A strange, abstract and beautiful novel, and a unique approach to holocaust literature. Kis' book uses a variety of literary techniques to build up a composite picture of Eduard, a secular jew in wartime Yugoslavia. There are oblique, almost abstract, accounts of his travels, dry retellings of his interviews by the authorities, question and answer narrative that veers fro the personal to the mundane to the shocking. Despite being short, it reminded me a little of James Joyce's Ulysses, but where Joyce's book internalized the narrative to turn the mundane into the epic, Kis does the opposite, transcribing the epic (the holocaust) in terms of Eduard's human thoughts and feelings. Many of Eduard's sufferings are mild, personal failures, barely presented as a result of persecution. Occasionally, though we get glimpses of the horror on a wider scale, such as lists of acquaintances who are dead or disappeared. A difficult book, in terms of both structure and content, but an excellent one.

With Kis we are as unable to pigeon-hole his writing style, genre and subject matter as with Vladimir Nabokov or Milorad Pavic. His ability to diversify his literary works and consistently to re-invent himself as an author is particularly evident in the yet adhesive collection of short stories, Encyclopedia of the Dead. Danilo Kis seamlessly records renderings of historical fiction from first century sorcerers to modern tales of Soviet conspiracy.

Often considered his greatest work, Kis has set Hourglass (Peshchanik) in the midst of World War II. Written larely as a barage of question and answers for a criminal investigation, Hourglass is a detailed description of the terror, both psychological and physical, which many endured at the hands of the Nazi-sympathetic leaders.

Kis shares his philosophical and moral struggle with two significant Russian authors - Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Sologub. The plight of man is his own baseness, sinfulness and stupidity. While Gogol-Chichikov attributes this plight arguably to Russia, or more precisely universal society, Sologub-Peredonov points his symbolist finger at specific neighbors. "No, my dear contemporaries," Sologub writes plainly, " it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon...about you." Kis, however, in seeing the world "doomed to destruction" finds a single culprit. Using Icarus as a means of decoding mankind's problem of sin, Kis accepts his own culpability. Where are the proofs that man is heading for disaster? "Here gentlemen; here, dear sister, here. Look closely, I am pointing at my heart."

Although the Hourglass is often tedious in its preciseness, pedantic in detail, it consistently reverberates with a poignancy in turn painful to read and elevated in its humanity. ( )

I wish I could give a better summary or description of what this book was about, but it eludes me. I read it in Paris years ago, when I was travelling across Europe for the first time; I have a photo of it in front of the Eiffel Tower. I hardly found it captivating but there was enough here to cause me to read to the very end. I was still wondering, even then. ( )