Danilo Kiš. Žamor povijesti

In six exceptional essays, Thompson brings the life and work of the “great and invisible writer” (as Danilo Kiša described Kundera) closer to us, skillfully moving along the same line on which Kiš’s art was created – the border between Literature and History. How much of the future Kiš can be found in the letters that, after meeting in Makarska, he sent to his first love, Jean McCrindle, the daughter of British communists? How much was he influenced by Samuel Beckett, the author for whom History was a “fainting” (for Kiš it was a murmur, terrible and inevitable)? How is Kiš’s axiom about the indivisibility of ethics and poetics inscribed and read in his works on European totalitarianisms, and how in the context of the atrocities committed in these regions, at the end of that same bloody 20th century? How did he know how to hear and convey in the documents on which he based his stories what historians too often did not – human suffering?