Bücher von Josip Novakovich

Josip Novakovich's Vignettes offers a wide-ranging look at his life, including his youth in hometown Daruvar, Croatia, where he attended school in a castle on a hill with barrels of whites and reds stored in the basement, "my peers and I learned the basics of math, grammar, history, and literature, somewhat dizzy and fumigated in wine vapors that seeped upward through the oiled oak floors."¿Over the course of seventeen short stories, Novakovich traces his relationship with wine: "Wine may have a lot to do with my interest in literature, or it may be the other way around-I am not sure which came first, those vapors, or the stories involving wine? And so, a bit of wine, in a small glass, a bit of truth, in a few lines."¿

Ivan Dolinar is born in Tito's Yugoslavia on April Fool's Day, 1948 -- the auspicious beginning of a life that will be derailed by backfiring good intentions in a world of propaganda and paranoia. At age nineteen, an innocent prank cuts the young Croatian's budding medical career short and lands him in a notorious labor camp. Released on the eve of civil war, Ivan is drafted into the wrong army, becoming a pawn in an absurd conflict in which the rules and loyalties shift abruptly and without warning. But even in a world gone mad, one course of action remains eminently sane: survival.Told with bitingly dark humor and a deep tenderness, April Fool's Day is both a devastating political satire and a razor-sharp parody of war.