria from the Holocaust to Haider (I B Tauris), is that the Austrian state, unlike Germany, remains morally compromised by its failure to grapple convincingly with the taint of its Nazi past. The Moscow Declaration of 1943 stated that Austria was not the willing accomplice, but the the first victim of Nazism, and a generation of schoolchildren were taught to believe that. A necessary lie? One should never forget the geopolitical pressures under which the diminished, humiliated Austrian state operated in the immediate postwar period, menaced as it was from the east by the communist threat. All of which provided a complex and demanding social context for fiction. Martin Chalmers and Serpent's Tail should be congratulated for bringing us this outstanding book.

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