Northwestern University Press has a really intriguing lineup of titles in the Writings from an Unbound Europe collection. Recently, I acquired 7 of them and this is the first I've read.

This book was easy to slip into, but it was not easy to grasp. Half of the novel took the form of an interrogation. So the reader feels a pressure as these questions are fired at them. The tension mounts toward the end of the book, and luckily, is broken up throughout by a few humorous asides. The observations are all startlingly intelligent, and the details are exquisitely rendered.

I couldn't help but picture the shape of the hourglass in visualizing the novel. It feels like too much information is being forced through a constriction point. That constriction point is our narrator, and the ones feeding him the info are the interrogators. And since we never really move outside this relation, except by virtue of our narrator's descriptions, we are treated to vivid memories contained within the trickle of his recounting.

I was captivated by the entire book, though it did not rely on conventional storytelling, character development or plot. It offers a rich look at a slice of history from a quirky, but brilliant perspective. Definitely rereadable. ( )

(A postscripted prologue, for want of capturing the essence of a brilliant novel. While staying in New Belgrade I have assumed a Calvinoean posture, I've become a Baron of the Balcony, reading out on the terrace while life and family matters are debated down below. Last night wine was flowing swiftly and I broached the topic of Danilo Kis, who apparently is no longer regarded at the zenith of Serbian Letters. The fate of Belgrade's Jews was discussed at length, as were their Sephardic origins. There is a memorial at the camp of Sajmište, which is less than three miles from where I'm typing this. It does make one think. Now on to my inchoate efforts.)

One doesn't breeze through Hourglass. You have to creep along. You lose yourself. This doesn't make sense. Whose voice is this again? The reader retraces, finds clues. One starts again. Hourglass wasn't a novel I just could slash into whenever time allowed such.

Like most of Kis' work, Hourglass doesn't pulse with Balkan references. The sleepy plane it terrorizes owes its origins to the Dark Times of last Century. Freud's myths were made manifest in the growling barbarity of ideology and the technocratic novelty of Kafka's Penal Colony.

While being very demanding, Hourglass deserves my highest endporsement. ( )

A strange, abstract and beautiful novel, and a unique approach to holocaust literature. Kis' book uses a variety of literary techniques to build up a composite picture of Eduard, a secular jew in wartime Yugoslavia. There are oblique, almost abstract, accounts of his travels, dry retellings of his interviews by the authorities, question and answer narrative that veers fro the personal to the mundane to the shocking. Despite being short, it reminded me a little of James Joyce's Ulysses, but where Joyce's book internalized the narrative to turn the mundane into the epic, Kis does the opposite, transcribing the epic (the holocaust) in terms of Eduard's human thoughts and feelings. Many of Eduard's sufferings are mild, personal failures, barely presented as a result of persecution. Occasionally, though we get glimpses of the horror on a wider scale, such as lists of acquaintances who are dead or disappeared. A difficult book, in terms of both structure and content, but an excellent one.

With Kis we are as unable to pigeon-hole his writing style, genre and subject matter as with Vladimir Nabokov or Milorad Pavic. His ability to diversify his literary works and consistently to re-invent himself as an author is particularly evident in the yet adhesive collection of short stories, Encyclopedia of the Dead. Danilo Kis seamlessly records renderings of historical fiction from first century sorcerers to modern tales of Soviet conspiracy.

Often considered his greatest work, Kis has set Hourglass (Peshchanik) in the midst of World War II. Written larely as a barage of question and answers for a criminal investigation, Hourglass is a detailed description of the terror, both psychological and physical, which many endured at the hands of the Nazi-sympathetic leaders.

Kis shares his philosophical and moral struggle with two significant Russian authors - Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Sologub. The plight of man is his own baseness, sinfulness and stupidity. While Gogol-Chichikov attributes this plight arguably to Russia, or more precisely universal society, Sologub-Peredonov points his symbolist finger at specific neighbors. "No, my dear contemporaries," Sologub writes plainly, " it is of you that I have written my novel about the little demon...about you." Kis, however, in seeing the world "doomed to destruction" finds a single culprit. Using Icarus as a means of decoding mankind's problem of sin, Kis accepts his own culpability. Where are the proofs that man is heading for disaster? "Here gentlemen; here, dear sister, here. Look closely, I am pointing at my heart."

Although the Hourglass is often tedious in its preciseness, pedantic in detail, it consistently reverberates with a poignancy in turn painful to read and elevated in its humanity. ( )

I wish I could give a better summary or description of what this book was about, but it eludes me. I read it in Paris years ago, when I was travelling across Europe for the first time; I have a photo of it in front of the Eiffel Tower. I hardly found it captivating but there was enough here to cause me to read to the very end. I was still wondering, even then. ( )