Celebrate!
A novel to take your breath away.
Similar to a number of Zoran Živković's shorter fictions, The Five Wonders of the Danube is a “mosaic," that is, a series of seemingly freestanding stories brought together into a cohesive whole in the final chapter.
And what a novel. A fabulist’s sensibility combined with simplicity, clarity and charm, a work of impossible magic that lives at the midpoint between Italo Calvino and Roald Dahl. There’s good reason why a reader will encounter a sense of wonder many times over.
To share glimpses of Zoran Živković's wizardry in action, I’ll shift to the five tales themselves:
First Wonder: Black Bridge, Regensburg: Early one rainy Sunday morning, the guard assigned to the bridge spots a large painting mysteriously fastened to the bridge itself. Soon thereafter, a string of higher-ups come on the scene. A series of questions are posed: Who put such a painting up on the bridge? And how and why was such a feat accomplished? This striking tale opens up many philosophical issues centered around the nature of art, as per the following quartet:
Site-specific art is a work created to exist in one and only one locale. The painting fastened to the bridge most certainly qualifies as such a case. The bridge authorities, the police and other organizations send teams of men up on ladders to remove the painting, but without success. After much effort, there’s a recognition that the only place where this large painting can exist as an artwork is its current spot up on the bridge. It doesn’t appear any of the men or women (yes, a young lady with long blonde hair from Military Security pops up - nice touch, Zoran!) are aware of the nature of site-specific art but whether they know it or not, that's precisely what this painting is.
The bridge guard’s first survey of the painting; “The painting seemed to invoke this very moment, an impression that was reinforced by the flock of river gulls flying in all directions. They were depicted so faithfully that it seemed the shrieking was coming from the painting too.” The exact merging of painting with background echoes those works of surrealist René Magritte. Yet this is only the painting on first viewing – with subsequent viewings by the guard and others, as if by strokes of alchemy, the painting’s subject changes, depicting the bridges featured in the novel’s future chapters.
Critical theorist Walter Benjamin speaks of an artwork’s “aura” – a force arising from the work's uniqueness. Each of the officials is struck by the painting’s quality and recognizes the value of viewing such an original painting versus the reproductions they currently live with. In keeping with our modern world’s stress on art linked with economics, these same officials also see the painting as a potential cash cow. Thus the ongoing conflict of objective aesthetic experience on one side and self-interest and ownership on the other.
As a kind of grand finale, the sea gulls that have been inserting themselves into the scene periodically throughout the morning take a predominant part in revealing the truer nature of the distinctive bridge painting. One way of interpreting this performance (ah, a work of performance art, after all!) is to gauge how we view the painting at different points as we continue reading. Remarkably, via the storyteller’s craft, the painting on the bridge of Regensburg metamorphoses in extraordinary ways following an encounter with all the various images and happenings in each ensuing chapter, from the Yellow Bridge in Vienna to the Blue Bridge in Novi Sad.
Second Wonder: Yellow Bridge, Vienna: Five people are crossing the bridge – two going left, three to the right. Although they are spread out and each one is unaware of the others, all five suddenly come to a complete stop. The halting lasts but a moment and all five resume their crossing. Why?
We follow the events preceding the bridge incident where we discover each of the five individuals – a theater prompter, a hit man, a prostitute, a book thief and a nun – has a brush with the fantastic and surreal. To take but one example, the hit man observes a chess game taking place on the bridge where a man playing black has regular black pieces but he’s playing against sixteen ruby-eyed white mice standing on their hind legs on various squares, each wearing little white coats with the name of the piece written in black letters on the back while the king and queen don yellow crowns.
Third Wonder: Red Bridge, Bratislava: For two homeless men, Issac and Fyodor, literature and the arts take center stage: Issac carves small figures in wood and Fyodor reads the novels of Dostoyevsky as well as penning his own manuscript. And when the fire of inspiration unites with a living fire, there’s a transformation nothing short of miraculous, bestowing expanded meaning to the words of Mikhail Bulgakov that “manuscripts don’t burn.”
Fourth Wonder: White Bridge, Budapest: An elderly gentleman, a famous composer and conductor, is on the bridge and reflects back on a particular incident years ago involving a young girl and suicide. The story winds through his memory of the past until he is overcome by a feeling of ecstasy in the present moment where “Nothing was more important right now than the music he was finally receiving without a sacrifice in return. He gave himself over completely to listening.” Without sacrifice? The White Bridge of Budapest assumes the role of teacher to provide him with a deeper comprehension of the profound connection between sacrifice and bliss.
Fifth Wonder: Blue Bridge, Novi Sad: Zoran Živković provides his own unique twist on that famous Zen koan: Does a dog have the Buddha nature? Like the Danube itself, this concluding chapter flows through Regensburg, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Novi Sad to capture images and motifs catapulting the tale to worlds beyond, even to the chimerical kingdom of authorial vision. What do I mean by that? You will have to read for yourself to find out.
Serbian author Zoran Živkovic, born 1948
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