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Nothing in the World: A Novella
Roy Kesey

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olivasdan, October 22, 2006

Book Review

By Daniel Olivas

In his hypnotic and chilling debut, "Nothing in the World: A Novella" (Bullfight Media, $8 paperback), Roy Kesey introduces us to the young Josko Banovic, who lives in Croatia just below his kinsmen's radar and prefers it that way.

As his parents argue about politics and Croatia's growing tensions with Serbia, Josko pines for his newly married sister, Klara, who has left Jezera to begin a new life in Dubrovnik. Josko collects abalone shells for Klara, hoping to give them to her when she returns home. In school, the "teachers rarely called on Josko, and the few times he volunteered an answer, they looked at him as though they remembered having seen him before, but weren't quite sure where." And Josko keeps his distance from the other students because it "was easier simply to be alone."

He is, in a word, anonymous.

But Josko's unassuming existence takes a dreadful turn when the Serbs escalate the conflict with Croatia with attacks on the towns of Krajina, Tenja and Dalj: "For the first time in his life, Josko had someone to hate." Josko enlists in the army, beginning a journey that will take him from heroism to the more ambiguous terrain often traveled by soldiers who commit and suffer from acts of violence that attend war.

Kesey seamlessly weaves the gruesomeness of battle with a dreamlike, almost fabulist style as we follow Josko in his transformation from hero -- he is a brilliant sniper -- to physically and emotionally wounded fighter who abandons the war to find Klara. Josko wanders from town to town, each ripped apart by battle, the few remaining inhabitants numb to violence. He encounters near starvation, exhaustion and hallucinations. He hears a girl's voice, calling him, leading him, somewhere, perhaps to Klara, guiding him on his quest: "She sang ballads and folk songs and at times only his name, and he wondered if she was beautiful."

At one point, Josko is arrested as a deserter and sent to a prison where, he is warned, "Sooner or later you sign your confession and then you disappear."

When interrogated, Josko honestly tells the guard who he is. But truth is met with disbelief and mockery: "Ah. So you're the famous Josko Banovic, the man who shot down two jets over Sibenik, who left the head of that Muslim sniper on a caf? table in Split." Josko realizes that he will undoubtedly face death unless he escapes. And escape he does, in a flurry of brutal, premeditated and bloody acts against his own countrymen.

Interspersed throughout the narrative, Kesey offers three fables, each beginning with "What happened was this" rather than the usual "Once upon a time." The first concerns an old woman whose home is attacked, "bullets from a far hill poured into her house, sizzling and popping all around her." She survives at first. Upon her eventual death, the townsfolk revere her as a saint and eventually turn the old woman's home into a shrine, which is soon desecrated by soldiers. The other two fables similarly demonstrate the struggle between the sacred and the profane, hope and destruction.

Kesey has created a quietly brilliant protest against war, an exquisitely rendered tale in the absurdist spirit of such classics as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Catch-22." It is a tale whose heroes and villains, through the course of battle, often change places until their roles blur.

It is a tale that sadly remains relevant and in need of telling today.

[This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]

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