Nothing in the World: A Novella

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Mary Akers, January 10, 2007 (view all comments by Mary Akers)
NOTHING IN THE WORLD lures you in innocently--and lyrically--enough. The first paragraph is lovely, placing the reader solidly in Josko' world, which manages (like so much of Kesey's work) to feel both familiar and exotic, no small feat:

"The white stone walls of Josko's house were tinged with gold in the growing light, and the only sound was the sharp ring of his father's pick glancing off the rocks in the vineyard. Josko ran to join him as the sun slipped into the sky, and they worked together without speaking, his father freeing the rocks from the soil, Josko heaving them to his shoulder and staggering to the wall they were building to mark their property line to the east."

This attention to detail and to the sensory experience of the reader is consistent throughout Roy's book and as I read I was drawn along, unwilling to leave that world that felt so very real to me. Even when the world became darker and more violent, or perhaps especially when the world became darker and more violent, for that is when Kesey's matter-of-fact, detailed style really grabs you by the throat:

"Josko opened his eyes, and the sky was a thin whitish blue. There was the warm salty sweetness of blood in his mouth, and behind his eyes he felt a strange dense presence. He raised one hand to his head. Above his left ear, a shard of metal protruded from his skull. He wrapped his hand around it and ripped it out. Pain deafened him, and strips of sky floated down to enfold him."

Okay, from that point on, I was entirely hooked. My own brain began to throb with a "strange dense presence" and I realized it was Josko in there, Josko in my brain, becoming part of my grey matter creating new peaks and grooves as he becomes a legend in his own country (unknown to him)--a celebrated war hero, first for shooting down two enemy planes with his unit, and then for singlehandedly killing the infamous sniper Hadzihafizbegovic and setting his severed head on a table in a cafe. The trouble is, as Josko moves through the countryside alone, becoming more and more dirty and disheveled (also crazed by the haunting female voice that sings in his head, pulling him along siren-like) he looks less and less like a war hero and he is repeatedly shot at, beaten, even arrested and imprisoned. In prison, in an utterly painful and ironic scene, the soldiers beat Josko most brutally of all because when they demand to know his name, he tells them he is Josko Banovic. Of course you are, says the soldier, and I am Marshall Tito. They kick him for claiming to be a man they have made into legend, a famous hero. We know he is Josko, he knows he is, and yet the soldiers may just kill him for telling the truth which they are certain is a lie.

That sense of tragic unfairness permeates NOTHING IN THE WORLD, absolutely aptly, given that it is a novella that has the fighting between Serbs and Croats as its backdrop. The writing is intelligent, the story is gripping and dark but also funny and redemptive in places, and the ending is perfect. NOTHING IN THE WORLD is a great read--and like nothing in the world I have read before.

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olivasdan, October 22, 2006 (view all comments by olivasdan)
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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Alicia, June 6, 2006 (view all comments by Alicia)
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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Product Details

ISBN:

9780975522042

Publisher:

Bullfight Media

Publication Date:

May 2006

Author:

Kesey, Roy

Binding:

Trade Paper

Language:

English

Pages:

116