⋙ Read Gratis Garden Ashes Eastern European Literature Series Danilo Kis William J Hannaher Aleksandar Hemon 9781564783264 Books

Garden Ashes Eastern European Literature Series Danilo Kis William J Hannaher Aleksandar Hemon 9781564783264 Books

Download As PDF : Garden Ashes Eastern European Literature Series Danilo Kis William J Hannaher Aleksandar Hemon 9781564783264 Books

Garden Ashes Eastern European Literature Series Danilo Kis William J Hannaher Aleksandar Hemon 9781564783264 Books

Danilo Kis was born in 1935. His father was Jewish; his mother was a Montenegrin of the Eastern Orthodox faith. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944, and World War II also brought an end to the petite bourgeoisie of Central Europe. GARDEN, ASHES is a requiem for both Kis's father and that Central European culture that had been Kis's birthright. At the same time, it also is a memoir of Kis's own youth. And what a distinctive requiem/memoir it is: rich, flamboyant, phantasmagorical, and (ultimately and paradoxically) both sad and uplifting.

The metes and bounds of the printed page do not confine the novel, which spills and sprawls everywhere. It is wonderfully Promethean. As told by Kis, everyday events from the life of his family (surnamed Scham, in the novel) become the stuff of myth, or, at the very least, fairy tale. Prosaic details are keenly observed and creatively woven into an often dream-like narrative. (A recurring theme is the confounding of dreaming and sleep, life and death.) There are many crafty metaphors. There is a brilliant ten-page retelling of the Old Testament story through the ten plagues of Egypt. And there are encyclopedic lists, one of "ologies" of pre-War Mitteleuropa (an excerpt: "irrationalistic studies, studies in Judeophobia, juridical studies, Lamarckian, lexicographical, lexicological, literary, Machist, magical, magnetic, martyrological, Marxist, Masonic") and another of the goods being piled on a cart of a Jewish family being relocated to the ghetto (an excerpt: "silverware chests lined with red cloth, like those cases designed to hold dueling pistols; an upright piano, a violin case like a small child's sarcophagus, bundles of documents, family portraits in baroque frames lifted out of their dusty repose and deprived of their eternal verticality").

Still, amidst the swirling visions, dreams, and fantasies of GARDEN, ASHES, what stands out most for me are the realistic snapshots of Central European life just before the events of World War II swept it all away, such as this description of a provincial railway station café, where the Scham family awaits a train: "It was a late summer afternoon, and flies swooped back and forth, intoxicated by their own flight and the heat. The room smelled of goulash and floor wax. A celesta stood in the corner, covered with cloth like a casket. Flypaper swayed back and forth, gently and lazily, measuring out the minutes. The bottles on the shelves were taking their siesta, crammed with the sun's rays and their own weight, like flower buds or artillery shells."

Kis wrote the novel in Serbo-Croatian. Translation into English must have been especially daunting, but William J. Hannaher pulled it off brilliantly. I have added GARDEN, ASHES to my list of books I hope to re-read some day, which is my highest accolade for a book.


Tags : Garden, Ashes (Eastern European Literature Series) [Danilo Kis, William J Hannaher, Aleksandar Hemon] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Let us not mince words here: Danilo Kis's Garden, Ashes is an unmitigated masterpiece, surely not just one of the best books about the Holocaust,Danilo Kis, William J Hannaher, Aleksandar Hemon,Garden, Ashes (Eastern European Literature Series),Dalkey Archive Press,156478326X,Literary,FICTION General,FICTION Literary,Fiction,General,Literature - Classics Criticism,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Garden Ashes Eastern European Literature Series Danilo Kis William J Hannaher Aleksandar Hemon 9781564783264 Books Reviews

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.
Danilo Kis was born in 1935. His father was Jewish; his mother was a Montenegrin of the Eastern Orthodox faith. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944, and World War II also brought an end to the petite bourgeoisie of Central Europe. GARDEN, ASHES is a requiem for both Kis's father and that Central European culture that had been Kis's birthright. At the same time, it also is a memoir of Kis's own youth. And what a distinctive requiem/memoir it is rich, flamboyant, phantasmagorical, and (ultimately and paradoxically) both sad and uplifting.

The metes and bounds of the printed page do not confine the novel, which spills and sprawls everywhere. It is wonderfully Promethean. As told by Kis, everyday events from the life of his family (surnamed Scham, in the novel) become the stuff of myth, or, at the very least, fairy tale. Prosaic details are keenly observed and creatively woven into an often dream-like narrative. (A recurring theme is the confounding of dreaming and sleep, life and death.) There are many crafty metaphors. There is a brilliant ten-page retelling of the Old Testament story through the ten plagues of Egypt. And there are encyclopedic lists, one of "ologies" of pre-War Mitteleuropa (an excerpt "irrationalistic studies, studies in Judeophobia, juridical studies, Lamarckian, lexicographical, lexicological, literary, Machist, magical, magnetic, martyrological, Marxist, Masonic") and another of the goods being piled on a cart of a Jewish family being relocated to the ghetto (an excerpt "silverware chests lined with red cloth, like those cases designed to hold dueling pistols; an upright piano, a violin case like a small child's sarcophagus, bundles of documents, family portraits in baroque frames lifted out of their dusty repose and deprived of their eternal verticality").

Still, amidst the swirling visions, dreams, and fantasies of GARDEN, ASHES, what stands out most for me are the realistic snapshots of Central European life just before the events of World War II swept it all away, such as this description of a provincial railway station café, where the Scham family awaits a train "It was a late summer afternoon, and flies swooped back and forth, intoxicated by their own flight and the heat. The room smelled of goulash and floor wax. A celesta stood in the corner, covered with cloth like a casket. Flypaper swayed back and forth, gently and lazily, measuring out the minutes. The bottles on the shelves were taking their siesta, crammed with the sun's rays and their own weight, like flower buds or artillery shells."

Kis wrote the novel in Serbo-Croatian. Translation into English must have been especially daunting, but William J. Hannaher pulled it off brilliantly. I have added GARDEN, ASHES to my list of books I hope to re-read some day, which is my highest accolade for a book.