MM: The process you’ve described strikes me as quite remarkable. The narrative structure of many of your works is very elaborate, often containing networks of leitmotifs and subtle, sometimes multileveled intertextual connections. Moreover, at a sentence-by-sentence level, your fiction is exceptionally precise. Nary a word is wasted; the only details present are those required to evoke clear images and clarify character and theme, and many sentences are quite lyrical. How do you understand this ability? Might your proficiency with mathematics and chess somehow play a role?
ZZ: I would say that your intuition is quite right. Although, as I mentioned, I lack full insight into how my creative process works, I am rather convinced that, in a certain way, it must be related to my inclination toward both mathematics and chess. In my younger days, I was considered very talented in both these areas. It was mere chance that I didn’t become a professional mathematician or chess player, but a writer. Sometimes, when I am feeling at odds with myself, I wonder whether chance is not culpable.
MM: Over the years you have made trenchant comments about the effects of market forces on literature. What are your views of the current state of, and future prospects for, literary fiction? What recent developments seem particularly auspicious or worrisome?
ZZ: I am quite aware that the market is the best regulatory mechanism in many human endeavors. But not in all. If there were only the publishing industry—focused entirely, like any other industry, on profit at all costs—we eventually would end up with almost nothing but the most trivial of literature. The situation is governed by a simple equation: triviality equals popularity equals marketability equals profit. There is definitely something fundamentally wrong with a system in which the decision makers—those who, in the final analysis, determine what we read—are my favorite villains: marketing directors and literary agents. Anna Karenina would have absolutely no chance with these guys. (The world of the publishing industry is the subject of my satirical novel The Book.)
My prime ambition is by no means to become a best-selling author, to get rich. My kind of fiction will always have a limited readership, and I have no intention of changing it to make it more “marketable” or to increase the number of my readers. (Actually, even if I wanted to do that, I doubt I would be able to.) Much more than quantity I am interested in quality when it comes to readers. My ideal is to have only quality readers, and they are, by definition, a rare breed.
It is no wonder then that all my attempts to find a major US or UK publisher have failed. My fiction simply does not fit the requirements of the publishing industry, at least not in the English language. Besides, I am a foreign author. But I have no reason to complain. Nearly all my books have been published in the US and UK by small presses. These are mostly beautiful editions of which I am very proud. My three Aio Publishing books are, as graphic products, real objets d’art. Also, my seven PS Publishing books are exquisite limited editions.
I see small, independent presses as a sort of resistance movement. The enemy they are resisting is strong and merciless, but not without certain weaknesses. The more trivial books the publishing industry produces, the more small presses can publish quality literature, including translations. And small presses are very fortunate not to have marketing directors and not to need the services of literary agents. They could even bring out Anna Karenina.
MM: How do you think technology—especially the Internet and the e-book—will affect the evolution of serious fiction? How do you view the imminent republication (by PS Publishing) of several of your works as e-books?
ZZ: The introduction of digital books is revolutionary in many ways. There is no doubt that an e-book has many advantages compared to its paper ancestor. This step is much bigger than the previous revolution, when printed books replaced handwritten ones. The possibility of having a huge library in a device smaller than an average paper book is truly amazing. Besides, the revolution is far from over yet.
But although revolutionary, this development is basically a change of form, not essence. Regardless of its numerous excellent features, a digital book is still a book. A container for text. The quality of the container is very welcome, of course, but it’s useless if the content is worthless. The essence is the quality of text—what we read, not what container we use for reading. A cheap secondhand paperback edition of Anna Karenina is far superior to the most sophisticated digital edition of a trivial piece of fiction.
By the time this interview appears, all seven of my books that PS Publishing brought out in the previous decade, plus The Fourth Circle and The Ghostwriter, will be available from them in digital editions. (Only Hidden Camera and The Five Wonders of the Danube are not included.) It remains to be seen how digital readers will respond to my e-books, but in any case I am glad I made this step into the future. I am still not old or conservative enough to believe that all good things are in the past.
Part III: Živković on Živković
MM: In all previous interviews, when asked to comment on individual works, you have demurred. Would you now, at this point in your career, be willing to discuss briefly the role your works played in your development as a writer of fiction?
ZZ: My fiction books didn’t originate in what one might define as a “natural” order—from simpler to more complex. In my opus there isn’t, in fact, any linear development. I didn’t start with the simplest and least ambitious works and advance toward the other end of the spectrum as I became more skillful and experienced. In such a linear spectrum, I couldn’t have possibly begun with The Fourth Circle—in many ways still the most complex of my books.
Considering the complexity of The Fourth Circle, it is no wonder that it took me so long to take the second step. It seemed that nothing less ambitious and comprehensive would have been appropriate. During nearly four years (1994–97), I was eager to start working on a new book—all the more so since I seemed to be getting occasional signals from my subconscious that a new critical mass had almost gathered. But all these signals proved to be false alarms. It was very fortunate that I was able to recognize the real nature of these apparent inspirational signs. If I hadn’t, I would have turned into one of those numerous authors who keep writing basically the same book all their life. For four years, everything new I was tempted to start writing was basically a continuation, in one way or another, of The Fourth Circle, so greatly was I influenced by my first book.
