 Hidden Camera
By Zoran Zivkovic Translated by Alice Copple-Tosic Dalkey Archive Press 217 pages, $13.95 By Joshua Cohen In the terrible spring of 1999, Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic was trapped with his wife and children in their apartment in Belgrade.Throughout the 77 days of NATO strikes, with food and water scarce,without electricity, Zivkovic was writing a book entitled The Book.Despite all, it was his funniest novel yet.
After completing that masterpiece of philosophy and mirrors, an American literary agent who couldn't sell Zivkovic's fiction offeredto get him a sizable advance to write a 100,000 word tome about what happened in Bosnia. After the brilliant physics fantasy of The Fourth Circle (1993), and the manic bibliophilic excesses of The Library(2002), how could he descend to mere reality? Zivkovic demurred. Hewould write not with history, but fantastically against it. Zivkovic's new novel opens as a detective story, with an unnamed man finding an envelope; an invitation within leads him to the movies.Expecting nothing, he sits in the theater, alone except for a beautiful woman. As the movie begins, the man recognizes himself on the screen. Further envelopes containing invitations forsake logic;our hero is baffled with clues. Is this real? What is? He suspects thetitular hidden camera and begins acting the confident detective for an unknowable lens. He is victim to the most pernicious of reality shows: the unexamined life. written as if it were already a movie, with the communist paranoia ofIn visits to a zoo and a hospital, our hero is led deeper into mystification; the detective story goes from pulp to metaphysicalmist, a sense of dread that would have flattered Philip Marlowe, werehe to have taken a pay cut to shadow Siddhartha. While he ostensibly follows a few appropriately anonymous characters, no explanation isgiven, just action, less dialogue, more of the chase. Hidden Camera is Zivkovic's youth glossed onto celluloid, The Castle with Sam Spadestarring as K. Our quest resolves in the last few pages, with our herofinally confronting the three shadowed characters at the scene of hisbirth. It's a resolution that settles the story as much as it unsettles the soul.
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