He's back!
From 1993 to 2016, Zoran Živković wrote twenty-two novels, roughly one novel a year. Years have elapsed since his last novel, The Image Interpreter, and many thought that was it - no more novels forthcoming from the Serbian man of letters.
But here we are today and Zoran Živković, age seventy-three, has given us a new novel, number twenty-three - The White Room.
In many ways, The White Room
is special. One prime reason: the novel's protagonist and first-person
narrator is none other than Zoran Živković himself. And on the first
pages of The White Room, crisis is at hand. After eating supper
alone (so strange, Ivana should have been home by now) and an hour
completely absorbed in reading Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language,
Zoran Živković sits in his fifth floor Belgrade apartment off Mihajlo
Pupin Boulevard and realizes (gulp) Ivana, the lady he's been living
with these past two years, is missing.
What in the world
happened to Ivana? Zoran reflects: Ivana left the apartment after giving
him a quick kiss, smile and wave goodbye at about 5:30. Drat! In his
crush to prepare for his evening creative writing class he didn't take
the time to ask Ivana where she was going. Ivana, in turn, knew he was
pressed for time and simply left without a word. And now there he is,
nearly 11:00 at night with no phone call, text message or email from
Ivana and he's ready to hit the panic button.
What to do? Of
course, there's one and only one sensible thing to do - call the police.
Zoran calls and is put on the line with a Senior Inspector Sanja
Mrvaljević. The inspector asks a list of specific questions, a bit too
many for Zoran's liking (it's no time to be asking him about a
new novel!), and Inspector Mrvaljević tells him she'll call as soon as
she has news.
Zoran frames his story thusly. And what makes this
novel truly remarkable is his distinctive authorial voice, a
combination Roald Dahl charming and Jorge Luis Borges fabulist, all
within the tradition of Middle-European Gogol/Bulgakov/Kafka fantastica.
Fans of the author are in for a series of pleasant surprises - a
number of familiar themes are given a further spin, a new Escher loop,
an added twist on what it means to write metaphysical fantasy. There's
way too many curves, swerves, wonders and surprises for me to divulge
anything more about arc of plot, thus I'll take an immediate shift to
note a batch of motifs and happenings -
LITERARY LINK
In Compendium of the Dead, second book of Zoran's The Papyrus Trilogy, Inspector Dejan Lukić exchanges reflections with a young lady in the police lab on José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions.
Saramago's classic revolves around death as both a physical fact and a
deeply rooted social and cultural phenomenon, themes that tie into
evolving events in Compendium of the Dead.
Recall Zoran is reading Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language,
a novel that's a whodunnit where there's a fluid crossover between
characters in a novel and real life people. Likewise, Binet's work ties
in with unfolding happenings here. We're well to keep this French novel
in mind when reading The White Room. If you haven’t actually read The Seventh Function of Language, then simply familiarizing yourself with the novel's basic facts will be enough.
INTERNET INDIGESTION
As
if Olympic sprinters hearing the starting gun, there's off: Zoran and
Inspector Mrvaljević begin a furious flurry of cell phone and email
exchanges. Oh, yes, Zoran's cell phone keeps ringing and he keeps
receiving links to videos Ivana sends one after the other. But, but,
but...right from the start, a decided oddness creeps in.
The
first piece of oddness: Ivana sends him a link to a video and Zoran
watches in stunned disbelief at Ivana in the jungle. “She had a large
taupe purse in her left hand while wielding a black umbrella in her
right, as if clearing a path through the jungle with a machete.” The
video clip ends with the kicker: “Finally arriving, she stopped, turned
back and looked at the camera positioned high above her, as if she
somehow knew that it was right there. For several moments she just
smiled, then waved at me with the umbrella handle. Then she pressed on.”
How
is this possible? And Ivana is dressed the same way as she was when she
left the apartment! Predictably, Inspector Mrvaljević bombards Zoran
with a list of questions. The video clips from Ivana continue and the
strangeness becomes progressively stranger.
All this makes for
lively reading but poor Zoran, he's forced to deal with all the bizarre
madness as a man of seventy-three. He forever attempts to calm himself
down. 'I was aware that I dare not fall into the trap spoken of in the
Chinese proverb: 'If you’re expecting a horseman, you have to be very
careful not to mistake your heartbeat for the beat of a horse’s hoofs.'"
HUMOR THROUGHOUT
During
one of his initial conversations with Inspector Mrvaljević, Zoran
suggests the possibility of kidnap and blackmail. The good Inspector
retorts, "If that were so, the blackmailers would already have called.
Besides, Professor Živković, the rich are kidnapped. Don’t get me wrong,
but those would be some really naïve kidnappers if they hoped to get
any sort of ransom from a Serbian writer.”
Ah, a line worthy of
Mikhail Bulgakov or Nikolai Gogal, two of Zoran's favorite writers,
writers he learned a great deal from in his writing of Middle-European
fantastica fiction.
PREPOSTEROUS!
As impossible as it might
seem, a second Ivana pops up. Does Ivana have a doppelgänger? And this
is only the beginning as the swirl of impossibilities forever increases.
My goodness, it's as if Zoran and the entire Serbian police force have
been swept up in one of those Escher illustrations.
And speaking
of doppelgängers, when Zoran takes a walk outside in the freezing
cold, there's these curious lines: “I nodded a greeting to my neighbor who
was returning from a walk with his excessively obese Belgian shepherd,
which was dragging him by the leash. He smiled at me as if apologizing
for the dog.” Hmm...did Zoran (author of The White Room) include a cameo appearance of himself in his own novel? If so, that would be a truly unique Escher loop!
NOVEL REDUX
What's
frazzled Zoran to think when he learns the police have hidden cameras
covering all of Belgrade – and even place hidden cameras in his very own
apartment? Echoes of Hidden Camera. Also, echoes of The Papayrus Trilogy when the National Security Agency swings into action. Part of the delight in reading The White Room will be glimpsing snatches of Zoran's oeuvre.
HEARTFELT
Zoran writes: “With its specific humor of the paranoid, Hidden Camera
inaugurated another pivotal motif: the idea of art and love as our
ultimate line of defense against mortality. Eros and Thanatos perform an
intricate dance in this novel. Without humor, its choreography would be
too macabre, not, as seemed to me far more proper, a delicate ballet."
With The White Room,
not only do we have the dance of Eros and Thanatos but there's also a
very personal merging of heart and mind, of inspiration and the creative
process, a moving portrait of an author's vision of his own life and
writing.
Serbian author Zoran Živković, born 1948
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