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    Nothing in the World
    Nothing in the World
    Nothing in the World
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Nothing in the World

    By Roy Kesey

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    About this ebook

    “In haunting, evocative prose, Roy Kesey captures the horrors of war, the insanity of genocide, as well as the fleeting joys of love. Nothing in the World is a memorable debut.”—Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

    Nothing in the World is sparingly written, yet with great detail and emotion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDzanc Books
    Release dateAug 1, 2008
    ISBN9781936873852
    Nothing in the World

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    • 4/5
      What I feel most compelled to say in awe of Roy Kesey's talent, is that I read his entire book in one sitting. One! Honestly, I couldn't put it down. Maybe that just illuminates my own obessive tendences, but I gluttonously devoured NOTHING IN THE WORLD, cramming it all in as fast as I could and then licking my fingers when I was done.NOTHING IN THE WORLD lures you in innocently--and lyrically--enough. The first paragraph is lovely, placing the reader solidly in Josko' world, which manages (like so much of Kesey's work) to feel both familiar and exotic, no small feat:"The white stone walls of Josko's house were tinged with gold in the growing light, and the only sound was the sharp ring of his father's pick glancing off the rocks in the vineyard. Josko ran to join him as the sun slipped into the sky, and they worked together without speaking, his father freeing the rocks from the soil, Josko heaving them to his shoulder and staggering to the wall they were building to mark their property line to the east."This attention to detail and to the sensory experience of the reader is consistent throughout Roy's book and as I read I was drawn along, unwilling to leave that world that felt so very real to me. Even when the world became darker and more violent, or perhaps especially when the world became darker and more violent, for that is when Kesey's matter-of-fact, detailed style really grabs you by the throat:"Josko opened his eyes, and the sky was a thin whitish blue. There was the warm salty sweetness of blood in his mouth, and behind his eyes he felt a strange dense presence. He raised one hand to his head. Above his left ear, a shard of metal protruded from his skull. He wrapped his hand around it and ripped it out. Pain deafened him, and strips of sky floated down to enfold him."Okay, from that point on, I was entirely hooked. My own brain began to throb with a "strange dense presence" and I realized it was Josko in there, Josko in my brain, becoming part of my grey matter creating new peaks and grooves as he becomes a legend in his own country (unknown to him)--a celebrated war hero, first for shooting down two enemy planes with his unit, and then for singlehandedly killing the infamous sniper Hadzihafizbegovic and setting his severed head on a table in a cafe. The trouble is, as Josko moves through the countryside alone, becoming more and more dirty and disheveled (also crazed by the haunting female voice that sings in his head, pulling him along siren-like) he looks less and less like a war hero and he is repeatedly shot at, beaten, even arrested and imprisoned. In prison, in an utterly painful and ironic scene, the soldiers beat Josko most brutally of all because when they demand to know his name, he tells them he is Josko Banovic. Of course you are, says the soldier, and I am Marshall Tito. They kick him for claiming to be a man they have made into legend, a famous hero. We know he is Josko, he knows he is, and yet the soldiers may just kill him for telling the truth which they are certain is a lie.That sense of tragic unfairness permeates NOTHING IN THE WORLD, absolutely aptly, given that it is a novella that has the fighting between Serbs and Croats as its backdrop. The writing is intelligent, the story is gripping and dark but also funny and redemptive in places, and the ending is perfect. NOTHING IN THE WORLD is a great read--and like nothing in the world I have read before.

    Book preview

    Nothing in the World - Roy Kesey

    NOTHING IN THE WORLD

    A Novella

    by Roy Kesey

    Dzanc Books

    1334 Woodbourne Street

    Westland, MI 48186

    www.dzancbooks.org

    Copyright © 2011, Text by Peter Markus

    All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

    Published 2011 by Dzanc Books

    A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

    eBooksISBN-13: 978-1-936873-85-2

    Printed in the United States of America

    The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

    For the four:

    Svana, Bayo, Kijo, Moca

    Puno hvala

    The children were walled into the pier, for it could not be otherwise, but Rade, they say, had pity on them and left openings in the pier through which the unhappy mother could feed her sacrificed children. Those are the finely carved windows, narrow as loopholes, in which the wild doves now nest.

    - Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina

    Because it matters what kind of emptiness is left behind by things or beings.

    - Milorad Pavić, Landscape Painted With Tea

    1.

