Bicontinental
disorder

>>Josip Novakovich’s Infidelities: Stories
of War and Lust explores the struggles
of Croatians at home and abroad

by JULIET WATERS

In an interview at the back of Josip Novakovich’s book of short stories, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, he says, “I will never be free from being drawn back to Croatia… or from the impulse to flee it once I am there. That exilic impulse is part of me wherever I am—I’d always like to be elsewhere. It’s a symptom of cultural schizophrenia—my bicontinental disorder. It’s quite expensive to treat it—lots of airfares.”

Whatever the price of treatment, bicontinental disorder is producing some of America’s best writers. Junot Díaz, who recently won the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has spent a lifetime travelling back and forth between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. Other writers whose dual citizenship has produced exceptional work include Chimanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) and Rattawut Lapcharoensap (Sightseeing).

Novakovich, who will be in town for Blue Metropolis this weekend, certainly ranks among these. His work represents a departure from the standard narrative of Eastern Europeans leaving the old country behind. It flows from a more fluid consciousness, able to shift between the horrors, joys and ordinary realities of both worlds.

(FYI: Novakovich will be part of the panel discussion “On the Road 2” on Saturday, May 3 at 5 p.m. at the Victoria, Hotel Delta (777 University). This is not a reading, as is listed in the program. And Novakovich is not on the panel “Beyond Communism,” which, unfortunately, runs at the same time.)

He’s also remarkably skilled at shifting genders. It’s two pages into the opening story, “Spleen,” before the narrator’s gender is definitively revealed. A priest commands the worshippers to cover “her” up. She has fled to escape a rapist, who she managed first to stab in the stomach with a kitchen knife.

The rest of the story takes place in the U.S., where in many ways the narrator seems more overtly feminized. This is not to say that Infidelities ever implies that women were better off in Croatia. The closing story, “Ribs” illustrates the soul grinding and degrading life in Zagreb that one woman has barely managed to survive.

Part of keeping her soul intact, however, does involve resisting the pressure of American culture to shave her legs: “Coca-Cola could have us by the throat, NATO could blast the hell out of the region if it wanted, but Gillette and Sharon Stone would not get to her, would not possess her hairs and scrape her skin with blades.”

“Ribs” has a plot complex enough to fuel a good-sized Eastern European novel. A probable widow (her husband disappeared after joining the army), the heroine decides to sleep with a sleazy bureaucrat to save her son from being drafted. When the official becomes impotent, an unexpected tenderness arises between them, only to be destroyed by a confession of personal and state secrets.

Like many of the stories in the collection, “Ribs” illustrates how the after effects of atrocities are so often harder to bear than the moments in which they actually occur.

“Hail” is the story of a Buddhist soldier whose life is repeatedly threatened as the balance of power keeps shifting between Serbian and Croatian platoons. The soldier’s spiritual detachment makes him an object of suspicion, alternately dooming and liberating him. Though the main character is never more than a few minutes from death “Hail” is, weirdly, one of the most lighthearted of the stories. The plot moves effortlessly and like some kind of karmic Rubik’s cube, as the other soldiers desperately realign themselves to survive.

In another story, a character describes Croatia as a country “with borders everywhere and territory nowhere. That’s all we have—borders, impossible to cover.” This is a fair description of the characters as well. Their identities have become so complex, they’re impossible to maintain. Often, because of this, they’ve given up the usual defences; and often this is exactly what enables them to survive, psychically, as well as physically.

Infidelities: Stories of War and
Lust by Josip Novakovich, Harper
Perennial, pb, 258pp, $18.95