The Ark and The Archivist

If I had to name one book that bewitched me as a child, it would not be a picture book or a collection of fairy tales, but rather a slim, steel blue, clothbound volume on my parents’ bookshelf: a genealogy of my mother’s family dating back to the 1700s. It was, as genealogies tend to be, a network of names, some with biographical entries, others bare, each accompanied by two dates—of birth and death—or, in the case of the latest offshoots, a date, an en dash, and a question mark. I would look for my mother’s name in the book’s final pages and fill in the void that did not contain my father, my brothers, my sister, and me, because the genealogy had been assembled by relatives who had decades earlier settled in San Francisco, and who no doubt (in those pre-internet days) had difficulties tracing all the members of the family, most of whom—including us—lived in the Middle East. Transfixed by the physical orderliness of a no-longer-physical past, and perhaps disconcerted by the fissure the book had inadvertently injected into my family by stripping us of the proof of our existence, I undertook, in childish heroism, my own compendium: a notebook that I titled “Everyone I Have Ever Known,” inside which I wrote, quite literally and in no chronological sequence, the names of everyone I had ever known: family members, friends, teachers, neighbors (both alive and dead). If I understood, even then, the futility of such a project, I could not help the compulsion to contain the uncontainable.

What I did not know was that I had entered Kiš-ian territory, the uncanny terrain of the writer Danilo Kiš.

An Orpheus who through mastery of language carries the reader to the underworld and back, Kiš, though still largely unknown in the English-speaking world, was that rare breed of writer as equally committed to style and technique as to excavating the truth, in all its cold-bloodedness—often by reinventing it. As he said in a 1989 interview:

I don’t believe a writer has a right to give in to fantasy… After everything the history of this century has dealt us, it is clear that fantasy, and hence romanticism, has lost all its meaning. Modern history has created such authentic forms of reality that today’s writer has no choice but to give them artistic shape, to “invent” them if need be: that is, to use authentic data as raw material and endow them, through the imagination, with new form.

Hailed by such writers as Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Joseph Brodsky—who deemed Kiš’s novel Garden, Ashes “the best book produced on the Continent in the post-war period”—Kiš...