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CHECKPOINT

Name: CHECKPOINT
Author: David Albahari
ISBN: 978-1-63206-192-8

by David Albahari ; translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018

A digressive but attention-grabbing critique of war’s horrors.

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A platoon of soldiers assigned to maintain order winds up doing anything but in this pointed military satire.

The collective “we” narrating this novel by Serbian-born novelist Albahari (Learning Cyrillic, 2014, etc.) insists that the checkpoint they’re guarding was opened with the best of intentions, albeit the vaguest of purposes. “We hadn’t been told whether the checkpoint was on a border lying between two countries or along a line dividing two villages,” Albahari writes. At first the checkpoint is so quiet as to seem unnecessary, but a parade of disruptions, most of them violent, soon arrives: a dead sentry with a slashed throat, two disemboweled locals, a corporal hanged from a tree, a mass of asylum-seeking refugees. The novel is delivered in one long paragraph, as if to suggest that all the violent and absurd chaos of military life is rightfully stuffed into one massive ball of mortality and dysfunction. Albahari occasionally plays that idea for comic effect, skewering the disorder of the chain of command and the ineptitude of the checkpoint’s commander. Though the checkpoint is all but neglected, somehow a mail delivery arrives; when photographers arrive to document the turmoil, the commander’s first thought is charging them a fee. (“You’ll see that Visa and MasterCard are our sponsors,” he says.) In that regard the book is a worthy descendant of The Good Soldier Svejk and Catch-22, though when Albahari gets dark (as every military satire must), he gets very dark; rapes, beheadings, and vicious stabbings are all part of the territory. Albahari’s rambling narration oversells the theme of the madness of war, but there’s no questioning his passion on the subject. An honest war story only emerges “once it conforms to the government’s truth,” he asserts. This novel celebrates fiction’s capacity to critique the party line.

A digressive but attention-grabbing critique of war’s horrors.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63206-192-8

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Restless Books

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LEARNING CYRILLIC
by David Albahari ; translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

- BOOK REVIEW
GÖTZ AND MEYER
by David Albahari & translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać

- BOOK REVIEW
WORDS ARE SOMETHING ELSE
by David Albahari

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TOM'S CROSSING
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.