books @ cc.

by Danilo Kiš (1965)

A semi-autobiographical story, Garden, Ashes is a recollection of Andy Scham, a young child living in Hungary during the World War II. Despite the ubiquitous shadows of Holocaust, Kiš’ masterful composition of vivid, precise minutiae of surrounding details and events, with an intense focus on the (eccentric) father, Eduard Scham, Garden, Ashes evokes the densely atmospheric writings of Bruno Schulz in The Street of Crocodiles.

by Danilo Kiš (1983)

A collection of metaphysical short stories set in various times and places, luminously darkened with the themes of fate and death’s impenetrability. With strong political undercurrents and recondite personal insights, Kiš’s reworked facts, Gnostic, Biblical, Koran myths and legends, political situations, rural folktales, depicting the delicate multitude and vicissitude of human life, perhaps with less faux vérité style than A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, yet with the same finely-crafted prose, subtle ironies and detachment that is both powerful and constrained.

by Danilo Kiš (1976)

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich consists of seven different yet casually interlinked short stories about revolutionaries, mostly centering around the Russian Revolution and its blind Stalinist totalitarianism that arbitrarily consumes its children. In its loose labyrinth of characters, loose deeds, occurences and details artfully described, readers find shadows of Borgesian influence. While the literary polemic with Borges is unmistakably deliberate with his faux documentary style (particularly A Universal History of Iniquity), Kiš’ lyrical mastery is all the more remarkably powerful in his detached yet delicate constructions of the grim subjects.

by Danilo Kiš (1972)

The book starts with a prologue that muses on the chalice/faces optical illusion, which then proceeds to interspersions of Travel Scenes, Notes of a Madman, and Criminal Investigation, each one with its own distinctive narrative (3rd-person narrative, 1st-person, silent dialogue), sometimes short sometimes running for pages. We are introduced to he protagonist, a railway clerk known as E.S., inquiring indignantly to the authorities for his reduced pension, and in his narrative also reveals other mundane day-to-day concerns (his quarrel with his sister and nephew) that he seems absurdly obsessed with, that at initial glance looks arbitrary but slowly and chillingly grows into dawning comprehension, that this is a futile defiant thrashing of a condemned man in the face of the implicit story that was taking place — the extermination and the massacre of the Jews.