Danilo Kis, Garden, Ashes (1965)
Kis’s Jewish-Hungarian father died in Auschwitz. His own life was saved by the fact that his Montenegrin mother had him baptised to the Orthodox Christian faith in 1939, when he was four. In 1947 she took Danilo and his sister to Cetinje, the tiny former capital of the kingdom of Montenegro. Hidden in a nest of rocky mountain peaks, Cetinje is a picturesque town of Mediterranean stone houses incongruously mixed with the palaces and ornate embassies of the Great Powers, but Danilo’s literary imagination remained deeply marked by the former Austro-Hungarian towns of his early childhood. From Cetinje, he went to Belgrade to study and then finally to France. He died in Paris in 1989, at the age of fifty-four. Although it employs a fictional form, Garden, Ashes is a journey around Danilo’s father. It is a short, atmospheric and poignant book. I can’t think of many others in which poetry and novel-writing come so close together.
London, December 2005
Chernobyl Strawberries Page 22