'101 Detectives' by Ivan Vladislavić

In the title story of this collection, the narrator is a feckless private detective attending, under an alias (of course), a convention of private detectives. His determined but hopeless attempts to act like a detective, even when inappropriate to the circumstances, and his truly detective-like attention to the details of his story, even if attending to the wrong details, and certainly even when this serves him no ostensible purpose other than the procession of the story, make this story a funny and sharp critique of not only both conventions and detection, but also of human aspiration, limitation, vulnerability and the subsumption of these by overarching structures, expectations and social mechanisms. The other stories, whether dealing with extreme marketing (the launch of the new Ford Kafka automobile) or literary readings or corporate innovations, share this approach and interrogation of both detail and language as they uncover the ludicrous disjunctions between human beings and their familiar situations.

Sept 2015