April Fool’s Day

by Josip Novakovich
HarperCollins (September 2004)
240 pages

Rights sold:
Italy: ISBN / Il Saggiatore - 24/09/2004
UK: DUCKWORTH - 17/09/2004
German: KEIN & ABER
Spanish: DESTINO
Croatian: MEANDAR
Turkish: INKILAP YAYINLARI
Polish: BAOBAB


Book Description:
APRIL FOOL’S DAY follows the story of Ivan Dolinar, a man caught in the cross-currents of senseless wars, ridiculous dictators, and the usual-and unusual-difficulties of just trying to get by in the Balkans.
Ivan’s life begins, auspiciously, on April Fool’s Day, 1948. As a boy growing up in a small town in Croatia, Ivan tries to love the people’s dictator, Tito, but his love is not returned. In a world of propaganda and paranoia, young Ivan quickly discovers that the best of intentions can backfire. At 19, full of hope and ambition, he enters medical school in Novi Sad, in Serbia, but his medical career is cut short by a prank and he is sent to a labor camp to dig rocks for two years. After his release, Ivan takes up philosophy, but when war breaks out, he is drafted-into the wrong army. A pawn in an absurd and brutal conflict, in which rules and loyalties shift unexpectedly, Ivan is wounded badly, but survives against all odds. Thinking to try the quiet life of family and home after the war, Ivan returns to his hometown. However, once again, his best intentions go awry. Fate has other plans for Ivan.

From the tavern to the ivory tower to the bloody battlefields, as Ivan’s fortunes rise and fall faster than you can say Yugoslavia, a tender novel emerges. At once dark and absurdly comic, a brilliant mixture of wit and humanity, APRIL FOOL’S DAY delivers a deeply affecting view of the human condition.

Quotes and Reviews:
"In this harrowing and hilarious novel, Josip Novakovich’s wry Croatian Candide is our sympathetic guide through the recent history of the Balkans, and through the pleasures and sorrows of an ordinary and extraordinary life." --Francine Prose

"No one portrays the lunatic grotesquerie of life--and death--in the Balkans like Josip Novakovich. APRIL FOOL’S DAY is both brutally ominous and bizarrely joyous. The only book I can think of to compare it to is the Czech classic, GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK." --Melvin Jules Bukiet

“A compulsively readable novel, enlivened in every sentence by the author’s warmly sardonic style. Novakovich has the storyteller’s gift." --Philip Lopate

“APRIL FOOL’S DAY is terrific: so funny, so desolate, so brave, so grim, so hilarious, back and forth, sentence to sentence. Novakovich’s wise fool seems the perfect voice for this absurd tale of a most starkly real time.” --Jane Hamilton

“In APRIL FOOL’S DAY you will find the heartbreaks of love, the ironies of politics, descriptions of war as horrible and humane as any in THE THINGS THEY CARRIED or ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Also, genuine wisdom: Josip Novakovich is a laughing, weeping and very entertaining philosopher. We are lucky to count him as a fellow citizen of our melancholy planet.”--Matthew Sharpe

"This darkly funny and disturbingly beautiful novel depicting the brutal disintegration of Yugoslavia invites comparisons to other absurdist classics - from Gogol’s "Dead Souls" to "Slaughterhouse Five." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Chicago Tribune
September 26, 2004 Sunday
A novel of war and identity set in the Balkans
Croatian-American author Josip Novakovich established himself as one of our best short-story writers in his two collections, "Yolk" (1995) and "Salvation and Other Disasters" (1998). An emigre who finds continuing inspiration in his homeland, Novakovich developed a narrative style that flowed with the rhythmic ease and the offhand humor of a village folktale to dramatize painfully serious Balkan settings and events, events that take on bizarre and fantastic dimensions as typified by the outlandish acts of hatred and violence that characterized the recent Balkan conflict.

For example, "Sheepskin" tells the story of a Croatian man who spots a fellow passenger on a train, a Serbian who he believes tortured him several years earlier during the war. In a brutal scene, he shoots and kills the man in a station bathroom. He soon learns that he was sadly mistaken in both sight and deed, when he recognizes another man at the next station who he believes was his torturer. He seeks out the widow of the man he killed with the intention of paying her recompense. But he continues the moral outrage by engaging her in a sexual affair. The story suggests that war continues, takes on new forms and finds new battlefields, both physical and mental, even when the conflict has been officially resolved.

In his debut novel, "April Fool’s Day," Novakovich returns to his Balkan setting and themes to tell the story of Ivan Dolinar, born April 1, 1948, in the Croatian village of Nizograd in the former communist Yugoslavia. With Ivan, the novel offers a satirical account of the region from the postwar rise of Tito as dictator through the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia into warring states and the accusatory aftermath that followed this breakup. History’s fool, Tito was the man who promised Yugoslavia a long-denied national identity, the would-be strongman who could provide a communist utopia while at the same time maintaining autonomy from the Soviet Union. Ivan becomes a mirror of the Yugoslav desire for power and recognition:

"From early on, Ivan wanted to distinguish himself, as though he knew that he suffered a handicap. He fell in love with power as soon as he learned how to crawl."

By being a good communist and patriot, Ivan believes, he can serve power and be an empowered citizen of the state himself. "Adoring power, Ivan was ready to love the army, the state, and the president himself."

