Impossible Encounters
By Zoran Zivkovic
Polaris, 2000
This is a short book of six stories by Yugoslavian Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic, each dealing with an impossivle situation (post-mortem, a conversation with God, a writer visited by his own character, etc.), and each of which feature, recursively, a book called Impossible Encounters. These are well crafted, but somewhat slight, and, as Bruce Sterling noted in his Nova Express review, somewhat stateless, existing in a world where “trains have no destinations, streets have no names, rivers and mountains have no histories, and characters have no ethnicities. It’s a very quiet world of used bookstores, family dining tables, and cramped university offices.”
I’m not sure I would want to read too many of these in a row, but they make nice “palate cleansers” between other fiction.
Since the Belgrade Polaris editions will probably be hard to come by, if you’re interested in reading these, they’re collected (along with several other Zovkovic books published by Polaris) in the PS Publishing collection Impossible Stories. I don’t have a copy of that for sale anymore, but I do have a copy of Impossible Stories II available if you’re interested.
