A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

Decades ago I got a copy of the old Penguin edition of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš for $2.95, probably at the Strand (the currently available edition is selling for $61.54 at Amazon); the other day my eye lit on it and, in the mysterious way these things happen, I thought “Why don’t I finally read that?” So I did, and while I enjoyed it, I wish I’d read it back in the ’90s, when I was deeply interested in the Balkans and reading people like Ivo Andrić and would probably have appreciated it more. The problem… well, let me quote the first paragraph of Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker’s “Literature, Power, and Oppression in Stalinist Russia and Catholic Ireland: Danilo Kiš’s Use of Joyce in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich” (South Atlantic Review 58.4 [Nov. 1993]: 39-58): Danilo Kiš belongs to a group of modern innovative writers who emerged in Yugoslavia during the sixties and seventies after a long period during which socialist realism had been the dominant mode of writing.…