Hidden Camera - (Eastern European Literature) by Zoran Zivkovic (Paperback)

About the Book

"A glowing, romantic conundrum." Booklist

Book Synopsis

From one of Serbia's greatest contemporary writers, Hidden Camera opens with the narrator finding a mysterious, blank envelope stuck in his apartment door inviting him to a private showing of a movie. Or so he initially thinks. Upon arrival at the theatre, he discovers that there's only one other person in the audience, a very attractive woman whom he's seated next to. Then things get a bit more mysterious. The movie he's been invited to see includes a scene showing him sitting in a park. Believing that he's an unwitting participant in a complicated hidden camera show, he goes along with the variety of setups he's faced with, which continue to get more involved and absurd. As the show develops, he becomes more and more paranoid and distrustful, but he keeps up the ruse to its thrilling conclusion.

Review Quotes

A short, meaty book, this is an antimodernist parable heavy enough for you to know you've absorbed real substance, yet ironic enough to ensure you don't want to kill yourself when it's over.

For all his control of mood and language, Zivkovic is a writer who prefers the playful to the profound, the scattering of seeds to the harvest.

Hidden Camera is a work of unexpected beauty and surprise. [...] Zivkovic is seeking to communicate something about the nature of life and death, of existence and non-existence, which bends perception into new and challenging shapes.

The writing is wonderful, sometimes dense and foreboding, sometimes light and allusive, never less than accomplished, and always well-suited to the artistic task at hand.

Winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award for his novella The Library . . . Zoran Zivkovic is an immensely talented fabulist whose work is somewhat reminiscent of Italo Calvino's wry and delightfully surreal postmodern fictions.

Zivkovic does a superb job of communicating the befuddlement, confusion, and awe of individual characters as they wrestle with mysteries that exceed the understanding that their time, place and intellectual capacity permits.

"Ž ivković does a superb job of communicating the befuddlement, confusion, and awe of individual characters as they wrestle with mysteries that exceed the understanding that their time, place and intellectual capacity permits."