ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“A Kafka for our times” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), David Albahari was born 1948 in Péc, Serbia. He studied English language and literature in Belgrade. In 1994 he moved to Calgary, Canada with his wife and their two children, where he still lives today. He mainly writes novels and short stories and is also an established translator from English into Serbian. He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His collection of short stories, Description of Death, won the Ivo Andrić Award for the best collection of short stories published in Yugoslavia in 1982 and his novel Bait the NIN Award for the best novel published in Yugoslavia in 1996. His latest collection of stories, Every Night in Another Town, has won the important Vital Award, one of the most significant literary awards in Serbia. His books have been translated into sixteen languages. English translations include a selection of short stories, entitled Words Are Something Else, as well as four novels: Tsing, Bait, Snow Man, and Götz and Meyer. He has translated into Serbian many books by authors such as Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, V. S. Naipaul, and Vladimir Nabokov as well as plays by Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, and Jason Sherman. He was a participant in the International Writing Program in Iowa (1986) and International Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary, under the auspices of the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program (1994–95). Between 1991 and 1994 he was president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating fiction and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s. The AATSEEL Award for Best Translation into English was given to her translation of David Albahari’s short-story collection Words Are Something Else, and ALTA’s National Translation Award was given to her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer in 2006. Her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunaclass="underline" Working in a Tug-of-War was given the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Restless Books is an independent, nonprofit publisher devoted to championing essential voices from around the world, whose stories speak to us across linguistic and cultural borders. We seek extraordinary international literature that feeds our restlessness: our hunger for new perspectives, passion for other cultures and languages, and eagerness to explore beyond the confines of the familiar. Our books—fiction, narrative nonfiction, journalism, memoirs, travel writing, and young people’s literature—offer readers an expanded understanding of a changing world.
PRAISE FOR CHECKPOINT
“Brilliant, weird, and audacious… Anyone who cares about world literature must read David Albahari.”
“A satirical take on war in the vein of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, Serbian author David Albahari’s Checkpoint is shocking and comic in equal turns, skillfully pulled together by the force of Albahari’s wit…. Visceral, wild, and often hilarious, Checkpoint is a dark delight.”
“A platoon of soldiers assigned to maintain order winds up doing anything but in this pointed military satire… the book is a worthy descendant of The Good Soldier Svejk and Catch-22, though when Albahari gets dark (as every military satire must), he gets very dark; rapes, beheadings, and vicious stabbings are all part of the territory…. There’s no questioning his passion on the subject. An honest war story only emerges ‘once it conforms to the government’s truth,’ he asserts. This novel celebrates fiction’s capacity to critique the party line.”
“Checkpoint is a tornado of a book. David Albahari, a noted Serbian author who lives in Canada, muscles this Kafkaesque short novel into the war-is-absurd literary tradition in one tremendous 183-page paragraph…. Comic and absurd scenarios alternate with episodes of fear, confusion, and horrific violence as the 30-man unit tries to make sense of a mission they don’t understand. They can’t communicate with their central command to get updated orders or news. They encounter enemies and refugees whose nationalities and languages they can’t identify. Amid all this haze, the narrator is free to free-associate…. Throughout the novel, the dirty realities of war mingle inextricably with such intrusions from the mystical and the imaginary. In the midst of slaughter, rape, and betrayal, the commander is visited by images from movies, literature, his past. When his men die he cries, he vomits, he collapses. Yet they remain as respectful and loyal as soldiers in a fairy tale…. Stylistically, JP Donleavy and Gary Shteyngart come to mind at times, while imagistically one might think of Goya, Picasso, or the Surrealists. But Albahari has a distinctive voice, and it comes through vividly in Ellen Elias-Bursać’s able translation from the Serbian.”