The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš

 

Internationally acclaimed Serbian author Danilo Kiš and his family lived through some of the harshest and nightmarish years of the twentieth century. His best-known books are the novel Hourglass and two collections of short stories: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and the collection under review. All nine tales in The Encyclopedia of the Dead are stunning, highly literary and deeply moving. But rather than offer observations of a general nature, I'll focus on the title piece since my heart softened and became progressively more tender with each sentence - nay, I'll go further: in all the many works of fiction I've read over the years, I've not encountered one more heartfelt.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE DEAD
During his visit to Sweden at the invitation of the Institute for Theater Research, one evening following a performance of August Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, the narrator's host escorts him to the Royal Library. It's nearly midnight and the building is closed but no matter - his host, Kristina Johansson, flashes a special pass to the disgruntled guard at the door permitting him entry. At this point Mrs. Johanssen bids her guest goodnight, leaving him to conduct his visitation solo.

What follows leads a reader to suspect this twenty-five page tale of Danilo Kiš might be more akin to Borges dreamtiger than Balzac realism since the library strikes the narrator as a dungeon, the guard a Cerberus and each of the rooms houses books arranged alphabetically - after visits to the A, B, C and D rooms, following a premonition, the narrator breaks into a run, wherein we read: "Agitated and out of breath, I arrived at the letter M and with a perfectly clear goal in mind opened one of the books. I had realized - perhaps I had read about it somewhere - that this was the celebrated Encyclopedia of the Dead."

The first thing he sees is the text's one and only illustration, exactly the same one he keeps on his desk, a photograph of his father taken in 1936 immediately following his discharge from military service with his father's name and the years 1910-1979 in parenthesis underneath. And to think his father died just weeks prior to his Sweden trip. One big reason he took this visit in the first place was to escape his grief, a futile gesture, he admits, since travel doesn't help - we bear our grief within ourselves.

I wish I could mail a copy of this book to everyone reading my review so the story could be read in its entirety. Since this is not possible, I'll shift to commenting on particular passages as a way of spotlighting the actual words of Danilo Kiš:

"When I saw that I might go on reading until dawn and be left without any concrete trace of what I had read for either me or my mother, I decided to copy out several of the most important passages and make a kind of summary of my father's life."

Isn't that what we all do with the loved ones in our life that have passed on? We assemble our memories into a tapestry of scenes, some vivid, others that fade around the edges, some other that are difficult to bring into focus and remain blurs, creating our own mini version of the Encyclopedia.

"What makes the Encyclopedia unique (apart from its being the only existing copy) is the way it depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes - the multitude of details that make up a human life."

This is precisely why biographies are critically important and are frequently bestsellers. Herodotus writes his highly readable, entertaining and insightful Histories, however with Plutarch and Suetonius there is a giant step forward in appreciating the details of a single human life. And again beginning with Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson such appreciation is brought more in accord with modern sensibilities.

"The only condition - something I grasped at once, for inclusion in The Encyclopedia of the Dead is that no one whose name is recorded here may appear in any other encyclopedia."

Ah, Danilo Kiš recognizes those people living ordinary lives, so called, have their own dramas worthy of being recorded and appreciated, even honored and revered.

"The sea he glimpsed, for the first time, at twenty-five, from the slopes of the Velebit on April 28, 1935, would reside within him - a revelation, a dream sustained for some forty years with undiminished intensity, a secret, a vision never put into words."

The Encyclopedia explicates not only the facts of his father's life, but equally or even more importantly, his fathers dreams and visions. In this way, the Encyclopedia expands out to the vistas of imaginative literature, most appropriate since Danilo himself is a spinner of language chimeras we term fiction.

"By the same token, and in keeping with the logic of their program (that there is nothing insignificant in a human life, no hierarchy of events), they entered all our childhood illnesses - mumps, tonsillitis, whooping cough, rashes - as well as a bout of lice and my father's lung trouble."

The Encyclopedia does not overlook or thoughtlessly cast aside those all-consuming bouts of pain and illness. Thus, Danilo's Encyclopedia even outpaces a conventional biography.

"For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings. That is why it records every action, every thought, every creative breath, every spot height in the survey, every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a brick from the ruins."

That's why I have never been attracted to history textbooks - too general. What textbook on twentieth century history would begin to document the daily suffering of my own father who grew up in an orphanage, hit the Normandy beach the first day of D-Day and toiled as a shift worker at a chemical factory for thirty years?

"He would curse God, heaven, earth, the Russians, the Americans, the Germans, the government, and all those responsible for granting him such a miserable pension after he had slaved a lifetime, but most of all he cursed television, which, insolent to the point of insult, filled the void of his evenings by bringing into the house the grand illusion of life."

Quite the telling observation by a sensitive literary artist - as torturous, humiliating and demanding as his father's life was over the years, the biggest insult dad must deal with is that cultural cesspool, the ever-present television with its unending stream of drivel.



“Thanks to suffering and madness, I have had a finer, richer life than any of you, and I wish to go to my death with dignity, as befits the great moment after which all dignity and majesty cease. Let my body be my ark and my death a long floating on the waves of eternity." - Danilo Kiš


Danilo Kiš, 1935-1989