About
Author: Josip Navakovich (Croatia)
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting
Place: Erstwhile Yugoslavia
Time: 1940s-2000s
My Rating (see what this means)
My Subjective Rating: 3
My ‘Objective’ Rating: 3.48
Introduction
According to Josip Novakovich, April Fool’s Day was his attempt to write the obituary for Yugoslavia – and Ivan Dolinar, the protagonist, was Yugoslavia personified.
Well, Ivan Dolinar is certainly something. This novel follows his journey through bleak and bleaker times as he grows up with Yugoslavia. Yugoslav history certainly plays instrumental part in Ivan’s life – the Soviet split or the Croatian Spring all mark turning points – with Ivan even crossing paths with another personification of Yugoslavia – the one-man state Josip Broz Tito – also a fellow Croat.
Through grim times – the book remains riotously funny – with its dry Soviet-style humour, marvellously absurd and magic realist – maybe? I am not really sure.
You should check for yourself!
Reviews
Ivan Dolinar’s life can be considered an intense ride – from intense patriotic fervour for Yugoslavia as a child to disillusionment in its prisons, from the philosophical qualities of bachelorhood to happy and unhappy marriages, from the joys of cuckolding to the chronic shame following being caught. And despite his attempts at avoiding groups, Ivan ended up an unwilling member of Milosevic’s Chetniks as well as their (obviously unwilling) POW.
A nation is a huge group of people, and each group of people has a lot of jerks in it, so if you identify yourself with the group, you partake of the jerkdom.
His life becomes an instructive proxy to understand the upheavals of one-man states like Yugoslavia – the suffocating restrictions, the abruptness of regime actions, the hollowness of its core. All these is captured in great writing and narrative choices – with fascinating characters and good story telling – and a fair bit of innovations.
<Spoilers Ahead>
The biggest innovation occurs on the 2/3rd mark of the book and the tone of the writing switches. Ivan is suddenly dead and Ivan’s soul? is observing the events leading to his burial from inside his dead body. Well written, it adds a crisp freshness to an already engaging book. The Yugoslav personification continues to hold as Yugoslavia has also recently died.
And then low and behold! Ivan claws out of his grave – is he a ghost? Or did he never die? It certainly is not clear. Is it supposed to mean that Yugoslavia never died? Or that the ghost of Yugoslavia continues to haunt its several Balkan republics?
The Balkan republics have made a fairly clear break from their Yugoslav past – well except Kosovo perhaps, and certainly except Bosnia and Herzegovina’s broken politics? Maybe that was the point – even if it seems small now. Didn’t Ivan once say –
“That’s all he’s made, a point. Points can’t be big. Don’t you know the geometric definition of a point? Points can’t add up to substance.”
Point or no point, April Fool’s Day is a marvelously written, thoroughly engaging book and I enjoyed reading it
The Balkan Century:
A great video on the history of the region from a great youtube channel
Picture Credits:
- Taken from ‘the Balkan Century’ video of one of my favorite YouTube channels