I embarked on a genuinely new fiction voyage only after I had managed to fully detach, to “decontaminate” myself, from The Fourth Circle. It was a long process that required a lot of patience and determination. I was, however, constantly aware that I had to go through it if I wanted to be an author. Many people manage to write their first book, but one truly becomes a writer only after the second book, which doesn’t happen very often.
Although, not being clairvoyant, I couldn’t have known it when Time Gifts appeared in late 1997, this tiny book was in many ways a landmark in my opus. First, it taught me that complexity is not the only virtue a writer should aim at. Equally virtuous is its exact opposite: simplicity. If The Fourth Circle was like a baroque cathedral, Time Gifts was like a Doric temple. I was so enchanted by its elemental architecture that it would be more than a decade before I returned to the baroque with Escher’s Loops (2008).
Second, Time Gifts was the beginning of a long series of books, more or less of the same modest size, now known as Impossible Stories. It comprises ten titles (Time Gifts; Impossible Encounters; Seven Touches of Music; The Library; Steps Through the Mist; Four Stories till the End; Twelve Collections; The Bridge; Miss Tamara, the Reader; and Amarcord), containing a total of sixty-five stories. I introduced the title Impossible Stories in 2004 when the first five parts were collected in one volume for a Serbian publication. The only complete edition of Impossible Stories so far appeared in 2010, published by the Belgrade-based publisher Zavod in two editions, one in Serbian, the other in English.
In an ideal world, Impossible Stories should be conside
red a single work, which brings me to the third important feature of Time Gifts—its composition. To put it simply, its whole is larger than the mere sum of its constituent parts—an amalgam, not a conglomerate. Each of the four stories in Time Gifts can be read as a stand-alone story, but only in the context of the whole book, especially the final segment, do they acquire full meaning. The same is valid for the entire series. Each of the ten titles can be published as a separate, stand-alone volume (how they mostly appear in various languages), but one gets the sense of completeness only after reading them all.
The fourth trait that made Time Gifts a landmark in my literary opus was the introduction of one of my pivotal motifs: the encounter and crossing of two realities, the world of the author and the world of his books. This was already hinted at in The Fourth Circle, in which a book is the first “object” to penetrate the barrier between parallel worlds. Books and their authors featured as protagonists in many of my subsequent fiction works—The Book; The Writer; Impossible Encounters; The Library; Hidden Camera; Four Stories till the End; Miss Tamara, the Reader; The Last Book; and The Ghostwriter—more than half of what I have written so far.
The two books that followed Time Gifts were important for their general humorous tone: satirical in The Book (the decline of the Gutenberg era) and ironic in The Writer (the clash of two authors’ vanities). It was essential that humor already appeared in my early books because it is probably the greatest challenge for an author. One either passes that exam or fails as a prosaist.
There is a curiosity related to each of these books. Although my third published, The Writer was my second written piece of fiction. It was completed in a mere two weeks, while I was on vacation on the Mediterranean island of Malta, in summer 1996. It was so hot there that—unlike my wife and twin sons, who can stand almost any heat and even enjoy it—I spent most of my time in a well-air-conditioned hotel lobby. It happened to be a rather convenient environment for writing this brief novel—so brief that I published it only after Time Gifts because I was unsure it could be considered a stand-alone work, even by my standards, which are far more flexible than those of the publishing industry. When eventually it did appear, I decided to add a subtitle, just in case: “A very brief novel, without chapters, about writing and darkness.” The Writer is unique in a more technical way. I wrote it entirely by hand, in a notebook. The laptop era was then more than a decade in the future.
I wrote The Book on my computer in spring 1999, during occasional intervals when there was electricity, between air raids in Belgrade. That was the time of the NATO campaign against my country that lasted nearly three months. I remember my frustration when I couldn’t use my computer during blackouts (still no laptops then). I tried to write with a pencil on paper, but for some reason I wasn’t able to repeat what I managed to do so easily on Malta.
It might seem paradoxical that my most humorous book originated in the least humorous circumstances. But there isn’t actually any paradox. Writing The Book was my vital response to the threat of death that, quite literally, constantly hovered above us. (I almost got killed, together with my family, when the Chinese Embassy, just across the street, was bombed, allegedly by mistake...) The biophilic forces in me were strongly opposing the thanatotic ones.
It was also between air raids that I got an offer from Northwestern University Press for publication of Time Gifts. In any other circumstances this would have been a cause for celebration, but at first I was totally confused, not knowing what would be a proper reaction. A U.S. publisher was interested in my book at the same time U.S. bombers were fatally active in the skies of Serbia. Elemental patriotic imperative required that I decline the offer, but after a careful consideration I realized that this situation was not that elemental. At Northwestern they were certainly aware not only of my position but also of their own. They risked being accused of lack of patriotism even more. If in that situation they decided to extend their hand, I simply had no moral right to refuse it. I accepted—and never regretted it.
