Montreal Gazette

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE

Yugoslavia’s breakup informs Josip Novakovich’s stories in Ex- Yu

- IAN MCGILL IS ianmcgilli­s2@gmail.com Twitter.com/IanAMcGill­is

The title catches your eye. Looking at first glance like something you’d see on an airport luggage sticker, it’s in fact a shorthand for “former Yugoslavia,” a clunky constructi­on that came into use in the 1990s when the world suddenly needed a handy way to refer collective­ly to all the new states that came out of that federation’s violent breakup. Clearly, then, Ex- Yu ( Esplanade/ Véhicule Press, 207 pp, $ 19.95) is not an idly named story collection. By now we’ve all grown accustomed to giving those new states their proper names, but Josip Novakovich wants to make sure we don’t forget what went into their making.

Novakovich, who teaches creative writing at Concordia University, was born in Croatia and spent much of his adulthood in the United States before taking Canadian citizenshi­p; he entered most Canadian readers’ radar in 2013 when he was named a finalist for the biannual Man Booker Internatio­nal Prize, a body- of-work accolade whose only Canadian winner, up till now, is Alice Munro. The overnight knowledge that a writer of such repute was among us came as a chastening wake- up call: we had some catching up to do, and there’s no better place to start than his 10th book, Ex- Yu. The 12- story collection spans a half- century of ( former) Yugoslavia­n history and showcases the author’s unique meld of harrowing subject matter, philosophi­cal and ethical inquiry and black humour.

Not surprising­ly given the stories’ settings, war and its aftershock­s are constants in Ex- Yu. White Moustache looks back to the Second World War and a place where, if you were a young male, “you couldn’t be a pacifist or a conscienti­ous objector (…) you’d end up in whatever army came to town first.” Acorns skips ahead 40 years and follows the progress of Ana, a Croatian-American who goes to occupied Bosnia as a UN translator. She naively believes her outsider status will give her immunity but soon realizes she’s among aggressors who have figured out that the outside world lacks the will to stop them.

Real events loom large, as in Dutch Treat, which revolves around the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, when thousands of Bosnian Muslims supposedly under the protection of a Dutchled UN contingent were killed by the Bosnian Serb army. The story follows two participan­ts in that atrocity as their paths cross years later in New York — one a former volunteer member of the disgraced Dutch force, the other a survivor who avoided death by hiding under the bodies of his neighbours and now makes a meagre living as a flower vendor. A fragile acquaintan­ce is struck up, with tangled motives on both sides.

We’re conditione­d to seeing such stories structured as redemption tales, but Novakovich, here and elsewhere, has something quite different in mind, pulling off an ending that refuses any easy resolution­s.

The United States figures often in Ex- Yu, and its role takes many forms, from welcoming haven to indifferen­t behemoth to complicit oppressor. In Be Patient, set in poverty- stricken 1950s Croatia, children are inoculated against the measles with an American- supplied vaccine, but something goes terribly wrong. When the condition of many of those children quickly begins to deteriorat­e, there would appear to be no way out of this scenario save for sheer despair. But Novakovich manages to end with an image that should have even the hardest- hearted of readers reaching for the Kleenex.

Novakovich’s comic touch, often so subtle that only a second reading reveals it, lies as much in playful structure as in content. After having White Moustache’s narrator express a healthy skepticism regarding the existence of ghosts, Novakovich then sets the story up so that a third party goes on to relate, yes, a compelling ghost story. Smoking and drinking — indulging, rationaliz­ing, struggling to quit, falling back into bad habits — pop up time and again, as does dry commentary on everyday life in the old Eastern Bloc. (“Oh, thank you! It’s so rare in socialism to get a compliment.”)

Novakovich also shows an

almost Tarantino- esque interest in the theme of revenge, with several stories predicated on the possibilit­y that villains, both domestic- scale and worldhisto­ric, just might get their just deserts, and in grotesque ways. It’s a strategy taken to a kind of logical extreme with Self Medicated, in which we’re invited to speculate on the drug- addled thoughts of Slobodan Milosevic as the Serb leader stews in a cell during his trial in The Hague for war crimes.

If it’s not already obvious, we’re dealing here with a writer who will tackle whatever it takes to make a story work. All fiction writers worth their salt must sooner or later write a deathbed scene, and Novakovich rises gloriously to the challenge in When The Saints, about a man

done in by the discovery of thirdstage lung cancer. By the time his ultimate reckoning arrives, the man has already run the full emotional gamut, from acceptance to defiance and back again: “Now that he was sure he was dying, Davor began to feel not only tranquil, but also happy — so happy that he began to fear that he would lose these moments of beauty, that he could not hold on to them, and thus the fear of losing the glimpses of beauty transforme­d itself into a fear of death just when he thought he was completely beyond it.”

Ex- Yu is packed with such moments, and with images that can take your breath away. In Honey in the Carcase, a man wandering in a war- ravaged countrysid­e sees “heads of wheat bent in the field like contrite sin-

ners; nobody harvested them.” That same man, having seen more horrors than anyone should ever have to, takes solace in the creatures he has been tending to: “Bees fulfil the Old Testament through the perfection of their laws and the New Testament through the perfection of their love for the Queen bee, for whom every bee is willing to die. Ivan thought that even if he had never read the Bible, from studying his bees, he’d conclude that a rational God existed.” That’s the kind of passage that can justify a whole book, and like dozens of similar cases in Ex- Yu, it’s all the more powerful for not being imposed on the narrative with a heavy writerly hand but arrived at organicall­y within the story.

Now that he was sure he was dying, Davor began to feel not only tranquil, but also happy — so happy that he began to fear that he would lose these moments of beauty, that he could not hold on to them — from Ex- Yu, by Josip Novakovich.

 ?? ME LV I N B U K I E T ?? Josip Novakovich entered most Canadian readers’ radar in 2013 when he was named a finalist for the biannual Man Booker Internatio­nal Prize, whose only Canadian winner, up till now, is Alice Munro.
ME LV I N B U K I E T Josip Novakovich entered most Canadian readers’ radar in 2013 when he was named a finalist for the biannual Man Booker Internatio­nal Prize, whose only Canadian winner, up till now, is Alice Munro.
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