books @ cc.

by Meša Selimović (1966)

Set in Sarajevo circa 18th century, Death and the Dervish is a first-person narrative account by the dervish of the title, Ahmed Nurrudin. A spiritual leader of a tekke, Ahmed — whose name is apparently given (his real name is never revealed, as are all characters in the book except for Hassan) — considers himself unworthy of the title Sheikh and Nuruddin, a man at an “ugly age… young enough to have dreams, but too old to fulfill any of them.”

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.

by László Krasznahorkai (1989)

From the backcover:

A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the whole world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find—music, cosmology, fascism.

by Arthur Koestler (1940)

A fictional account of a show trial during Stalin’s 1930s purges, Rubashov, the protagonist, once a revolutionary disillusioned by the regime, is abducted, jailed, tortured (psychologically) and finally confessed to a series of “counter-revolutionary” crimes he didn’t commit, for the ideals of the Revolution.

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Gerhana Tengah Hari

translated from English to Indonesian by Gayus Siagian
published by Pustaka Jaya, 1982

The translation is sadly of low quality, with too many basic grammar and typographic mistakes.

Chronicle of the Future
by Svetlana Alexievich (1997)

( New version from the Dalkey Archive Press available )

“This is not a book about Chernobyl, but about the world of Chernobyl,” so Alexievich wrote, and indeed, instead of writing about what happened, she compiled a wide range of oral, first-hand testimony, accounts, sometimes occasional rant and condemnations from broad range of people involved and/or affected by Chernobyl. Plenty of tongue-in-cheek resignations in the face of something big and unknown gone wrong. Alexievich is mostly invisible—she allows everyone to speak for themselves—although a certain amount of editing has definitely been done. Alexievich realises that “suffering is our refuge”, that, as one of her interviewee said, people who haven’t suffered hungered for stories about suffering— “cheap philosophy”.

by Mark Mazower (2000)

A short but broad-ranging history book, it challenges the common one-dimensional stereotype of “the Balkans”. From the Romans to the present, including the Byzantine and Ottoman experiences, it treats the former Turkish domains as part of a common, if complex, historical inheritance.