Garden, Ashes - (Eastern European Literature) by Danilo Kis (Paperback)

About the Book

"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, but one of the greatest books of the past century." Aleksandar Hemon, from the introduction

Book Synopsis

The celebrated Serbian writer Danilo Kis has blended bits of realism, snatches of dreams, and echoes of his own consciousness as a child to shape this magical and memorable novel.

In Yugoslavia during the Second World War, young Andi Scham and his beleaguered family are constantly moving and searching for refuge. Yet the physical hardships of the world do not intrude on Andi's adolescent world of vivid observation and imaginative withdrawals. From his memories emerges the wondrous story of his father, Eduard Scham-the Wandering Jew, Don Quixote, red-eyed, crazed, drunk, bellicose, a man who recedes from life and then disappears in the Holocaust.

Andi's search for his father is a poetic, lyrical remembrance of things past.

Review Quotes

"Kis's work is gripping, a set of clever modernist experiments with a frequent core of deadly seriousness; imagine Kafka encountering the Holocaust, or Borges visiting the Gulag without losing a sense of humor and you have a rough approximation of Kis's accomplishment." - The Daily Beast

"...preserves the honour of literature" --Susan Sontag

"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, but one of the greatest books of the past century." --Aleksandar Hemon, from the introduction

"Garden, Ashes will influence the most current trends in the art of the literary avant-garde--so much so that it may even shape the course of the novel." --Le Figaro

"In Kis's case . . . it is the consistent quality of the local prose that counts. It is how, sentence by sentence, the song is built, and immeasurable meanings meant. It is the rich regalia of his rhetoric that leads us to acknowledge his authority. On his page, trappings are not trappings, but sovereignty itself." --New York Review of Books

About the Author

Danilo Kis (1935-1989) was a Yugoslavian author and translator born in what is now Serbia to a Jewish father murdered at Auschwitz and an Eastern Orthodox mother. After his book A Tomb for Boris Davidovich was accused of anti-nationalism he went into self-imposed exile in France. He was awarded the Golden Eagle of the City of Nice and, just before his death in Paris in 1989, American PEN's Bruno Schulz Prize.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.