The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Writer, by Zoran Zivkovic´, translated by Alice Copple-Tosic
reviewed by Tim Feeney

Untitled document

Zoran Zivkovic´. The Writer. Trans. Alice Copple-Tosic. Polaris/Ministry of Whimsy, 2002. 81 pp. Paper: $8.00.

Zivkovic´ is a Serbian writer whose stories often run in the tradition of Calvino/Borges-style fantasy—i.e., he’d be illustrated by the Brothers Quay, not Hildebrandt—but, like Calvino and Borges, he just as often presents nifty little metafictive exempla, as in 1998’s The Writer. This compact novella offers a brisk examination of authorship and ontology, somehow managing to be really funny in the process. An unnamed narrator, suffering from writer’s block, intends to write the final chapter of his book, which began as a novel but has morphed into a story collection. As if stalling, he instead discusses other matters, eventually mentioning a pretentious would-be novelist friend, one with a predilection for Freudian analysis. This novelist has written the narrator into his fiction with the stipulation that the narrator not recognize the character based on himself. When antagonism builds between the two, the narrator attacks the novelist’s pretenses, whereupon the novelist attempts an analysis of the narrator; each is struggling to control—to write—the other. The narrator’s dream sequence late in the story seems to offer an interpretation of the novel we’ve been reading, though naturally the sequence is itself open to the reader’s interpretation; author and reader aren’t so much braided as dreadlocked. Ultimately, we’re not sure who the book’s title refers to: we could be reading the novelist’s work or the narrator’s or someone else’s entirely (and an ingenious textual feature serves to further complicate everything). While William Gass famously wrote that “one thing [the death of the author] cannot mean is that no one did it,” Zivkovic´ suggests that the complex relationship between writer and reader can indeed get knotty to the point that a novel might as well have literally no one as its author.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Writer, by Zoran Zivkovic´, translated by Alice Copple-Tosic reviewed by Tim Feeney Untitled document Zoran Zivkovic´. The Writer. Trans. Alice Copple-Tosic. Polaris/Ministry of Whimsy, 2002. 81 pp. Paper: $8.00. Zivkovic´ is a Serbian writer whose stories often run in the tradition of Calvino/Borges-style fantasy—i.e., he’d be illustrated by the Brothers Quay, not Hildebrandt—but, like Calvino and Borges, he just as often presents nifty little metafictive exempla, as in 1998’s The Writer. This compact novella offers a brisk examination of authorship and ontology, somehow managing to be really funny in the process. An unnamed narrator, suffering from writer’s block, intends to write the final chapter of his book, which began as a novel but has morphed into a story collection. As if stalling, he instead discusses other matters, eventually mentioning a pretentious would-be novelist friend, one with a predilection for Freudian analysis. This novelist has written the narrator into his fiction with the stipulation that the narrator not recognize the character based on himself. When antagonism builds between the two, the narrator attacks the novelist’s pretenses, whereupon the novelist attempts an analysis of the narrator; each is struggling to control—to write—the other. The narrator’s dream sequence late in the story seems to offer an interpretation of the novel we’ve been reading, though naturally the sequence is itself open to the reader’s interpretation; author and reader aren’t so much braided as dreadlocked. Ultimately, we’re not sure who the book’s title refers to: we could be reading the novelist’s work or the narrator’s or someone else’s entirely (and an ingenious textual feature serves to further complicate everything). While William Gass famously wrote that “one thing [the death of the author] cannot mean is that no one did it,” Zivkovic´ suggests that the complex relationship between writer and reader can indeed get knotty to the point that a novel might as well have literally no one as its author.

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