The Lute and the Scars

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There are various ways of imagining a new era of world literature. My favorite is to remember the story of Danilo Kiš.

His outside story is the devastated history of Central Europe. He was born in 1935. In 1944, his father, who was Jewish, was taken to Auschwitz, and did not return. In 1947, Kiš was repatriated with his mother to Montenegro, where he studied art, then the violin, and finally entered the University of Belgrade in the Department of Comparative Literature. He would go on to teach Serbo-Croat to students in various French universities, and he eventually settled in Paris — an emigrant in the self-imposed style of James Joyce. He died in Paris in 1989, when he was only fifty-four. But the inside story, the story of his art, is even more unique.

Can I put it in a highspeed sentence? His style was encyclopedia entries, definitions in historical dictionaries, legends told in footnotes, postscripts incorporating unsubstantiated rumor. His fictions very rarely looked like fictions. Instead, they adopted the look of annals or chronicles or pulp fictions. Because this, after all, is what happens to a life: if it’s remembered at all, it’s remembered in words. And this is the essence of the style called Danilo Kiš: it is always an experiment with foreshortening.

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