One of the stories is set in Reykavik and written by the Icelandic author Agust Borgpor Sverrisson, on page twenty three he writes “Finally, a yellow bus arrives.” Matching this short sentence is a statement of learning penciled into my notebook, which reads: “In Reykavik, the buses are yellow.” That after so few pages I felt it necessary to codify this sliver of education may point to why this book frustrated me as a completed project despite being filled with great writing from ten different authors, cities, countries, and languages.

Here are some reasons why the whole idea is silly:

1. Short stories are about characters, sometimes about narrative. There are certain stories wherein the element of location speaks louder than others (see ‘Dubliners’, but we’ll get back to there). On the whole stories are not about places, though they invariably happen in them. This is as true as saying they’re not about words, though they have to make use of them. This symbiotic relationship does not connote sameness.

2. I’m thinking, now, about a book I read in high school. It was called ‘The Beach’ and I started reading it in the eight-second interval between its publication and the spiral rage of “cultural behemoth”-ism that ending in the creation of a film and the decision by the author to move away and make zombie movies. I’m thinking of this book because I’m on the sofa of my mother’s house where I first read it several years ago and there was this wonderful passage about how people’s personalities are mirrored in their choices of favourite places to visit. One can assume that either Crossan has read the book or (as likely) has come to ponder the same notion. What saves ‘The Beach’ is that the narrator knows that this earnest little grasp at humanity is also pretentious and self-fulfilling. To illustrate why, do the following little writing exercise: Grab two pieces of paper and write at the top of each your current location, either in a large scale (Canada, the Universe, the West) or a small scale (My mother’s couch, for example). Now, on the first page follow your location with an equals sign and then the word “dark”. On the second page write “= light”. Now write me a paragraph explaining why on a metaphorical level each statement is true. Submit your finished work to jacob709_902@hotmail.com (my address) and I will assign you a letter grade from A to F based on traditional academic rubrics.*

*Note: This is unlikely to happen. I am very busy. I don’t even have the time to write good jokes.

This exercise should enlighten you to this point I’ve been trying to make. If it didn’t, you will get an automatic F.

3. I know the editor makes light of the impossibility of the assignment. This doesn’t make anything about it less obnoxious. For proof, ask yourself the following question; which is more obnoxious, practiced naivete or practiced naivete that advertises how much it has practiced?

It should be stated that much of this anthology contains short stories and very little of it contains any of this editorial counting-to-infinity-just-to-show-you-that-I-can’t. Some of the short stories are great, all of them are good. They’ve all been corralled into English and share in an ongoing game of tag as their narratives make recurring use of certain urban fairy tale mainstays (the confused loner, the intellectual loner, the artistic loner, the loner-that-dare-not-speak-its-name). Let’s all take a moment to bring to light some of the best moments from the writers themselves, I’m sorry for speaking out of turn and not focussing on their contributions first and foremost. None of this is their fault. I’m a dick, sometimes, I’m sorry. I drink too much and nobody else ever votes for my favourite political candidates.

Jacques Reda wants to tell you about Paris. If I was buying the book’s central premise I’d tell you that Reda wants to deflate the romantic image of Paris’s outsiders by writing a dark tale about homelessness. I’m not buying that idea though. Reda wrote his story, like all the other contributors, well before being rebranded by Crossan and Comma. His light his touch, his voice is mature, and his city is still beautiful even if he doesn’t need it.

In ‘The First Day of the Fourth Week’, the above mentioned Agust Borgpor Sverisson (accents mark withheld due to the age of my laptop) introduces me to Reykjavik and modern Icelandic literature. I don’t believe I had ever read any. If I was to extrapolate to his entire country I would describe modern Icelandic literature as knowingly ironic, intimate, and kind of mean in the pin-prick efficiency of its humour. Of course, it would be silly to extrapolate in this way, from one writer to the whole of a nation’s output. It would be a little like extrapolating from one short story to the reverberating soul of a whole city (sips his beer, smiles effetely to himself…)

Empar Moliner gives the anthology its wittiest moment in a dryly sarcastic tale of a mid-level poet and academic charged with encapsulating his home city (Barcelona) within the lines of a short poem. The tone is pitch-perfect, the characters fleshier and more three-dimensional than the genre requires. There are some really sublime moments. In a different context, the whole idea could even be considered subversive.

I want to get back to Dubliners, because I’m Irish-Catholic and somebody made me read it when I was a kid. There are no stories from ‘Dubliners’ in the anthology, obviously, but it shares in the prehistory of the project. James Joyce’s Dublin obsession is on one side of a certain division in “place” writing. Joyce is a writer of “a place” (Dublin), his writing, his language even, is folded so deep into the weather of the city, into its streets and stagnations, that it is unimaginable elsewhere. On the other hand are the Hemingways and Le Carres, writers I would want to call “of places” in that all of their works rely on an intimacy with their setting, but that setting can and does change from project to project. Pretty much every major writer from my country is the latter kind of “place” writer (the fiction chameleons Atwood, Ondaatje, Munro, and also Cronenberg from film). Pretty much everyone from the current crop of British writers is the former (see Zadie Smith, see ‘Londonstani’, see ‘Brick Lane’). Maybe my problem with Decapolis is that it has the heart of the second kind of writing (a sort of eight quid rendition of a European vacation) and the structure of the first (a statement of place and principles from ten points on the map, a geobiography, a guttural shout from the centre of something).

As a retail object, ‘Decapolis’ is value-priced and stuffed with quality. Sadly, I don’t review retail objects, I review books and I take a real offence whenever I am told how to read something. Even in the stories’ best moments, my reaction was inevitably forced through the filter of the imposed editorial boundaries. The purest experiences were found in the reading about cities I’ve never considered visiting, cities devoid of any template to compare to through Crossan’s heavy-handedness. In Sverisson’s Reykjavik and Simpraga’s Zagreb I felt legitimately transported, and not because the shadow of the city was the strongest in these examples or even because the narratives were the most engaging (they were all engaging; engaging being reviewer-speak for “fun to read”). I got the most out of them because in reading them I felt the closest to their original context.

My advice, in the end, is to buy the book. But before you read anything, take a normal pair of kitchen shears and cut out pages seven to fifteen. That’s the introduction. You really don’t want to read that. Know that doing this will decrease the book’s resale value, you’ll need to be okay with this before committing to the purchase. If you’re not 100% sure you won’t want to pawn it away in the future, leave the book alone. There are other cities you could visit for the eight pound fare.

Jacob McArthur Mooney lives in Canada. He is a co-editor at ThievesJargon.com. To read a selection of Jacob’s poetry on the showcase section of this site, click here..