The Ki?? of Death
WADE, ALAN
The Kis of Death The Encyclopedia of the Dead By Danilo Kis Farrar Straus Giroux. 199 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by Alan Wade Fiction writer; free-lance critic The fable is an unpopular genre...
...He is such astrong and original writer, and his stories about death are so vigorous, that reading him we can almost believe that outwitting our doom isn't merely a foolish hope, but rather a possible strategy...
...It is as though he wishes to escape the details of daily existence, to oppose the determinism inherent in both repressive political systems and a world ruled by an incomprehensible—or possibly nonexistent—God...
...Only death is certain...
...But then the heretic drops to the ground and is killed...
...That is every writer's only real hope and the premise of this collection...
...Everyone's vain wish...
...Recalling the fate of Borges' character who was unable to forget anything, the Encyclopedia inspires horror...
...Challenged by the apostle Peter to prove the truth of his doctrine, Simon performs a miracle—flying into the sky as high as the sixth heaven...
...It even mentions the flowers he began painting in the final months of his life—which turn out, as she discovers when she awakes, to look exactly like the sarcoma that killed him...
...our end is not extinction, it is an eternal life on the page in this writerly vision of the afterlife...
...It consists of nine dark tales, all relating to death and ranging through history from shortly after the time of Jesus to the present...
...There is something terrifying in the notion that nothing will be forgotten, as frightening as the prospect of living your whole life over again without a single change...
...From the minimalists to the (somewhat scarcer) novelists of baroque extravagance, our writers generally forgo its overtly metaphysical intentions in favor of one or another of the current brands of naturalism...
...I want to achieve immortality through not dying...
...Despite the seeming finality of that ending, the story is hardly an apologia for Christianity...
...Gogol, Dostoevsky, the Bible of both testaments, and especially Kafka ho ver pressingly in the near background...
...This astonishes and momentarily defeats the apostle...
...In "The Story of the Master and the Disciple," a master helps an unworthy student finish a mediocre book, then is repudiated by the student as his reward...
...How are we to use these events to arrive at belief...
...The appearance of truth, not truth itself, is what becomes important...
...She seeks to reinsert herself in his posthumous life by insisting that she was his muse and chief subject...
...Everything is there, "every fish ever caught, every page read, the name of every plant the boy ever picked...
...What does the death of a wonder-worker mean...
...Simon is a more energetic and energizing character than the sanctimonious Peter, and his miracles are as impressive as those of Jesus...
...If theodor of ulterior motiveclings to some of them—the sense that they were written not so much to discover as to illustrate something already known, as in Aesop's simpler fables—they nevertheless resist easy interpretation...
...She falls asleep and dreams that the thousands of books on the walls contain comprehensive accounts of the lives of everyone who has lived since the library was founded in 1789 (apart from the famous, who are not included here...
...And in the Naboko vian "Red Stamp with Lenin's Picture, " the mistress of a dead poet has burned their correspondence and thereby excluded herself from his biography...
...Its premise is that "each individual is a star unto himself...
...All that mattered to him— because what his world valued most besides an honorable life was an honorable death—was to preserve the dignity required of an Esterhazy at such a moment...
...We are left with a host of subversive questions: Do miracles prove anything...
...The vision is not reassuring...
...History," the narrator tells us, "is written by the victors...
...Theability of language to overcome mortality is the explicit subject in these bookish allegories...
...free-lance critic The fable is an unpopular genre in America these days...
...Writers fantasize...
...it takes on a life of its own...
...Yet, as Allen and Kis know, lives end and words survive...
...The latest work of Danilo Kis to be translated from the Serbo-Croatian, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, comes out of a different, mostly Central European tradition...
...Language does not merely comment on life...
...Legends are woven by the people...
...Or did he know she was lying to comfort him, so that his courage was therefore real...
...In the title story, a Borgesian fantasy subtitled "A Whole Life," the narrator is locked into the Swedish Royal Library for the night...
...He seems to write almost as an act of protest against the naturalism of most conventional fiction...
...The Hapsburg rulers affirm the first, his radical supporters thesecond...
...As he goes to his execution, serene to the last, his mother falsely gives him a signal that he is to be pardoned...
...Woody Allenhassaid, "Idon'twant to achieve immortality through my work...
...Death here does not have the last word...
...death...
...The Book of Kings and Fools" has a mid-19th-century Frenchman writing a book asserting the value of freedom and the dangers of tyranny...
...Did he believe her, and die with an air of bravery because he thought he would be pardoned at the last minute...
...Different as they are from Milan Kundera's speculative novels, they are similar in the sense of plot, character and description being overwhelmed by questions about history, faith, love, language, and, always with Kis...
...In an alternate version of the miracle, Simon has himself buried alive and promises to rise on the third day...
...The Encyclopedia fulfills the universal wish that all the trivial yet irreplaceable details making up our existence not simply vanish with our death...
...Kis begins with the quasi-biblical story of Simon Magus, a heretic who preaches that the Christian God is a tyrant and the world has irredeemably fallen...
...To Die for One's Country Is Glorious" recounts the final hours of Esterhazy, a Hungarian aristocrat sentenced to death for his participation in a violent uprising...
...Though his mistress, the whore Sophia, takes this as confirmation of his teaching that "Man's life is a Fall, and a hell, and the world is in the hands of tyrants," Peter claims victory for the newly revealed truth of Jesus...
...the words themselves do...
...Though his descriptive powers are considerable, and he can create vivid, memorable characters, the author's interest is mostly elsewhere...
...Death is indeed the one certainty in these parables, and words and fantasies are what rescue a life from death's oblivion—or, as in some of the tales, consign that life to an end worse than oblivion...
...Long after his death the work is plagiarized and transformed into a 20th-century blueprint for totalitarianism...
...When his decomposing corpse is dug up, Sophia walks of finto the desert, still faithful to Simon's teachings...
...She finds the volume that records her father's detailed biography from his birth to his death two months earlier...
...Her mortal body returned to the brothel, while her spirit moved on to a new Illusion...
...He has some of the savage beauty of Milton's Satan, undermining any orthodox reading of this story as effectively as Lucifer did Paradise Lost...
...No matter how far-flung the stories are in space or time, Danilo Kis launches his readers at once into an intellectual battle with ultimate problems...
Vol. 72 • August 1989 • No. 12
