Globetrotter
Ellen Elias-Bursac
(Translator)
Description
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. Albahari seizes his reader's attention and never yields it in this remarkable, gripping tale.
Product Details
| Publisher | Yale University Press |
| Publish Date | August 26, 2014 |
| Pages | 216 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780300201321 |
| Dimensions | 7.7 X 6.0 X 0.4 inches | 0.6 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
"Easily one of the finest writers of fiction today."--Bill Marx, Arts Fuse
"Albahari maintains masterful control of the narrative . . . [and] a thriller-like energy."--Daniel Goldman, Words Without Borders
"Ellen Elias-Bursac's translation . . . delightfully renders in English the astonishingly precise words Albahari chose in Serbian. . . . Globetrotter encapsulates its author and his countries, and it swallows the reader whole."--Jeffrey Zuckerman, Music and Literature
"[A] beautiful translation."--Scott Abbott, Goalie's Anxiety (blog)
"Stripped of Bernhard's vitriol and Sebald's world-weariness, Albahari breathes fresh, funny life into the almost-genre of the European historical thinkpiece."--Walter Gordon, Full Stop
"In Globetrotter, David Albahari explores the consciousness of emigres from the former Yugoslavia, Croatia and Serbia, showing that while abroad, many of us are even more intensely preoccupied with our histories than we were while living in Yugoslavia. His narrative, structured out of realistic details and perceptions with self-conscious meditation blending history, civilization and its discontents, and personal experience, reaches a density and intensity akin to Krasznahorkai's and Thomas Bernhard's. An intensely idiosyncratic narrative, enjoyable and thoughtful."--Josip Novakovich, author of Shopping for a Better Country, a Man Booker International Prize finalist
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