Growing Up In A Fear Based Society
Early Sorrows (For Children and Sensitive Readers) by Danilo Kiš
A set of connected short stories by the acclaimed Serbian novelist and essayist.
abandoned_water_tower_ii_by_streetofearlysorrows
Never before translated into English, this collection of interconnected stories, originally published in Belgrade in 1969,
form the poignant, lightly fictionalized account of the acclaimed late novelist's boyhood in Yugoslavia. With a remarkable combination of affection, whimsy and wretchedness, these 19 lyrical, very short stories tell a recurring tale of spiritual innocence tainted by shame and the terror of life in hiding. In addition to his finesse with language and sensory detail, Kis succeeds at rendering a precocious child's struggle to comprehend the world. In the characteristic "The Game," a father hiding his Jewish origins is proud but unnerved when he catches his fair-haired son pretending to be a Jewish feather merchant, like the grandfather whom the boy has never seen. Frightened by the uncanny spectacle, the boy's gentile mother spins a bedtime tale that subtly informs the boy of racism and its mortal consequences. In each brief vignette, the boy contemplates his own disappearance and death, which he sees foreshadowed in his father's deportation to Auschwitz. Though its subtitle pitches the book to a relatively limited audience, Kis's slim work will touch vestigial nerves in most readers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. amazon
Danilo Kiš (Serbian Cyrillic: Данило Киш; 22 February 1935 - 15 October 1989) was a Serbian and Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian, member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. As a Jewish Serbian-Hungarian author and poet whose untimely death in 1990 left tragically unfinished one of the most complex literary oeuvres to emerge from Central and Eastern Europe, the influence of Borges runs very strong in his work, from the early Garden, Ashes to his masterpiece, a collection of stories entitled The Encyclopedia of the Dead. Indeed, Kis once remarked (in "A Lecture in Anatomy") that the literary genre known as the short story could be divided into two epochs: before Borges and After Borges. One such prominent work by Kiš was A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. This great anti-Stalinist book incorporates several Borgesian ideas, the most visible one being the inclusion of authentic medieval protocol on the workings of the Inquisition in the southern France among the stories dealing with persecutions in Stalinist concentration camps. Careful reading reveals many quite unbelievable similarities between the title story and the medieval one, showing perhaps that the Babelian library is indeed periodical as the old wizard imagined. . . . Some similarities with A Universal History of Infamy may be detected too, although A Tomb is written with a grim power which significantly outweighs the relaxed style of the early Borges.
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A set of connected short stories by the acclaimed Serbian novelist and essayist.
abandoned_water_tower_ii_by_streetofearlysorrows
Never before translated into English, this collection of interconnected stories, originally published in Belgrade in 1969,
form the poignant, lightly fictionalized account of the acclaimed late novelist's boyhood in Yugoslavia. With a remarkable combination of affection, whimsy and wretchedness, these 19 lyrical, very short stories tell a recurring tale of spiritual innocence tainted by shame and the terror of life in hiding. In addition to his finesse with language and sensory detail, Kis succeeds at rendering a precocious child's struggle to comprehend the world. In the characteristic "The Game," a father hiding his Jewish origins is proud but unnerved when he catches his fair-haired son pretending to be a Jewish feather merchant, like the grandfather whom the boy has never seen. Frightened by the uncanny spectacle, the boy's gentile mother spins a bedtime tale that subtly informs the boy of racism and its mortal consequences. In each brief vignette, the boy contemplates his own disappearance and death, which he sees foreshadowed in his father's deportation to Auschwitz. Though its subtitle pitches the book to a relatively limited audience, Kis's slim work will touch vestigial nerves in most readers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. amazon
Danilo Kiš (Serbian Cyrillic: Данило Киш; 22 February 1935 - 15 October 1989) was a Serbian and Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian, member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. As a Jewish Serbian-Hungarian author and poet whose untimely death in 1990 left tragically unfinished one of the most complex literary oeuvres to emerge from Central and Eastern Europe, the influence of Borges runs very strong in his work, from the early Garden, Ashes to his masterpiece, a collection of stories entitled The Encyclopedia of the Dead. Indeed, Kis once remarked (in "A Lecture in Anatomy") that the literary genre known as the short story could be divided into two epochs: before Borges and After Borges. One such prominent work by Kiš was A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. This great anti-Stalinist book incorporates several Borgesian ideas, the most visible one being the inclusion of authentic medieval protocol on the workings of the Inquisition in the southern France among the stories dealing with persecutions in Stalinist concentration camps. Careful reading reveals many quite unbelievable similarities between the title story and the medieval one, showing perhaps that the Babelian library is indeed periodical as the old wizard imagined. . . . Some similarities with A Universal History of Infamy may be detected too, although A Tomb is written with a grim power which significantly outweighs the relaxed style of the early Borges.
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