November 7, 2016
The characters in Novakovich’s excellent stories tend to be in extremis: people in the midst of war, or refugees escaping it, or veterans trying to forget it. His muscular prose and remarkable sense of place and history (both recent and somewhat distant) make for thrilling reading. What’s more surprising and impressive is the breadth of territory covered here. One story is set in Hungary in the 1950s; another follows a Dutchman named Martin Neeskens who worked for the U.N. during the Bosnian conflicts in the 1990s but now lives in New York. Another, set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, involves a clutch of international roommates, including two Russian émigrés, crammed into an apartment. Themes overlap, but each story presents its own unique world. In the title story, Jovan, a refugee from Croatia now living in Belgrade, reconnects with an old friend named Danko. The very act of mentally reopening that door is complex—painful and confusing and grotesquely humorous, but above all inescapable. “Smoke is the flavor of our memories,” Jovan says. Novakovich’s evocative stories leave echoes after reading.
November 1, 2016
A host of characters grapple with the legacy of war, religious obsessions, surreal instances of violence, and an enduring guilt in this collection by a writer who was born in Yugoslavia and now lives in Canada.Novakovich's (Shopping for a Better Country, 2012, etc.) new collection abounds with stories of displacement. Characters leave the countries in which they were born to seek their fortunes elsewhere; religious pilgrims suffer misadventures as they grapple with their own mortality; and people find themselves taking on the personality traits of those they encounter under bizarre circumstances. The aftermath of war--whether those that took place in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s or the second world war decades earlier--leaves a heavy mark on many, which sometimes manifests as realistic depictions of trauma and grief and sometimes ventures into the surreal and mystical. In "Dutch Treat," a former U.N. peacekeeper encounters the survivor of a massacre in Srebrenica years later in New York. The two engage in a wary back-and-forth, as the former peacekeeper is both overcome by guilt and begins to take on qualities of the other man's paranoia. That kind of strange obsessiveness lends many of these stories a welcome unpredictability, whether Novakovich is writing about a grieving family or a soccer hooligan who seeks to make amends for his role in a horrific act of revenge. And some of the observations made throughout the book are wonderfully succinct. In one story of an interpreter caught up in war, for example, Novakovich summarizes the protagonist's predicament neatly: "It seemed incongruous to Ana that these men would have childhood memories." In a different story, another character offers a more humanistic take on things, saying, "All we are is soul." The stories told here span the gulf between the two statements. These often haunting stories of violence, faith, and disconnection make for a memorable voyage into a number of unsettled minds.
COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
January 1, 2017
A man defends the design of a Soviet-style building by saying, Ugly can be beautiful if you look at it long enough, evoking the mood of this new collection of short stories by award-winning, Croatian-born writer Novakovich (The Art of Coughing, 2012). The line could also refer to the mental structures that Novakovich erects in each story. Throughout this collection, we meet rotting, uncouth, and destructive people who make morally questionable choices, as well as more nuanced, hopeful characters. There are those who experience religious awakenings and those who suffer losses of faith; those who carry on amid ghosts of the past. Some characters express patriotism, others disdain for their homeland. Lives are tossed about by circumstances beyond their control, like a hitchhiker's close call, a child's preventable suffering, and the unintended consequences of assuaging one's guilt. Novakovich inhabits his characters with a sensitive imagination, shaped by experiences in his youth of politically troubled Yugoslavia. There are parables rich in deep humor, love, and lessons of appreciation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)