"One white wintry day, a green mufflerless truck dropped Milan Dolinar off at home, maimed. Milan carried his severed arm and leg in a potato sack, because he had heard that science could put his limbs back on. After several weeks the ice thawed, and the hand and the leg rotted, despite Milan’s keeping them in the coldest corner of his basement. Yet he kept even the bones, thinking that science would one day be able to restore his limbs."
In the above excerpt from the beginning of April Fool’s Day, as Ivan Dolinar’s father returns to his Croatian village in 1948, we get the image from Novakovich in the same stark honest manner that is war. The narrative voice is not one of horror or sorrow or indignation. It is acceptance of these things as part of life. This is what struck me in the beginning of the story and armed with both the experience of Candide and recent studies of early western civilization, I thought of the difference in various cultures in their thinking on life, and the ultimate end of life—death.
It would appear that the matter-of-fact state of existence is a strong indicator of both religion and sociological times. The harder and shorter the expectation of life, the stronger the belief in something better after life. Death is not feared, often welcomed as a release from suffering and oppression. If anything, this would be in line with the “man created God” mode of thinking. Wishful thinking.
Ivan grows up fatherless (Milan dies three months after Ivan’s birth), and rarely worries about God or death although he is obviously philosophically interested in the concept at an early age, when he hides inside a World War II bunker and comes across “human skeletons (were) scattered around him in the dank darkness.”:
“He took one skull with a hole in the pate and carried it home wrapped in newspapers like a watermelon. He hid the skull in the attic, imagining it would work as a ghost-receptacle. The executed man’s ghost would visit what remained of his body and would perhaps come out of the skull at night to smoke cigars and sigh with sorrow. In the evening, while visiting the skull, Ivan lit a cigarette butt he’d found in the gutter, and smoked and coughed. There was no sighing of the ghost, and Ivan felt brave indeed. Maybe there were no ghosts, only souls, and souls went far away, to heaven or hell. What would happen in resurrection? He savored the mystery surrounding the skull.”
After medical school, labor camp, teaching positions, marriage, a child, and an illicit affair, and having experienced the continual upheaval of the Balkan wars and witnessing the death of friends while in service, Ivan finds himself unable to move or speak one morning. He is fifty years old, and has tried every which way to make his life a full one, yet feels he has accomplished nothing, has touched no one, has no great faith or belief. Yet he muses on his dying, as he is able to hear everything going on around him as he lays in his coffin; first on display in the living room, then on its way to the graveyard.
Here we see a change in how Ivan views his past life, and his current state of death, as he lingers somewhere in between .
To be continued…
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
That first paragraph has a nice flavor of absurdity. The image of Milan begins to come together.
Interesting the relationship to the limbs, the intimacy we maintain with our parts.
Now that’s nice detail.
The bones of war are crossed throughout this novel, and Novakovich uses them to fine advantage.
Knew you’d like that paragraph!