April Fool's Day

Hoo boy, do I love to come across a book that grabs me from the first page and will not let me go until I read the last word. April Fool's Day is such a book. For those who love evocative, creative prose, Josip Novakovich will provide six hours of incredible literature. I found myself looking at the frontispiece every now and then for the first twenty or thirty pages, looking for the name of the translator. (There is none: it's written in English.) I didn't have to look, because translation, for those who speak a second language, can never come close to the beauty of the original language in which a book was written. I should have trusted my own sense. Poor Ivan is born on April 1, 1948, but his parents decide to make it April 2, officially, since they don't want any ill tidings to come to their new son. Well, sorry, folks, the entire fellow's life is one long April Fool's Day. Longing to praise his country's leader, he gets punished; longing to love, he gets lonely; longing to be right, he doesn't know if he's wrong. This is a powerfully philosophical book, much more this than satirical, I think. Read it. It is really that good.

Croatian author Josip Novakovich's novel bursts the bounds of genre. Both naturalistic in its depiction of the Yugoslavian war and its atrocities, and fantastic and darkly absurd in its depiction of the life of main character Ivan Dolinar, the novel seesaws between the horrific and the hilarious. Surprising in his ability to wrest unique images from universal experiences, Novakovich writes with such clarity and directness that the reader immediately identifies with Ivan and empathizes with him as uncontrollable forces buffet him throughout his life. Born, appropriately, on April Fool's Day, 1948, Ivan immediately comes alive for the reader through the author's recognition of the universal qualities of children. In many ways Ivan is a child-Everyman, albeit one with a Croatian upbringing. At nineteen, he passes the exams for medical school, where he forms fast friendships, tries to fall in love, and excels in anatomy--until he and a roommate are overheard joking about assassinating Marshall Tito, a conversation which results in a four-year sentence to a prison labor camp, where, absurdly, he has a cigar with Marshall Tito. As Ivan becomes more and more a prisoner of his political system, the sense of absurdity grows. Eventually, thanks to nationwide unrest, Ivan, a Croat, is drafted into the Yugoslav army and, absurdly, sent to Croatia to fight the Croatian army, only to be captured by the Croats and forced to fight the Serbs until his unit surrenders to the Yugoslav Army which drafted him in the first place. Forced to make a 100-mile march, the end of which would be freedom for anyone who survived, Ivan observes atrocities beyond his imaginings. In the second half, his eventual marriage, fatherhood, employment, and decision to engage in "preemptive adultery" lead to further absurdities (and some long-standing enmities) as he ages into his fifties. Having studied philosophy, Ivan continues to look for meaning in life, often engaging in personal religious debates as he searches for "a chance to think something essential," something which would "give him the sensation of being alive." The conclusion is a blockbuster, sixty pages of the most absurd, farcical, and hilariously ironic writing in recent memory, a section which comes close to slapstick at the same time that it is indescribably bleak. Mining the emotions of both comedy and tragedy, the ending transcends the boundaries of realism. Novakovich writes a testament to the absurd, creating a satire/farce which features a main character whose wasted life comes as close to tragedy as anything the Greeks imagined. Mary Whipple

Josip Novakovich is now one of my favorite writers! This book managed to deal with some very tough issues in the Yugoslavian war while at the same time come off as one of the most humorous books I've read in literature since Mark Twain. Ivan Dolinar is the perfect picaro, and can I think be listed among that great international tradition. The death and afterlife of Ivan is some of the most imaginative and compelling storytelling I've read since García Márquez. As soon as I finished April Fools Day I rushed to find what else I could read from Novakovich. His short stories are just as clever and addicting. Josip Novakovich must be one of the most underrated writers out there. A great, original voice. Read him!

As in his short stories and essays, Novakovich places his protagonist in a series of impossible situations--then sits back and watches small truths about the way we are emerge. This is the mark of a truly great, humorous and sensitive writer. In his first novel, Novakovich proves he's tuned in to the human condition, not to mention how our history is one great cycle. April Fool's Day is a testament to the innate storytelling skill Novakovich brings to the table. April Fool's Day should be read by any serious reader or writer.

Novakovich's prose has a brash clarity that moves pages and as a result April Fools' Day can be read cover-to-cover in one or two sittings. Let's just say that Ivan's not a boring guy, and in a market where the bulk of literary novels spend hundreds of snail pages negotiating the slightest quiver in the character's emotional landscape, Novakovich's Ivan seldom enjoys such a position of privilege or the meandering introspection that often comes along with it. Ivan's beaten and battered and on the move and Novakovich's deft employment of black and absurdist humor create a novel that reads like epic folklore. April Fools' Day, Josip Novakovich's first novel (he has several other books of essays and short stories)is full of Ivan - the kind of character who demands a novel coalesce around him. Ivan demands alot in this novel - alot that he never gets. He's the kid with grand gumption who derails a train and beats his younger brother with great relish and fears ghosts and horses and dreams big, he's the young man who watches his delusions of grandeur fade, he studies medicine, he smokes a cigar with Castro and eats what he's already eaten, and Ivan cannot for all his effort figure out how to negotiate those mysterious females. Ivan also goes to war and prison and gets married and grows older although maybe not wiser and dies and lives on... He does everything and nothing. He flickers from doer to hapless victim again and again and it's in these sections that I found myself rooting for Ivan the way I find myself rooting for myself sometimes - hoping for the best, putting my head down and going for it.