Infidelities - by Josip Novakovich (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>Tragicomedy of the highest order, this stellar collection is Croatian writer Novakovich's best ever.</p><p> Hailed as one of the best short story writers of the 1990s, Josip Novakovich was praised by the <em>New York Times</em> for writing fiction that has the crackle of authenticity, like the bite of breaking glass. In his new collection, he explores a war-torn Balkan world in which a schoolchild's innocence evaporates in a puff of cannon smoke, lust replaces love, and the joy of survival overrides all other pleasures. </p><p> As Serb, Croat, and Bosnian Muslim armies clash in the cities and countryside of the former Yugoslavia, it's hard to tell the front lines from the home front. The characters in Infidelities--soldiers and civilians alike--are caught in the ridiculous, often cruelly whimsical contradictions of war and the paranoia and folly of those who conduct it. In Ribs, a Croatian woman whose husband has already been taken by the war will go to any length to keep her son out of the army, including sleeping with the draft officer, a tryst that leads to an unexpected, and disturbing, spiritual vision. A Buddhist soldier in the Bosnian Muslim military isly accused of being an informer to the enemy Serbs after his detachment ambushes itself in Hail. A draft dodger is in the hospital for a transplant, in A Purple Heart, when a high-ranking Croatian general steals the heart for himself (and dies) while the dodger suddenly discovers a new thirst for life. In Spleen, a Bosnian émigré in America learns that even in the throes of passion she cannot find release from the haunting memories of her homeland. </p><p> These stories cover a broad sweep of time, reaching back to the first shots of World War I in Sarajevo and forward to the plight of Balkan immigrants in contemporary America. Throughout, acts of compassion, gallows humour, even desire arise from a landscape devastated by tragedy.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"<em>Infidelities </em>is a joy to read. In Josip Novakovich comedy lies beyond hope and is at once a wound of the spirit and its balm-not to mention personal identity's last ditch strategy for survival. I found the book exhilarating."--<strong>Stuart Dybek</strong><br><br>"A wry and compassionate observer, Novakovich . . . continues to write about his homeland with flinty precision and a peppery brew of sublimated emotions. Fluent in the many shades of meaning conveyed in the subtlest of gestures and the briefest of conversations, and gifted with a stinging sense of humor, Novakovich fashions take-charge tales of displacement that embody the fracturing of war and the misdirection of lust, the dream of sanctuary and the chasm of loneliness."--<strong><em>Booklist</em></strong><br><br>"Eye-opening, fibrillating fiction. . . . Brutally honest. . . . We are much the better for Novakovich's fertile, cross-border imagination"--<strong>Minneapolis Star Tribune</strong><br><br>"Novakovich has perfected the grand style of the Continental anecdote, with its...retrospection [that] falls prey to irony."--<em>Publishers Weekly</em><br><br>"Novakovich is a natural storyteller; in INFIDELITIES, he never lets the human heart out of his sight."--<strong>Aleksandar Hemon</strong><br><br>"Novakovich is one of the great American writers of recent emergence."--<em>Kirkus Reviews</em><br><br>"Novakovich's mix of America and Croatia makes for unique insights into the troubled Balkan region. One comes away with a sense of why that region imploded, and why its people acted as insanely as they did."--<strong><em>Hartford Courant</em></strong><br>
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