'The Encyclopedia of the Dead' by Danilo Kiš

Although in some ways the stories of Kiš resemble those of Borges, they are more shaped by sentiment and by the upwelling of popular memory (sometimes toying with the currency of cliché). Kiš builds vertiginous piles of detail and near-simile, much of it drawn from the heterogeneous history of the Balkans. In the title story, a woman is shut overnight in the Royal Library of Sweden, where she finds an encyclopedia with entries for every person who ever lived who does not appear in other encyclopedias. She finds her recently deceased father’s entry, which proves to contain every possible detail about his life. Because the ability to come up with an infinite amount of detail is closer to the fiction writer’s art than to the capacities of memory (let alone of historical record), this story I think is a key to the way Kiš proceeds. That the woman wakes up to find it was all a dream (except that a picture of a flower she copied from the encyclopedia turns out to look exactly like the cancer that killed her father) shows that Kiš is as interested erasing the border between waking and dream as he is in erasing that between history and fiction.

Oct '15