A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Eastern European Literature Series) (original 1976; edition 2001)

A collection of seven sparse tales about the dark comedies of life in the Comintern, and how revolutions devour their own children, as Saturn did. Bitterly mocking these cruel moments of fate. Read them all in one sitting, after bedtime, and will stay with me long after. ( )

I've had this book since the 1980s, when I bough a series edited by Philip Roth called Writers from the Other Europe, and I decided to read it now for the Reading Globally theme read on Turkey and the Balkans, since the author (at the time he wrote the book) was a Yugoslav; now I suppose he would be considered a Serbian. On the surface, the book, billed as a short novel but really a series of stories connected by theme and occasionally by characters, is not about Yugoslavia, as all but one of the stories take place in revolutionary Russia and in its aftermath of the 1930s Stalinist show trials, but it obliquely sheds light on the kind of darkness that has fallen on all too many people and places, not only in the 20th century but also, as the chapter/story "Dogs and Books" makes clear, in medieval and other times.

The chapters/stories are essentially condensed biographies of fictional characters portrayed so vividly they could be real historical characters. Eachis involved in some way in the revolution, and each ultimately falls victim of the 1930s purges. The fascination of the book lies in Kiš's writing,both classically descriptive and modern, his ability to characterize these people, portray the insanity of the Stalinist system, and occasionally make the reader laugh. (The medieval story deals with the inquisition and pogroms against Jews.) In the introduction to my edition, Joseph Brodsky writes, "Only the names here are fictitious. The story, unfortunately, is absolutely true; one would wish it were the other way around." I will be looking for more of Kiš's work.

Danilo Kis is someone whom I have wanted to read ever since I heard Susan Sontag share her admiration for him in an interview several years ago. This novel, really a collection of short stories whose characters are thematically interwoven over space and time, details a series of lives as they encounter revolutionary movements, and how those revolutions have irrevocably changed the lives of the people involved. Being a Yugoslav, Kis' primary interest might have been the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, but the story set in the fourteenth-century shows the universality of Kis' concern. Regardless of setting, each of the stories is set against a mental landscape of prisons and human abattoirs where suffering and horror are par for the course. Kis uses a lyrical, detached style which softens and distances itself from the horror we know is occurring, creating a kind of "litterature verite," full of horrible whimsy, making the stories irresistible to read.

He is deserving of a bigger audience in both Europe and the United States. ( )

You can read this book as a description of the East Europe history (the reviews usually focus on this point), but you can also read it as a collection of stories with characters crossing their paths between them in an almost magical style. Good stories, great descriptions of the characters, their personal story and their failure or success in life.

Very well written, It is a must read, specially if you like (or are curious about) the east europe style. ( )