By
– August 31, 2011
One slap is all it takes for a Serbian newspaper columnist prone to the cerebral to descend into madness. The novel’s unnamed narrator stumbles into a conspiracy after spotting a man hit a woman on the shore of the Danube. Intrigued, he follows her, unwittingly setting off down a trail of shadowy anti-Semitic attacks and igniting a frantic search for signs around Belgrade to decode the mysterious, repeating patterns he suddenly can’t escape. When a stranger slips him an indecipherable manuscript about Kabbalah and the history of the Jews of Zemun and Belgrade, he calls upon a mathematician and a group of Jewish artists and intellectuals to make sense of it.
His search for meaning unmasks the rampant anti-Semitism pervading past and present Belgrade, and he uses his newspaper column to denounce it. The narrator, who is not Jewish, becomes a marked target for anti-Semites as he continues his journey into Belgrade’s secret societies and conspiracy theorists.
Unfortunately, the stream of consciousness narrative is written as one 300-plus-page paragraph without line breaks or chapters, making the book difficult for the eye to follow.
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Jaclyn Trop is a Los Angeles-based freelance reporter.
