"A Kafka for our times" (Neue Zrcher Zeitung), David
Albahari was born 1948 in Pec, Serbia. He studied English
language and literature in Belgrade. In 1994 he moved to Calgary,
Canada with his wife and their two children where he still lives
today. He mainly writes novels and short stories and is also an
established translator from English into Serbian. He is member of
the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His collection of short
stories Description of Death won the Ivo Andric Award for the best
collection of short stories published in Yugoslavia in 1982 and his
novel BAIT the NIN Award for the best novel published in Yugoslavia
in 1996. His latest collection of stories, Every Night in Another
Town, has won the important Vital Award, one of the most
significant literary awards in Serbia. His books have been
translated into sixteen languages by the most prestigious
international publishers, among them Harcourt, Harvill, Eichborn,
Gallimard, Cossee and Einaudi. English translations include a
selection of short stories, entitled Words Are Something Else, as
well as four novels Tsing, Bait, Snow Man, and Gtz and Meyer. He
has translated into Serbian many books by authors such as S.
Bellow, I.B. Singer, T. Pynchon, M. Atwood, V.S. Naipaul and V.
Nabokov as well as plays by Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, Caryl
Churchill and Jason Sherman. He was a participant in the
International Writing Program in Iowa (1986) and International
Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary, under the
auspices of Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program
(1994-95). Between 1991 and 1994 he was president of the Federation
of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia.
Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating fiction and
non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the
1980s. The AATSEEL translation award was given to her translation
of David Albahari's short-story collection Words Are Something
Else, ALTA's National Translation Award was given to her
translation of Albahari's novel Gtz and Meyer in 2006. Her book
Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes
Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War was given the Mary Zirin Prize in
2015.
Praise for Checkpoint
“Brilliant, weird, and audacious... Anyone who cares about world
literature must read David Albahari.”
*Alex Gilvarry, author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy
Combatant*
"A satirical take on war in the vein of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse
Five, Serbian author David Albahari’s Checkpoint is shocking and
comic in equal turns, skillfully pulled together by the force of
Albahari’s wit.... Visceral, wild, and often hilarious, Checkpoint
is a dark delight."
*Foreword Reviews, Starred Review*
“A platoon of soldiers assigned to maintain order winds up doing
anything but in this pointed military satire….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…. 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.”
*Kirkus Reviews*
“Checkpoint is a tornado of a book. David Albahari, a noted Serbian
author who lives in Canada, muscles this Kafkaesque short novel
into the war-is-absurd literary tradition in one tremendous
183-page paragraph…. Comic and absurd scenarios alternate with
episodes of fear, confusion, and horrific violence as the 30-man
unit tries to make sense of a mission they don’t understand. They
can’t communicate with their central command to get updated orders
or news. They encounter enemies and refugees whose nationalities
and languages they can’t identify. Amid all this haze, the narrator
is free to free-associate…. Throughout the novel, the dirty
realities of war mingle inextricably with such intrusions from the
mystical and the imaginary. In the midst of slaughter, rape, and
betrayal, the commander is visited by images from movies,
literature, his past. When his men die he cries, he vomits, he
collapses. Yet they remain as respectful and loyal as soldiers in a
fairy tale…. Stylistically, JP Donleavy and Gary Shteyngart come to
mind at times, while imagistically one might think of Goya,
Picasso, or the Surrealists. But Albahari has a distinctive voice,
and it comes through vividly in Ellen Elias-Bursac’s able
translation from the Serbian.”
*Blogcritics*
“[Albahari] unfolds events like a fever dream, seamlessly weaving
brutality and comedy. His vision of war is a grim fairy tale
without a moral lesson, and a warning for an age of reconstituted
borders.”
*Publishers Weekly*
“Albahari’s novel is a decidedly harrowing one, moving from a
straightforward account of men at war into a more surreal, even
symbolic, place. The blend of modern concerns and the tone of a
bleak fable recalls the works of Magnus Mills and Manuel Gonzales,
but there’s something more sinister present here as well. In its
final pages, this novel takes a bravura turn, adding another layer
atop all that’s gone before and closing on an absolutely harrowing
note.”
*Words Without Borders*
“[Checkpoint] is a book that shows war in all its horror and its
pointlessness and will surely be added to the roster of great
anti-war novels.”
*The Modern Novel*
Praise for David Albahari
“Albahari makes us feel how fiercely the present needs to know the
past. The present is an expression of the past, whether we know
what it was or we don’t, and when there exists only a void between
us and our antecedents, he suggests, it is this void, rather than
what ought to be our own lives, that will claim us. The book is a
sophisticated meditation on the inextricability of historical
memory and identity; it is also a gorgeous work of the imagination
about an act of imagination. The tone is pure, as strange as can
be, and hypnotizing.”
*BOMB*
“The book's single paragraph encourages reading it in one sitting….
Even translated from his native Serbian, Albahari's prose has the
contemplative, textured quality of such Eastern European writers as
Kundera.”
*Booklist*
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