Zoran Živković acknowledges the complexity in Escher's Loops requires a very attentive and patient reader. The Serbian author goes on to say, "I tried to do in fiction what Escher did in his paradoxical weird drawings."
Indeed, we read about men and women along with the stories those men and women tell about men and women and the stories those men and women tell about men and women and the stories those men and women tell, all swirling, looping, stepping and interlocking as if alternately in an Escher tessellation or Escher spiral or walking on an Escher stairway. Fortunately, we don't have to keep names straight as characters are identified strictly by occupation - several from the list: lawyer, dentist, mailman, undertaker, butcher.
In terms of structure, Escher's Loops is 350-pages divided into four parts: The First Loop, The Second Loop, The Third Loop and The Fourth Loop. Each loop contains nine chapters. The Second Loop is longer than The First Loop, The Third Loop is longer than the Second Loop and, at 175-pages, The Fourth Loop comprises half the book; in other words, The Fourth Loop is exactly the same length as The First Loop, The Second Loop and The Third Loop combined. I suspect you can guess why there's good reason for the progressively longer length of each successive loop. That's right - elements from the previous loop or loops are reintroduced and recombined as we move through the loops.
Does this sound like a good bit of mathematical precision? Yes, of course, it does. However, let me quickly add, each and every story in Escher's Loops contains the simplicity and charm found in the author's other novels. By way of example, we can begin by taking a look at the actual stories within the first chapters of The First Loop.
Chapter 1: A surgeon is about to enter an operating room where he’s urgently needed but halts in front of the double glass door. A powerful memory roots him to the spot. Those who know something of the surgeon’s life would assume he is recalling the one stain on his career - years ago, in this very operating room, he left a pair of surgical tweezers inside a young woman. However, this is not the case. The surgeon is recalling a much less dramatic incident: despite the fact he hates going to weddings, he attended a colleague’s wedding where the ceremony was delayed due to the absence of the priest. An uneasy tension pervaded the church until, in her agitation, the bride stamped her foot on the stone floor. All fell silent and the bride turned and glared at him, a glare the surgeon interpreted as a military order. He nearly ran to the back of the church where he discovered the priest alone in his office standing straight at attention, cue in hand, rooted to the spot next to a pool table. If he knew the priest better, he would have assumed the priest was recollecting the traumatic memory of being overcome by terrible stage fright during his first wedding ceremony. But this is not the case. The priest is recalling a much different memory.
Chapter 2: The priest’s memory: Our man of the cloth remembers an incident at a theater he attended regularly where he developed a keen interest in watching a particular actress. In the middle of a run of one play, the actress was struck dumb and stood motionless on the stage. The audience’s discomfiture at the unexplained gap was palpable. Suddenly, the priest popped up from his seat and began vigorously applauding. A moment thereafter, the audience joined in. The sound of the audience’s thundering applauds jolted the actress out of her trance and the play proceeded without a hitch. In the days thereafter, everyone assumed the actress’s momentary lapse was caused by the empty seat in the front row that evening. They supposed she was in a romantic relationship with a handsome young man who usually occupied the seat.
Chapter 3: But all were mistaken – what completely threw the actress off was recalling a traumatic memory: as a little girl she watched as firefighters fought a terrible blaze that engulfed a two-story house in her neighborhood. A terrified old woman appeared at a window in an attic. A ladder promptly swung over from one of the fire trucks and a beefy firefighter quickly climbed the ladder to haul the woman down, all to the cheers of the crowd. But then, amidst the flames, the firefighter climbed the ladder a second time, entered the window and rescued a parrot. Third time up and the tension mounts: there's a delay after he entered the attic. Finally, he emerged but halfway down the ladder the firefighter halted as if frozen. The crowd turned their heads away since the building was about to collapse in flame, meaning certain death for the firefighter. But the little girl started to sing. At that very instant, the firefighter snapped out of it and, just in the nick of time, quickly climbed down to safty. His fellow firefighters thought the little chest he was carrying down the ladder was to blame, a chest that prompted the firefighter to think back to an incident when he was a lighthouse keeper and discovered a mysterious chest. But the firefighters were wrong. It was an entirely different memory.
Clicking into the author's storytelling rhythm, we are not at all surprised when the next chapter begins with that fateful memory in the firefighter's past.
Let's pause here and recount a key idea behind Escher art: intricate fitting together and repetition of complex figures in elaborate patterns. By what I've noted above, one can easily detect several patterns emerging: characters stunned into recalling a powerful past memory, others' misattribution of the memory, and, as a literary grand finale, the memory leading into another story.
And this is only The First Loop! The Second Loop introduces sets of two people confined in a small space - to take one example: a lawyer and older gentleman wearing a Frosty the Snowman costume trapped in an elevator when the power goes out. What to do? Tell stories, of course! And the stories in The Second Loop include men and women from The First Loop pausing to engage in conversations with God.
The Third Loop both introduces new characters and cycles back to men and women now familiar to a reader. Additionally, two new twists are added: suicide attempts and the appearance of an elderly woman in a green coat and matching pillbox hat and shoes who has her own tales to tell of attempted suicide. Finally, in The Fourth Loop, we have the characters reappearing in different roles and unexpected activities and more generous helpings of Zoran Živković storytelling magic so imaginative it boarders on the impossible, reminding a reader of the art of - of course, M.C. Escher!
Serbian author Zoran Živkovic, born 1948
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