Words Are Something Else (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

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About Words Are Something Else

Product Description David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed largely outside the canon of Serbian literature, have influenced a generation of Balkan writers. This collection gathers Albahari's best and most important stories, moving from an early preoccupation with the family and Central European culture to metafictional searches for the roots of his identity. From Publishers Weekly "One false move gives rise to a whole story," says the "writer," the protagonist of one of the 27 very short stories in this debut collection from Serbian writer Albahari. His stories comes in a jumble of styles, from sensitive portraits of his family and the rueful nostalgia to surreal struggles with man-sized insects and fantasies of Godzilla and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance mingling with the populace of his Serbian town. They are interspersed with monochromatic vignettes illustrating tired banalities of everyday life and an essay in the style of a shopping list. For Albahari, momentous events and the most insignificant ones are fair game for his ruminations. His concerns are the timeless questions of truth, loneliness and the human condition, and his personal identity, as a writer and as a Jew, is a prominent theme. Despite a pervasive bitterness, Albahari pushes his fruitful wit and invention to some delightful limits. Although his focus is largely autobiographical, he is never satisfied to rely on a single authorial voice and instead creates an eclectic mix of alter egos, some more developed than others. The best of these works are capable of great depth ("...the Death of Ruben Rubenovic..." is particularly moving), but a number of them lead only to cul-de-sacs, the endgame of a false move. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The latest in Northwestern University's excellent series of writings from Eastern Europe, this is the first appearance in English of the prose of Albahari, a Serbian of Jewish ancestry. Albahari foregoes the common ideological or ethnic identification often associated with writers from Eastern Europe, especially the nations of the former Yugoslavia; unlike writers of the Socialist-Realism school, he does not take on the Serbian national problem as the center of his writings. Instead, his stories take postwar Yugoslavia as their setting and focus on family, relationship, aging, loneliness, and death, exploring the impact of totalitarianism on individuals and society. This is especially evident in his treatment of Ruban Rebenovic, a former textile salesman whose life and death are woven into the fabric of several stories. Strongly recommended for the informed lay reader and the scholar of Central and Eastern European literature.?Frank R. Levstik, Kentucky Dept. for Libs. & Archives, Frankfort Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review "David Albahari cooks up a heady stew of cast iron and remembrance in this selection of masterly short fiction. . . . [W]riting as good as Albahari's goes CNN one better--he gives us news that stays news." -- Boston Globe "Each of Albahari's stories is a literary experiment. After reading them, one is left with a lingering effect and a wish to go back and reread the tales in order to ponder further the mystery of the creative process of writing." -- World Literature Today "David Albahari writes in the rich Balkan tradition of urbanity and multiculturalism . . . the stories are less about the particularities of place than about the universal riddles of language . . . playful and good-natured, recalling the metafictions of Robert Coover and Albahari's countryman Danilo Kis." -- New York Times Book Review "A masterly collection . . . accomplished and resonant tales: powerful evidence of the ermergence of yet another important Eastern European writer--and a pleasurable and rewarding surprise for American reade