“[Albahari] unfolds events like a fever dream, seamlessly weaving brutality and comedy. His vision of war is a grim fairy tale without a moral lesson, and a warning for an age of reconstituted borders.”
“Albahari’s novel is a decidedly harrowing one, moving from a straightforward account of men at war into a more surreal, even symbolic, place. The blend of modern concerns and the tone of a bleak fable recalls the works of Magnus Mills and Manuel Gonzales, but there’s something more sinister present here as well. In its final pages, this novel takes a bravura turn, adding another layer atop all that’s gone before and closing on an absolutely harrowing note.”
“[Checkpoint] is a book that shows war in all its horror and its pointlessness and will surely be added to the roster of great anti-war novels.”
PRAISE FOR DAVID ALBAHARI
“Between adventure and apocalypse… Kafka and Kubrick… combining in grotesque-comical manner all the ridiculousness, beauty, horror, subtlety and extravagance that literature can hold.”
“The book’s single paragraph encourages reading it in one sitting…. Even translated from his native Serbian, Albahari’s prose has the contemplative, textured quality of such Eastern European writers as Kundera.”
“Albahari makes us feel how fiercely the present needs to know the past. The present is an expression of the past, whether we know what it was or we don’t, and when there exists only a void between us and our antecedents, he suggests, it is this void, rather than what ought to be our own lives, that will claim us. The book is a sophisticated meditation on the inextricability of historical memory and identity; it is also a gorgeous work of the imagination about an act of imagination. The tone is pure, as strange as can be, and hypnotizing.”
“Albahari has written another investigation into the dark currents flowing just beneath the surface of human experience, and we should feel lucky to follow him down.”
“Albahari is one of the great writers of this world and we do not know it, or not enough.”
ALSO BY DAVID ALBAHARI
Leeches
Götz and Meyer
Globetrotter
Learning Cyrillic: Stories
Snow Man
Bait
Words Are Something Else
Tsing
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2010, 2018 David Albahari
Translation copyright © 2018 Ellen Elias-Bursać
First published as Kontrolni Punkt by Stubovi kulture, Belgrade, 2010
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher
First Restless Books paperback edition September 2018
Paperback ISBN: 9781632061928
eISBN: 9781632061935
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938301
Cover design by Matt Dorfman
Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
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