April Fool's Day
“Dark-humored” doesn’t begin to describe Josip Novakovich’s April Fool’s Day, a novel that follows the misadventures of a Croat who survives the brutality of a Communist dictatorship, the horror of a vicious war and the crushing disappointment of post-Soviet freedom. Somehow, Novakovich finds a few things to laugh about among some of the most inhumane historical facts of the twentieth century. Giving him the benefit of the doubt and diving into the novel takes a strong stomach and a willingness to laugh in the face of fear, but the book is worth it.
Ivan Dolinar is, in his childhood, an enthusiastic and optimistic citizen of Yugoslavia. Born on the first day of April in 1948, Ivan’s early years are spent in a harsh environment that will only grow harsher as he grows older. His father had lost an arm and a leg in WWII, but, hoping that medical technology would one day allow for their reattachment, Milan Dolinar kept the severed limbs in a sack in his basement. He refused to relinquish his dedication to them, even after they had decomposed to a pile of bones. Ivan inherited his father’s grim determination, and he spends most of his life trying to make the best of rapidly deteriorating situations.
Despite the difficulty of achieving personal success in Communist Yugoslavia, Ivan appears on the brink of triumph after his first year of medical school. Of course, anything that seems too good to be true always is, and before Ivan knows what is happening a stupid prank gets him sent to a labor camp on an island in the Adriatic. Here the Yugoslav authorities make him break rocks for two years, modeling their abuse on the gulags of Siberia.
Things can always get worse for Ivan, however, and as Yugoslavia is engulfed in a nightmarish civil war he finds himself conscripted into the wrong army. He is a Croat in a Serbian unit, forced to kill and torture his ethnic brethren and destroy his own country for fear of being tortured and killed himself. Even when fate frees him from his service in the Serbian army, the horrific twists of the war push him into one dangerous situation after another.
Eventually, Ivan gives up fighting and tries to live a proper Croatian life, with a wife and a child, but when a disturbing secret from his past is revealed his marriage becomes nearly as hellish as the war. Ivan is certain, finally, that only death can bring him peace, but, alas, it turns out that even that isn’t true.
Novakovich makes all this bleakness funny in the traditional Slavic manner: by resorting to grim but hilarious absurdity. In his book, the dead can walk, coincidences are plentiful and fantastic and, no matter how hopeless a situation appears to be, his characters can usually find the up-side to it. Only in these pages could Ivan’s stay in a prison camp be interrupted by a visit from the Yugoslavian dictator, Tito, and the Indian prime minister, Indira Ghandi; the jocular discussion in which Tito and Ghandi share their opinions of assassination attempts is cynical and sidesplitting. When the novel descends, in its final chapters, into complete incredibility, Novakovich manages to retain control of the narrative, and the strong voice of his character keeps the absurdist satire from going over the top.
There are, too, lighter touches of humor, such as when Ivan, in attempting to build a safe, sane, domestic life for himself, reaches out to examples beyond (in his opinion) backward Croatia. He consults American literature for tips on psychological self-help, child-rearing, marital sexual excitement and dental hygiene. The American way of life is beyond foreign to him, and, despite the fact that he finds American living almost as distasteful as totalitarianism, he gives it a shot anyway. Of course, given Ivan’s lot in life, even halfhearted Americanism doesn’t come easy to him.
At its core, April Fool’s Day couldn’t be more serious. It is filled with mourning for the destruction of the people and culture of the former Yugoslavia, and it is also a tribute to the resilience of the people who survived one of the most senseless conflicts of the last hundred years. Novakovich shows that such resilience comes in the ability to challenge adversity and then laugh about it, to refuse to succumb emotionally or physically. In the end, life may kill you, but that is no reason to give up.
Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.