He enters medical school in Serbia and seems headed for a promising career as a doctor--he is one of the few people in his class to pass his exams--but these plans are cut short when, wrong place, wrong time, he gets mixed up in a friend’s prank. The state apparatus takes the prank seriously, convicts him of a plot to assassinate Tito and hands down a 2-year sentence of hard labor at an island camp in the Adriatic. One day Ivan is busting rocks when Tito appears, with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on his arm. (Power loves company.) They engage Ivan in such pleasing conversation that Tito rewards him with a fine Cuban cigar. The dictator also adds two years to Ivan’s sentence in hopes that the labor will help the prisoner reach political maturity. Gandhi gives Ivan a silk scarf. The silk scarf becomes the only pleasing constant in Ivan’s life over the next 30 years.

After serving three years, he gains early release from prison during an easing of political and social restrictions in 1968 but finds that his criminal record has branded him an outcast, barring him from employment and career. He spends a number of hapless years as a graduate student in philosophy, until he is drafted into the Serbian-controlled Yugoslav army to fight his fellow Croats. He soon deserts and finds himself outfitted in the enemy’s uniform and fighting for the other side. Like his fellow soldiers, he kills when he is ordered to, even civilians.

In an act of gallantry, he shoots his superior officer dead while the latter is in the act of raping a woman with whom Ivan had fallen in love. The woman he saves becomes his future wife, and she bears a child whom she believes looks like the dead officer. Several years later, she learns that Ivan is the true father of the child (he also raped her on the killing floor). She stabs him in the stomach, only to ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital. Both the war and Ivan’s home life typify the moral, political and national ambiguity of what it means to be a former Yugoslavian. One’s saviors are also one’s enemies, and victim enacts revenge against victimizer, only in turn to become a victimizer.

Through situations like these, Novakovich gives us a novel that is psychological and political, as Ivan’s inability to fit in anywhere, his isolation from his mother and brother, his wife and daughter, as well as his supposed friends and fellow citizens, mirrors his homeland’s instability and questionable national identities. It is perhaps for this reason that the novel is episodic in structure, as Ivan is a wandering soul, a man pushed along by circumstances beyond his control. Only in death, when Ivan’s ghost appears, does Ivan seem to gain any sense of self and a potential to affect others that he lacked in life.

Though Ivan’s has been a life of failure, it has also been one of varied richness. Novakovich makes extended use of allusion--musical, mythological, medical, biblical, literary--to show that Ivan is a learned man, even though he has never really traveled in the world. (Not surprisingly, the world-innocent Ivan remained a virgin well into his 20s.) But he has lived and seen and thought. In this sense, he is a fully rounded character, the type of protagonist E.M. Forster famously argued in "Aspects of the Novel" that we rarely find in fiction. Ultimately, Ivan’s difficulties in life and love are Novakovich’s means of exploring a host of philosophical, religious and spiritual issues that give his Balkan particulars larger universal dimension. Like many of us, Ivan is a man who wanted much out of life.


Kirkus
August 1, 2004 - STARRED REVIEW
A Balkan Everyman’s progress through the later 20th century and the afterlife. Protagonist Ivan Dolinar is born on April 1, 1948, and grows up in the Croatian village of Nizograd, where he learns "to admire the power of the state," worship Tito, and channel his adolescent romanticism into the study of medicine. In a quirky episodic narrative, Ivan attends medical school in Serbia and somehow passes his exams, but finds his life plans irrevocably altered after a prank misfires and he’s
charged with plotting to assassinate Tito and sentenced to four years’ hard labor. In prison, he meets Tito (who’s surprisingly cordial, under the circumstances) and is befriended by visiting Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, then released early (during the "Croatian Spring" of 1968), and reinvents himself as a student of philosophy. Similar ups and downs mark the next 30 years, during which Ivan remains basically unemployable, finally loses his prolonged virginity, fights for the Yugoslav Army (against his fellow Croatians), marries after having perhaps fathered a daughter (the facts are ambiguous), experiences the pleasures and plains of adultery, and succumbs to a stroke in his early 50s. The Croatian-American author’s deadpan prose, used to such brilliant effect in his story collections Yolk (1995) and Salvation and
Other Disasters (1998) is less effective here, because Ivan - whose inability to fit in anywhere subtly parallels his homeland’s instability - is too emotionally subdued to be a particularly compelling character. But Novakovich’s understatements work superbly in the closing chapters, when Ivan’s inquisitive ghost achieves a harmony with his surroundings that had been denied him throughout his life. A flawed though agreeably eccentric first novel from one of the more interesting and unusual contemporary writers.

Publishers Weekly
Like Aleksandar Hemon and Ha Jin, short story writer Novakovich (Salvation and Other Disasters) manages the feat of writing vibrantly and inventively in a second language, shaping English to the dictates of his satiric, folk-tinged storytelling. His debut novel tells the story of Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian Everyman born in the town of Nizograd in 1948. As a boy, Ivan is a bully and a patriot (as one chapter title puts it, "Ivan loves the state apparatus"), and he grows up longing to serve his country. After a buffoonish but successful stint in medical school, he’s about to become a doctor when a foolish joke gets him arrested and sent to a labor camp on a desolate Adriatic island. He’s released three years later, but his criminal record makes
him unfit for everything except graduate school in philosophy. Demoralized and hapless, he’s drafted into the Serb-heavy Yugoslav army to fight his fellow Croats; he soon deserts and is hustled into uniform on the other side. Novakovich gives a pithy, biting account of the Balkan wars, following it up by an even more caustic account of Ivan’s marriage to a woman he raped during the war. The story culminates with
Ivan’s first-person account of his own death and afterlife. Novakovich’s English is foreign-tinged and brash, giving a jolt of chaotic energy to this dark Balkan comedy.

About the author

Josip Novakovich is the winner of two Whiting Awards-one for his fiction, and one for his essays-a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Arts grant, and several O. Henry Awards. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope, Double Take, Tin House, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals.