Garden, Ashes: A Novel (Eastern European Literature Series) [Paperback]

The collapse of the USSR was the best thing that ever happened to American and western European opera houses. In a parallel fashion, the fall of the walls between East and West has enabled us to 'discover' a wealth of literature - some of it suppressed previously - of unexpected brilliance. Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis (1935-1989) is a prime example.

"Garden, Ashes" is anything but a 'novel' in the usual English-literature sense. Even the most perspicacious reader will be hard pressed to assemble a plot from it, or to impose any chronology on it. The jumble of childhood memories, the syntax of dreams, the exciting confusion of an old photo album in which the pictures have fallen out of order and lost their labels -- those are the compositional rules of Garden, Ashes. Yes, it's possible to declare, on the book cover, that Kis has written a semi-autobiographical tale of his childhood in World War II Yugoslavia, with his demented father and family, and at times the child narrator reveals his age - nine, eleven - and attaches names to his people, his own being Andi Scham. Yes, the family is oddly endangered, forced to flee, afflicted with poverty and hunger. But no, this is not another Holocaust tale, or if it is, the boy Andi didn't experience it as such. For him, it was an adventure toward a heroic deed, the mastery of Death, the ability to control and indefinitely postpone Death - his own death, of course - through fantasy and fantastical redefinition of all perceptions. Don't expect to be able to articulate where the boy Andi emerged as the Author Danilo; they are simultaneous. Memory for both is the shadow of onrushing Death. Eleven-year-old Andi already mourns for the past he will remember when he sits down to write as thirty-year-old Kis; near the end of the book, he says: "And so, gradually and quite unconsciously, my mother poisoned me with her reminiscences, nurturing in me a passion for old photographs and mementos, for soot and patina. A victim of this sentimental education, I yearned along with her for the days that would never come back, for ethereal journeys and faded landscapes..." Soot and patina! That's a succinct description of the 'affect' of this lovely, agonizing meditation on a boy's realization of mortality, of the sluggish brevity of life.

I have no idea how splendid Kis's prose may be in his native language, but in this translation by William Hannaher it comes out as lyric poetry as fine as that of Nabokov or McEwan. Read it aloud to yourself, if you have the time. Trust me, death and starvation notwithstanding, this is an exhilarating book, a paean to vivid perceptions.

It's heaven hell and purgatory - that is the three distinct metaphorical division of the book. you will find that sometimes bad is better than good and it is better to live in dream than in reality. The grey area between dream and reality in this book is unlimited. The author talks about his father - sometimes his father is like Don Quixote and on other occasions his father is the little tyrant without the crown. It is very close to a modern day Don Quixote. The transalation by William Hannaher is great and worth reading. I will recommend reading this book

The Holocaust, in the form of quick references to ghettos, cattle cars, and death camps, is in the background of GARDEN, ASHES. But the content of this book is dominated by the perceptions and sensibilities of Andreas, a young boy whose family life is abnormal because his brilliant father slips into a pathetic madness.

In writing this story, Kis endows Andreas with "...a sick hypersensitivity" that "turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo..."

Meanwhile, Edward, Andreas's father, has this to say about himself. "There are people... who are born unhappy and to make other unhappy...They are titans without the power of titans, dwarf-titans whose only greatness was given them in the form of a rigid dose of sensitivity that dissolves their trifling strength...They follow their star, their sick sensibility, borne along by titanic plans and intentions, but then break like waves against the rocky banks of triviality. The height of cruelty allotted them in lucidity..."

To explore the interaction between this hypersensitive and impressionable boy and this amazing yet doomed father, Kis basically follows an ordinary developmental timeline. Here, Andreas discusses with his amazing lyricism such ordinary boyhood issues as his mother, childish sexuality, biblical stories, and the interaction of his extended family. At the same time, Andreas begins and ends his narration with his fear of death. Death, he initially hopes to outwit or outrun. But he is eventually able to manage his fear through narrative and literature and seems to breakout when he is able to tell his mother, "I have written a poem."

Andreas and his father are vivid and memorable characters. Even so, this fascinating novel, which presents the perceptions of an intense and brilliant child, is almost allegorical in style. GARDEN, ASHES is fine work but not recommended to anyone looking for plot-driven fiction.