From the first page NOTHING IN THE WORLD grabs the reader and inflicts its grand dilemma of not being able to put the book down yet never wanting for it to end.
At the top, NITW is a soldier's story, Josko's story, a Croatian boy in a blind-leading-the-blind army defending itself against the Serbs. It's a story of war and its horrors, but at its true and large heart, it's a story of the human spirit, the struggle to cope with that which can not be coped with; the mind, the will to survive and prevail, and the things that galvanize that will, in Josko's case, a mysterious siren song and an idealized and vaguely incestuous passion for Klara, Josko's older sister, married and living in Dubrovnik.
Kesey has given us a complex and unflinching character in Josko Banovic, and, as a reader, you breathe the same air as every character in this novella, hear the lugging of their hearts along with your own. The setting is vividly imagistic and Kesey's prose is beautifully tight and precise, the pace, intense. What's unsaid resonates as vibrantly as what's on the page. Bleak fables lace the text; their grim and true lessons yield no false hope. Yet, for all its brutal truth, there is hope here, and jubilation in what heroism really is--flawed, often not pretty, atrocious, even. Josko Banovic haunts you, and you continue to hope for him long after the last page has been turned.
This novella deserves huge attention and celebration that literary fiction can punch and jab at all levels; that it can rock, that it can roll; that literary fiction is alive and well and necessary to feed what is human in us (and props to Bullfight Media and all the small presses that believe in art's sake). It's not to be missed.
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Nothing in the World: A Novella by Roy Kesey
Alicia, June 6, 2006
From the first page NOTHING IN THE WORLD grabs the reader and inflicts its grand dilemma of not being able to put the book down yet never wanting for it to end.At the top, NITW is a soldier's story, Josko's story, a Croatian boy in a blind-leading-the-blind army defending itself against the Serbs. It's a story of war and its horrors, but at its true and large heart, it's a story of the human spirit, the struggle to cope with that which can not be coped with; the mind, the will to survive and prevail, and the things that galvanize that will, in Josko's case, a mysterious siren song and an idealized and vaguely incestuous passion for Klara, Josko's older sister, married and living in Dubrovnik.
Kesey has given us a complex and unflinching character in Josko Banovic, and, as a reader, you breathe the same air as every character in this novella, hear the lugging of their hearts along with your own. The setting is vividly imagistic and Kesey's prose is beautifully tight and precise, the pace, intense. What's unsaid resonates as vibrantly as what's on the page. Bleak fables lace the text; their grim and true lessons yield no false hope. Yet, for all its brutal truth, there is hope here, and jubilation in what heroism really is--flawed, often not pretty, atrocious, even. Josko Banovic haunts you, and you continue to hope for him long after the last page has been turned.
This novella deserves huge attention and celebration that literary fiction can punch and jab at all levels; that it can rock, that it can roll; that literary fiction is alive and well and necessary to feed what is human in us (and props to Bullfight Media and all the small presses that believe in art's sake). It's not to be missed.
(6 of 10 readers found this comment helpful)