Svetislav Basara – författare

Ordered by two mysterious men to write a statement of about 100 pages, the narrator of Chinese Letter--who's not sure of his name, but calls himself Fritz--faithfully records the bizarre occurrences of his daily life: his absurd conversations with his mother who is abducted by slave traders, his visits to his friend who works in the hospital's autopsy room, and his sister's tumultuous marriage to the butcher's son, to name a few. Widely respected in Serbia, the term "Basarian" has been coined to refer to his unique writing style, reminiscent of the best of Samuel Beckett for its directness, existential pondering, and odd sense of humor.

Svetislav Basara’s short fiction plays wild games with time and space while nonetheless keeping one foot grounded at all times in the real-life concerns of a young writer during the late communist and postcommunist eras in the former Yugoslavia. Dealing with civil war and other matters of life and death, Basara’s stories remain stubbornly eccentric, retaining every quirk, kink, and convolution made famous in his celebrated English-language debut novel, Chinese Letter.

Hired to write a travel article for a magazine, Ulan-Bator ventures to Mongolia, where he finds a cast of odd and outlandish expatriates, including an ex-Red Army officer turned Buddhist, a French zombie, and an American correspondent for a newspaper that no longer exists. At the center of this philosophical romance is the Genghis Khan Hotel, where a group of drunken intellectuals endlessly debate a new cosmological theory proposing that the world itself is a hologram.

Exploring sanity and insanity, truth and untruth, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease is Svetislav Basara’s unblinking and unforgettable deconstruction of the Soviet psyche.Told as an eclectic collection of appropriated testimonies, treatises, missives, and police files, The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease follows the progression of the contagion’s patient zero, a Soviet citizen (sometimes) named Demyan Lavrentyevich Parkinson, as he ascends from hellish health to the sacred illness.Hailed as one of Serbia’s most influential living writers, Svetislav Basara’s scathing, irreverent critiques of authoritarianism have twice won him Serbia’s prestigious NIN Award. In The Rise and Fall of Parkinson’s Disease, Basara lives up to this reputation with a book as formally ambitious as it is intellectually sophisticated. His blend of grotesque absurdism and wry humor evokes the paranoid, vexing worlds of Franz Kafka’s novels and the meta-textual assemblages of Paul Auster. Told from a colorful range of perspectives, the novel is a multifaceted, crystalline account of truth, lies, and history, a sprawling case study of humans in an inhuman society.