![]() What particularizes them are the witty, intricate development of each case their richly drawn, engaging characters and Živković’s diverse play with the underlying challenge he has set for himself: like Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, these novels interrogate the possibilities and limitations of the detective genre. Each turns out to hinge on a book purported to possess truly miraculous powers, which make it the grail of a secret cult led by a Grand Master who, of course, remains anonymous to the very end.Īll of which makes these novels sound far more schematic and repetitive than they actually are. Each event triggers an investigation by Lukić, which soon attracts the attention of the secret police who, under the guise of cooperation, doggedly track and surveil the inspector. Yet here we have three that not only adhere rigorously to convention (at least at the outset) but share many common elements.Įach novel begins with a seemingly impossible event: The Last Book with the medically inexplicable deaths of several patrons of the Papyrus Bookshop The Grand Manuscript with the disappearance from a closed, locked room of a famous author and her latest manuscript Compendium of the Dead with the appearance in the thoroughly guarded rare-book room of the National Library of a second copy of a fifteenth-century incunabulum known to be unique. In interviews, Živković has declared his aversion to all genres: “Any generic restrictions are highly damaging for literature.” No genre is more hamstrung with restrictions than the classic detective story. Happily, Cadmus Press has begun publication of uniform editions of English translations of all of Živković’s twenty-two books-including, as here, new stories.Īmong the first is The Papyrus Trilogy, an omnibus of three linked detective novels featuring Police Inspector Dejan Lukić. The reason, I think, is a long history of erratic publication of English translations by British and American publishers, often in small, hard-to-find editions. Yet for all his international renown and awards-most recently he was named 2017 Grand Master by the European Science Fiction Society, only the eleventh author to be so honored-Živković has nowhere near the English readership his work warrants (see WLT, Nov. ![]() 608 pages.Īround the world, in over twenty-three countries and twenty languages, readers have long delighted in the works of visionary Serbian fantasist Zoran Živković.
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