From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be. Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn't know where they are, what border they're protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can't be sure whether they're fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment. Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari's Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war. "A satirical take on war in the vein of...

Displaced from his home more than twenty years ago as Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia descended into war, Serbian author David Albahari found safety in Canada, where this novel was written. In Globetrotter, Albahari deals with the bewilderments of exile and lost identity, themes he has investigated in earlier works. But in this unsettling experimental book he also enters new arenas, where sexual identity and the nature of blame and guilt attract his scrutiny.Narrated in a single uninterrupted paragraph, the novel takes place in the late 1990s at the Banff Art Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Three men—a painter from Saskatchewan and the narrator of the tale, a writer from Serbia, and a man whose traveling Croatian grandfather long ago jotted his name in a local museum's guest book—become acquainted, then attached, then fatally entangled. On a climactic mountain hike that seethes with jealousy, desire, shame, and guilt, each man must engage in a final struggle....

A "sardonic and brutal" journey into Serbia's underground secret societies and conspiracy theories (TheIndependent). The place is Serbia, the time is the late 1990s. Our protagonist, a single man, writes a regular op-ed column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking pot and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping a beautiful woman. Intrigued, he follows the woman into the tangled streets of the city until he loses sight of her. A few days later he receives a mysterious manuscript whose contents seem to mutate each time he opens it. To decipher the manuscript—a collection of fragments on the Kabbalah and the history of the Jews of Zemun and Belgrade—he contacts an old schoolmate, now an eccentric mathematician, and a group of men from the Jewish community. As the narrator delves deeper into arcane topics, he begins to...