Ten Writers Who Are Reinventing the Art of Storytelling

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JOSIP NOVAKOVICH
Stark truth from the Kafka of Croatia

A Croat brutalized by a Serb during the Balkan war of the 1990s runs across his tormentor in a restaurant and murders him, only to see another man who resembles the torturer even more, and then another. A Croatian woman, gang-raped in the war, turns sexual procuress to survive and then marries a politically ambitious physician who can't quite bring himself to trust her. A young woman is murdered by a jealous lover, and her door, punctured by three silvery bullet holes, becomes a sacred relic for a 10-year-old boy who adored her.

The people who fill the stories in Josip Novakovich's Salvation and Other Disasters (Graywolf) are forced into states of grace and damnation by the violent recent history of the Balkans, and by a legacy of authoritarian irrationality that can turn everyday life surreal in a second. “What people take to be bizarre or expressionistic in, say, Kafka, is just the way things are in Eastern Europe,” says Novakovich. “You don't have to invent much.”

Novakovich, 42, left Croatia in 1976 to go to Vassar. He majored in psychology with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. “I wanted to explore the philosophical aspects of Freud, and instead they were making me fiddle with rats and electrodes,” he says. “The textbooks bored me too. So I began to read Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.”

He also wrote reams of letters to friends at home. “I was very confused between the two cultures,” he says. “I mean, even Americans are confused by America.” The writing habit grew into three collections of tales and true narratives mixing folkloric magic, humor, and the grim realities of war. Now living in the Cincinnati area with his Nebraska-born wife, Jeanette, and two children—he teaches writing at the University of Cincinnati— Novakovich looks back on the landscape of conflict in his homeland with sadness and a very Eastern European irony. “Before the Balkan war a lot of my themes were American; but once it happened, I had to write about it,” he says. “Think of me as somebody suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Or, if you prefer, a war profiteer.” The profit that Novakovich amasses in this richly and poetically written, mind-expanding volume is the sense that although life is threatened by war, life is also enriched by the dark and terrible understandings it brings.

NORAH LABINER

To finish her complex and subtle first novel, Our Sometime Sister (Coffee House), Norah Labiner tucked herself away in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. “The snow was falling, I was alone in a friend's cabin, and there was this Jack London feeling,” she recalls. “It was great and it was horrible. I had no excuse not to do the writing.” This combination of pioneer spirit and aloneness with the self can be found all the way through the novel, which combines lively storytelling with Labiner's unique skill at conveying psychological depth.

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