    The white stone walls of Joško’s house were tinged gold in the growing light, and the only sound was the sharp ring of his father’s pick glancing off rocks in the vineyard. Joško ran to join him as the sun slipped into the sky, and they worked together without speaking, his father freeing the rocks from the soil, Joško heaving them to his shoulder and staggering to the wall they were building to mark their property line to the east.

    The dust began to rise as the sun burned off the dew. By the time his mother called that breakfast was ready, the vineyard was flooded with light, and sweat slicked Joško’s neck and back. He walked to the shaded patio, turned on the faucet and took a drink from the hose.

    Water spilled from the sides of his mouth, and Joško went still as two small blue butterflies came over the wall and settled at the edge of the puddle. He stared at them, thinking of nothing, then crouched down and clapped his hands around them, felt the faint beat of wings against his palms, parted his thumbs and peered inside and saw that his hands were empty.

    * * *

    School went as usual: alone at lunch and during the breaks, invisible in the classroom. The teachers rarely called on Joško, and the few times he volunteered an answer, they looked at him as though they remembered having seen him before, but weren’t quite sure where. His classmates didn’t go out of their way to avoid him, but never sought him out or showed much interest in what he had to say. It was easier simply to be alone.

    The last bell rang and Joško hurried home, put on his swimming suit, took up his fishing spear and headed into the hot low hills west of Jezera. The hillsides were patched with wild olive and fig trees, sage and thorn. At the top of a rise he caught another trail that led to a stone lookout. From there he could see the whole island of Murter, a severed finger of earth and heat, the Croatian mainland to one side and to the other the quiet sea.

    Ten minutes later he arrived at the cliffs, and edged down through the striated rock. Boulders the size of tanks crowded the water that swirled over the tide pools and shifted away, and again he felt invisible, but here it was a source of strength. He worked back and forth along the shoreline, stopping short of every crevice, dropping down and crawling forward, careful to keep his shadow from falling across the water.

    No one else in his family was any good at spearfishing, but it had never seemed difficult to Joško. It was simply a question of knowing where to go and how to get there, and of not missing when the moment came. Though he would never have admitted it to anyone, at times he tossed dying fish back into the water, throwing his spear again and again for the pleasure of hitting what he aimed at.

    Three fat sea bass now hung from the stringer on his belt. He set his spear in a cleft in the rocks and hooked the stringer over its tip, drew a cloth from his waistband and wound it around his right hand. The periška that lived in the sand of the sea floor were by far his favorite food, but the edges of their long ochre shells left wounds that took weeks to heal.

    He watched the sun settle into a thin bank of clouds on the horizon, then stepped out onto a ledge and dove into the water. The deeper currents thrashed and curled. He kept at it, dive after dive, until his shell-bag was so heavy that he could barely make it back to the surface.

    He checked the tide pools for abalone shells for his sister, and found only one. It was almost four inches across, too big for the earrings and brooches that Klara made, and the inner surface was already weathered and dull. He tucked it into his bag all the same, climbed up the cliff, and now the wind strengthened. The Adriatic whorled into the coastline, small waves spiking and guttering below. Shade by shade the sky turned his favorite color, a ridged blue-gray as solid as stone.

    He returned to his house, and its red slate roof glowed under the streetlights, and there were grapes and cantaloupes in a basket on the patio. As he washed the salt from his body, his mother came up the sidewalk, back from the market where old women waited with their twined bunches of rosemary and dill. She took the fish and the periška, and Joško went to Klara’s bedroom. The pile of abalone shells in the corner was almost a meter high and smelled of rot. His parents complained from time to time, but he always insisted that sooner or later she would come back, would need the shells, would use every single one.

    He went to the kitchen, opened the periška and cut out the meat while his mother cleaned the fish. He watched as she fried everything in olive oil. Then they all sat down at the table, and after his mother had prayed they began to eat, wiping up the grease with slices of bread, drinking wine from rough wooden pots.

    When the dishes were cleared, Joško’s father turned on the television. The news was the usual mix of referendums and local elections, arguments about conditions in Kosovo and the Vojvodina now that they’d been swallowed again by Serbia, and discussions of Slovenia’s recent freedom after three short days of fighting. His father said that he couldn’t understand what was happening, that all Yugoslavs were supposed to be brothers. His mother said that that hadn’t been true since Tito died, and that the Serbs were not to be trusted under any circumstances.

    They both looked at Joško, and he smiled and shrugged. These were the same

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