In quick succession, in just over three years after The Book (2000–2003), I wrote four more mosaic novels: Impossible Encounters, Seven Touches of Music, The Library, and Steps Through the Mist. With the exception of The Library, they all originally appeared in English in the UK monthly magazine Interzone, the only place for my fiction in the English language during that period. With as many as nineteen published stories, I was one of its most frequent contributors at that time. The Library had a privileged position in the third issue of the Leviathan series of anthologies, which were brought out in the United States: each of its six parts began with one of the stories in The Library. It was that edition of The Library that won the World Fantasy Award in 2003 in the novella category.
Although I consider each of the first five Impossible Stories significant in its own way, The Library is probably the most important. It is my most widely translated book, with fourteen foreign editions so far and several more forthcoming. The second of its six parts, “Home Library,” is, I believe, exemplary of my idiosyncratic approach to the art of the fantastic. All the essential keys of my poetics are contained in it.
After Steps Through the Mist I took a welcome break from writing mosaic novels. Although I was certain that the series was far from complete, if I had continued to write it, I would have become a far too “specialized” author. The time had come to show some versatility. Again, two humorous books ensued—Hidden Camera and Compartments.
With its specific humor of the paranoid, Hidden Camera inaugurated another pivotal motif: the idea of art and love as our ultimate line of defense against mortality. Eros and thanatos perform an intricate dance in this novel. Without humor, its choreography would be too macabre, not, as seemed to me far more proper, a delicate ballet.
Compartments is based on a different kind of humor—the humor of the absurd. The progress of an innocent passenger through a train coach (the word “train” is never used in the book), full of bizarre and absurdly comical travelers in their six compartments, with the conductor as a modern-day Virgil, was meant to be a metaphor for life and our uncertain and unreliable quest for its meaning, which is often full of absurdities. The most we can hope for when we leave the final compartment is hope itself.
The second half of Impossible Stories (Four Stories till the End; Twelve Collections; The Bridge; Miss Tamara, the Reader; and Amarcord) is founded on two elements pivotal in Hidden Camera and Compartments. Thematically, these books are variations of the dance of eros and thanatos, although humor is their dominant tone. I used mostly darker shades of humor, as appropriate for the context of the stories. The only exception is probably Amarcord, which is more akin to the first five mosaic novels, thus closing the entire series in a circle.
I am not supposed, of course, to have favorites among my own books, but were I to do so, it would be Miss Tamara, the Reader. In this book I believe I came as close to my ideals of a mosaic novel as falls within my abilities.
The four novels published after the Impossible Stories series was completed are rather different among themselves—a quality important for an author whose opus consists of close to twenty titles, by which point certain similarities between books seem more or less inevitable. The Last Book is a kind of metafictional thriller. Although the finale—with its intersection of two realities, that of the writer and that of the characters—probably betrays the expectations of fans of the classic detective novel, it is by far my best-selling book. In Italy alone it sold nearly twenty thousand copies in a mere year and a half—quite an achievement for a writer whose natural print runs are rather smaller.
Escher’s Loops is—as discreetly pointed out in its dedication—an experiment in what I call “nonlinear narrative geometries”. This book is not about Escher (his name is mentioned only in the title), but its structure is based on his non-Euclidean geometries. Its complexity requires a very attentive and patient reader. I tried to do in fiction what Escher did in his paradoxical weird drawings. Who knows? In th
e long run, this might be my principal contribution to the art of literature.
The Ghostwriter is my second novel to contain some autobiographical elements (the first is The Writer). I simply had to pay a huge debt to my tomcat Buca (“Fatty”) who, since 2001, has always been somewhere in my vicinity, mostly on my desk, while I was writing my fiction. With time, Buca became sort of my literary alter ego. The Writer and The Ghostwriter are also my only two entirely realistic novels. In both of them I tried to penetrate as deeply as I could into one of the greatest mysteries of all—the mystery of literary creation. Curiously, I didn’t need any fantastical elements for that purpose.
I was convinced that The Ghostwriter appropriately concluded my literary opus. The more so since a year after it was published (2009) my collected fiction appeared in two volumes (Novels and Impossible Stories) in both Serbian and English editions. Besides, at that time I had a strong impression that I had said what there was for me to say in literature. As I teach my students, one of the greatest virtues of an author is to know when to stop writing. Alas, only the rare ones choose the right moment.
I did, however, continue, and in the most unusual way. As if, by a miracle, I found myself in the world of The Ghostwriter, I got an offer to write a novel about the Danube River. A member of the Serbian government approached me in early June 2010 and told me that they were supposed to provide a Serbian cultural contribution to a big international project called “The Danube Initiative.”
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