David Albahari

David Albahari is one of the foremost practitioners of post-modern fiction in the world today. He was for many years the editor-in-chief of Pismo, a magazine of world literature, and lived in Belgrade. He left Serbia in 1994 and moved to Calgary, where he now lives.

His most recent novel in English, Snow Man (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), was praised in the Georgia Straight by John Burns, who wrote: “Provocative insights abound: into the making of meaning, the stability of history, the arbitrary nature of division, be it person from person or country from country. Snow Man is the easiest difficult book you will read, Albert Camus by way of Josef Skvorecky.”

Snow Man is a dark comic novel about a Serbo-Croatian academic who finds himself exiled in an unnamed Canadian city. The novel explores the loss of meaning and reality that can accompany the dislocation caused by war and the need to leave one’s home behind.

“Rarely have the echoes of war found
such subtle and beautiful expression.”
—Le matricule des anges

Albahari’s best known novel, Götz and Meyer, translated into English in 2004, consists of 168 pages and only one paragraph. Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian explains: “One may feel, at a conceptual level, uneasy about a book that ties an unusual style to the deepest levels of human atrocity; but once you read it, it becomes clear not only that it could not have been written any other way, but that such a style should, perhaps, be reserved for descriptions of such moral crisis.”

“I don’t believe in linear stories,” Albahari said in an interview with VUE Weekly. “Life doesn’t happen that way. Life goes in several directions and that’s what I do in my stories.” Albahari’s work is mainly autobiographical, marrying the history of Yugoslavia with insights on memory, identity and dislocation.

David Albahari was born in Peć, Serbia, in 1948. He began publishing his poems, novels and short stories in the early 1970s and has since written eleven novels and nine short story collections. Albahari has translated numerous books into Serbian, including works by Pynchon, Atwood, Updike, Bellow and Nabokov. His own works have been translated into fourteen languages, including English.

Albahari has written several dispatches for Geist, all of them in English, in his first experiment writing in a language other than his native tongue. (In 2005, during a University of Iowa radio interview, Albahari explained that writing in English interrupts the flow of his novels.)

Books by David Albahari translated into English include: Words Are Something Else (Northwestern University Press, 1996), Tsing (Bayeux Arts, 1997), Bait (Northwestern University Press, 2001), Götz and Meyer (Harcourt, 2005) and Snow Man (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005).

Albahari’s work has earned him many accolades. In 1982 he won the Ivo Andrić Award for Opis Smrti (Description of Death), in 1997 he won the NIN Award for Mamac (Bait) and in 1998 he won the Blakanica Award for Mamac.

David Albahari was a special guest at the Geist May Days event on May 10, 2008, at the Listel Hotel, and on May 12, 2008, at the SFU Writers’ Lectures series, where he was a featured writer and speaker.