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Four Stories till the End
by Zoran Zivkovic
translated by Alice Copple-Tosic
(Polaris, £ not advised, 188 pages, paperback, first published 2004,
this edition published 2004.)
Review by John Toon
 Something
clever is going on here, but I don't honestly know what. In each of
four environments--a prison cell, a hospital room, a hotel room, and
a lift--the narrator is interrupted in some recreational activity by
a series of visitors who wish to tell him stories. There are four stories
in each of the four sections of the book, and the stories in each section
are closely linked and seem to have some bearing on the narrator. The
visits are punctuated by intrusions from a relevant authority figure,
who always stays to tell the fourth story. There is a final profound
crisis--it seems to suggest the narrator has died, although it's all
couched in symbolism--and the next section begins.
Is it about art, or death? Punishment, or redemption? I really don't
know. I've found Zivkovic's work to be obscure before, so this wasn't
entirely unexpected, but it's a bit hard to comment on a book I just
can't fathom. The repetitive structure is obviously significant, although
the narrator turns out not to be repeated in all four sections, with
the first three narrators visiting the fourth. What the visitors' stories
are supposed to tell us is anyone's guess--they're generally entertaining
to read, and almost seem to add up to something, but their meaning remains
maddeningly elusive. The story of the spiteful magician who smuggles
unpaying audience members into a circus gave me a chuckle, and the various
descriptions of the hotel facilities in the third section are ludicrously
funny, but all the while I had the nagging feeling that the author was
trying to say something, and I just couldn't quite hear what it was.
More by way of a fable than a straight story, this book is likely to
appeal to the philosophers among you. All I can definitively say about
it is that the prose has the slight stiltedness one may generally expect
from translated works, but is lively enough to keep you reading. Tantalising,
but not wholly satisfying.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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