A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
Danilo Kiš fills his reticulate novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich with interlacing personal narratives, scattered excurses, conflicting geopolitical histories, and detail as broad and difficult as the history of the Soviet Union itself. Although much of this detail, while impressive, was obviously lost on me, it was the power of his unique style that arrested me most. He creates a novel which is most definitely not a collection of individual short stories, but, rather, a collection of fictional and non-fictional accounts of one story, a similar fate (some more deserving, some less deserving), each account willing to defer the existence of a final account, a final truth, onto another account. This continual reference sometimes points in the direction of other accounts located in Kiš's novel, sometimes to historical dates and places (which, to the lay reader, such as myself, are often indistinguishable from fictional dates and places), sometimes to other works (The Gulag Archipelago, Borges, Hope Against Hope). Alexsandar Hemon refers to this style of continual reference as "a link in a network of leitmotivs and in a larger network of the historic experience of the Soviet revolution."
In "The Sow That Eats Her Farrow", Kiš writes of Gould Vershoyle, a suspected saboteur who has recently emigrated to Ireland, and who, under the impression that he is to fix an onboard radio, is coerced onto a Soviet ship, the 'Ordzhonikidze.' This tale is one of seven; seven of one. In the following tale, "The Mechanical Lions," mention is briefly made of Vershoyle's capture in passing. The tales remain seemingly distinct and unrelated but are bound together in their use of the same historical event (Vershoyle boarding the Soviet cargo ship). This similarity of historical subjects between two seemingly distinct stories wouldn't be altogether noteworthy if it wasn't for the fact that Kiš undermines this "historical fact's" privileged presence. That is, he refuses to take for granted that it is exclusively in the way that it has been revealed to us -- instead its truth is an event, an event that involves a play between disclosure AND concealedness, not a proof through correspondence. Kiš removes such exclusivity to pure presence by casting doubt on his own account of his own story. Kis writes, "some of the sources," refering in this case to his own previous story, "are rightly suspect...[yet] even if the cited documents exude a certain unreliability...[they] nevertheless deserve to be recorded."
Here we see Kiš questioning his own authority, his own story's credibility, his own claim to authorial intention -- and in doing so, he hands the meaning over to the conversation that is had between the reader and the text... to the truth of the event of reading.
In much the way Kiš makes room for the disclosed as well as the concealed aspect of the truths in the stories, and the room he makes for the text and the reader to converse, he also makes way for the role of narrative in historical accounts. He starts "The Mechanical Lions" admitting that one of the two characters are historical, the "other person -- unhistorical though no less real" will play the largest role in the story. The 'unhistorical' narrative creation enters into a similar dialogue with the historical account.
This hermeneutic, circular style is what made A Tomb for Boris Davidovich one the richest books I've had the pleasure of reading recently.
