Garden , ashes by Danilo Kiš

Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš

Serbian fiction

Original title – Bašta, pepeo

Translator – William J Hannaher

Source  – personal copy

It is the week the Kaggy and Simon choose to do a book club for a certain year this time around it was 1965 I am very late so I have this and hope to get another if I’m not to tired over the weekend I’m on nights and the third book late next week anyway the first book I choose was as with the other times I have taken part in the book club was published in its original language on the year here 1965 saw a novel by the well known Serbian writer  Danilo Kis a writer that has maybe not been grabbed by the English speaking world in translation a new edition of his best book known  Encyclopedia of the Dead came out last year from Penguin and Dalkey has translated a number of his books in recent years but still feels under looked I have even not reviewed him until today I have another couple of his books. He was born in what was Austro Hungary but is now Serbia and was Serbia after Austro Hungarian empire split up and was invaded by Hungary the region that  Kis lived in his father was a travel writer and Hungarian speaker. His own childhood was the bases of the earlier books in his writing life so the father-son relationship is one that reflected his own. 

Inside, the name “Singer” is incised in large letters. WHere the sides widen, the comany emblems appear symmetrically, cast as gigantic spiders. On more careful anaylysis, however we discover – not without astonishment – that the spiders plaited into the eylets of the iron side are not really spoider at all but rather a muchanical shuttle – magnifed a hundredfold – with a spool from which the thread unwinds, as thick as a cord, magnified and therefore difficult to recognize. like the letter s giving the illusion of spider legs . The emblem is painted a golden yellow, like a nobleman’s coat of arms , and so are the arabesque on the laquer head of the machine

A siunger sewing machin grabs Andi’s eye here .

This is a story of Andi Scham childhood one that saw them move around the Balkans and Hungary as his father Eduard a travel writer who is working on his third bus, ship, rail and air travel guide the third vol he has done of this book about traveling. The father a drinker and one of those characters that jump of the page Kis own father must have been a similar type of man an obsessive with his subject that he is in love with Travel. He is almost a preacher for travel. But at the same time given the time he is working on his book as events around him the chance he has to escape the Nazi shadow start looming til he one day he just disappeared. A childhood that sees the young boy showing his world from the family sewing machine described in detail as what we see is the Holocaust told through the eyes of a young boy that lived through it. from them sheltering in the woods trying to avoid the oncoming storm the love of his mother this is a touching tale.

My father had been vainly offeruing hus new timetable, on which he had worked for years, for publication. The manuscript lay in a drawer of hios desk, retyped, covred with red pencil marks, crammed with corrections in the margins, glued-on inserts, footnotesm memoranda, supllements, preambles, replete with strange symbols and miniature ideograms.The ideograms were the ones my father had cut pout aof his 1933 timetable and had patiently glued onto his new manuscript, giving it a specail charm

His fathers life work the travle guide

Kis used Eduard Scham in a couple of his books and this is thought to be a largely autobiographical view of his own life so like Andi  Danilo lost his father in the middle of world war two to probably Auschwitz but what makes this is the detail from the sewing machine to his mother carrying a tray early in the book it shows a world disintegrating before our eyes through the naive eyes of a child. A great first choice for 1965  book club and the first Kis on the blog and not the last I think. Have you read his book?