Volume 36, Number 16 · October 26, 1989
Being and Dying
By William H. Gass
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 199 pp., $17.95
Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica. To my Western ears, the name seems that of an imaginary city. It is located in Yugoslavia, a country put together out of bits and pieces like Dr. Frankenstein's notorious experiment: impressive that it can walk at all, but making any move with difficulty. The city is near enough the Hungarian and Romanian borders that I can easily conceive it drifting into either one like a cloud: a dozen languages intermingling, languages rearranging their vowels to resemble one another the way the politicians do. 'The story I am about to tell,' the narrator of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich begins,
Review, 3811 words
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