Four Stories Till the End

by Zoran Živković

In what strange edifice of the imagination do you find a condemned cell, a hotel room and a hospital room? What kind of hotel offers a zinc mine, a meat-packing plant, a weapons factory and a cemetery of famous artists among its attractions? Why do four people commit suicide in the same bathroom and why does a literature professor cut up several of the greatest works of literature into a confetti of letters? In this wildly imaginative, wildly funny satire on Art and Death nothing is quite what it seems and the maze of symbols grows more complex with each encounter.

Genres: Serbian Literature, Short Stories, Fiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Zoran Živković was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, in 1948. In 1973 he graduated from the Department of General Literature with the theory of literature, Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade; he received his master's degree in 1979 and his doctorate in 1982 from the same school. He lives in Belgrade, Serbia, with his wife Mia, who is French, and their twin sons Uroš and Andreja. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology. He's received plenty of awards, one of them being the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella (The Library, 2003).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

“It seems that throughout my artistic universe, despite its darkness, there is one sound that prevails in its many shapes: the sound of laughter.” - Zoran Živković

The Serbian author's Four Stories Till the End is a short novel of perfectly timed charm, a meditation on art and creativity, dreams and the fantastic, the joys of storytelling and ultimate questions of life and death.

Zoran Živković has observed: the more elements of the fantastic injected into a work, the more a writer is well to exercise control and provide coherence in order to achieve the best narrative results. And since Four Stories Till the End contains numerous instances of the fantastic that are bizarre, weird, wacky and wild in the extreme, I'm pleased to share good news: Mr. Živković has created a clear, easy to follow structure composed of four key building blocks:

Courteous Narrator: Each of the four chapters is told in the first person by a calm, well-mannered gent who is perhaps a librarian or college instructor. Zoran Živković recounts how one Serbian critic described his literary voice as “too English.” I suspect this critic was alluding to the way in which Mr. Živković frequently features a polite, reserved narrator reminding a reader of such prototypical British characters as tea sipping Septimus Harding from Anthony Trollop’s The Warden.

Sparse Settings: Here are the four chapters: 1) The Cell, 2) The Hospital Room, 3) The Hotel Room, 4) The Elevator. In each chapter, this is the space where the narrator receives his visitors and where all conversations are conducted.

Garrulous Guests: The narrator in the cell has a guard who opens the cell door to let in visitors one at a time: his lawyer, the prosecutor, the judge. Each visitor has an astonishing story to tell and each of the three stories shares a common image and motif. When the judge leaves, the guard enters once again to relate his own story. Then, after the departure of the guard, there’s one final, climatic event transforming the narrator. This “visitors-stories-transformation” template is then used in the hospital room, the hotel room and the elevator.

Language: Absolutely no colloquialisms or jargon in sight. Similar to nearly all of the author’s other novels, individuals are identified not by name but by occupation - five from the list: missionary, sculptor, veterinarian, animal tamer, maid. And it’s so easy for readers around the globe to identify with the four unnamed narrators in their unnamed cities. Added to this, the vocabulary is simple and the storytelling is incredibly engaging, remind one of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox or The BFG. Translator Alice Copple-Tošić deserves a special call-out for rendering the author’s Serbian into smooth, accessible English, such a delight to read.

So, keeping in mind the overall structure, as a way of sharing a more specific taste of this remarkable work, I’ll shift focus to one chapter: The Hospital Room:

After the duty nurse quickly makes sure he’s doing fine, the narrator returns to reading his book but is interrupted by the arrival of an older man, a patient from a room down the hall. The narrator invites his gust to take a seat and the oldster immediately introduces himself as a retired circus ticket-collector and launches into the challenges he faced when people attempted to sneak into the circus for free: in winter, hiding kids under one’s long coat (the world record is held by a tram driver hiding eleven kids under his raincoat); in autumn, using an umbrella (but, curiously, some of the best circus performers were those discovered in umbrellas); in summer a magician performing tricks and in spring, a master hypnotist hypnotizing ticket collectors.

However, this is but prelude - the old man goes on to say his circus memories merely serves as introduction since the real reason for his visit is to share a mysterious dream he had, a dream about someone confronting disaster on a ship. And that someone is none other than the narrator himself.

The narrator's second visitor is a retired circus animal keeper who tells of the various ways in which she got the animals to go to sleep: elephants by Baroque music, lions by heroic epic poetry, giraffes by early Impressionist art, monkeys by black and white neorealist films. She then conveys her dream of calamity when the narrator is aboard an airplane.

The third visitor is a retired plump circus detective who relates his experiences involving a checkroom attendant poisoner, a female fire fighter with arsonist inclinations and an usher and cleaning lady, both serial killers. He goes on to describe his dream of the narrator facing catastrophe on a train.

Following the departure of the narrator's third guest, the nurse enters and speaks of her previous job as a circus nurse who prepared the performers mentally: trapeze artists with mathematics, jugglers with theological problems, illusionists with the philosophy of time and clowns with ultimate metaphysical questions. Then she details her dream with the narrator as main character stepping into a radiant room.

I've synopsized for brevity's sake - all three visitors and the nurse describe their experiences and dream in much greater detail and with more color and pizzazz. My wish here is to convey a sense of pattern and reference this pattern to highlight two additional points:

The author has noted Nicolai Gogol has been a major influence in his own writing, specifically how to increase the symbolic value of a fantastic story. Four Stories Till the End serves as an excellent example: things like a bird, a door, a stone sculpture, creativity bordering on madness and intense, blinding light all carry symbolic weight and reappear from chapter to chapter.

Also, the specific manner in which Nicolai Gogol uses dreams to emphasize previously stated themes and details associated with his characters. Likewise, Zoran Živković's dream sequences in Four Stories are employed for similar reasons.

I certainly hope your interest has been aroused. Four Stories Till the End is a short novel well worth seeking out. Available both as a standalone book and as part of Impossible Stories Two published by Cadmus Press.


Serbian author Zoran Živković, born 1948

[Bogi Takács]

Short, snappy, weird. I liked how the stories tied together and it had some wonderful imagery (being chased by a tunnel - brrrrrrr) but ultimately this one didn't feel like Živković's strongest work. I consistently enjoy his writing though, so I'm slowly making my way through his oeuvre...
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Source of the book: Bought with my own money

[Pooja Pimputkar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like a painting wrapped up in a novel. Dark, funny and immensely profound..Am going to re-read this labyrinth of metaphors soon. Because reading it once is not enough to get all the meanings out of it.

[Jelena · Rating 4 out of 5]

za prvo čitanje, 4.5 zvezdice. mislim da je ovo jedna od onih knjiga koje moraš pročitati makar dvaput da bi uvideo sve metafore i ostale skrivene detalje koje je Živković utkao u ove priče.