UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

[I think it would be fair to say that this review - first published in late 2005 - speaks for itself...]

Enigmatic would not be a word that I would choose to describe the work of the Bosnian literary phenomenon that is Hoçe. Nor would I dare lumbering his output with the following adjectives: mysterious, inscrutable, numinous, fragmentary, revolutionary or explosive. Georgy Riecke may have the balls to call his most recent publication, Receding Rainfall, a ‘paltry twenty four pages of poetry’, but that is entirely his own affair – he always struck me as inclined to peculiarly absurd forms of suicide anyway. To my mind, perhaps the most sensible course of action a reviewer can take is to state that Hoçe’s work exists and leave it to the reader to decide whether he wants to take the possibly life-threatening risk of dragging his eye across the pages of his books.

Why this hesitation to make a critical judgement on Hoçe other than in negatives? It is not on account of my cowardice I assure you. Hoçe may have a reputation for revengeful violence (once allegedly pursuing one hostile critic for five months across the uncharted wastelands of the Antarctic, armed with a set of poison-tipped quills – I am told, however, that once the unfortunate man had woken from his cold-induced coma, he and Hoçe became the best of friends, Hoçe claiming that he had only wanted to make an artistic act of justice) but that would never deter either my vitriol or praise – I am no stranger to the dangers and thrills of adrenaline-junky extreme reviewing, after all. No, my reluctance to carry out my critical metier stems from my awareness that the writer would view such terms with vituperative scorn. However, by negatively invoking these terms, let no-one believe that I have anything but the utmost respect and admiration for this Balkan force of nature.

Indeed, perhaps an appreciation conveyed through negatives is the only one that could possibly appeal to Hoçe, obsessed as he is with the inescapable voids of being. His single-word name, for instance, in its erasure of a normal two-name form, speaks eloquently of both the parts of his being that cannot be represented and of the violence committed against his fellow countrymen in the final years of last century. Hoçe himself hinted at such a reading of his name and of his work in one of his few public pronouncements since he retreated to the Carpathian Mountains to escape his perilous infamy in his own country, saying:

‘The denial of moments, the denial of names, the denial of being: such things to me speak like the guts of a fish. My stories, my life perhaps can only be read by a soothsayer.’

Moreover, in one of the few critical works to approach Hoçe’s oeuvre without ignorant dismissal or obscene abuse, Grosnor Padviconavic makes the astute comment that:

‘Hoçe’s work is literally almost nothing – but what a nothing! Like the scratched marks on a canvas of an abstract artist, his fragmentary collections of words suggest whole worlds previously unexplored by pen and ink: they could mean anything, they could mean everything.’

So it is that in attempting to review Receding Rainfall I am alert to the inescapable triviality and impossibility of my task – like shouting an epigram into infinity – and the fact that it is only through negatives that I can do justice to Hoçe’s singular genius.

Inevitably then, I cannot hope to explain the plot of his most recent work. It is undoubtedly an anti-novel taken to the extreme, consisting of twenty-four pages or chapters, of dense, almost impenetrable words, connected to each other more through a pattern of association than anything so predictable as a comprehensible meaning. Within this seeming labyrinth of logomania, however, it is possible to discern an infinite array of possible narratives, such that, despite the slimness of this book, it could be said to contain more than all the volumes of an entire library of world literature.

On my first reading, I was able to pursue the following threads through its pages: an objective account of an uprising of geriatrics against the excessive disintegration of their jumpers made from state-provided wool; a first-person explanation of the art of bread-making from the point of view of a yeast cell; a satirical broadside against hats, written, so it seemed, by a scarf (but surely there was some symbolic resonance to this, another layer of satire in which Hoçe was perhaps commenting on the absurdity of ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia); a deeply moving and consciously naïve tale of a young man returning home from war to find his home town has been turned into a factory for manufacturing sprinklers; and a black comedy set in the Urals, culminating in disembowelment with a lollipop stick.

But of course, such a work demands many re-readings to search for the next narrative which always seems on the point of disappearing in the black scramble of word on word. Therein lies both the genius of the work and its danger. As one puzzles over a page, trying to hold on to the torn shreds of potential meaning, one soon realises that the number of chapters in the book is no accident. Each chapter demands at least an hour of your time to bring it to the point of comprehensibility, such that you could spend a whole sleepless day on one reading of the whole book.

But this reading would in turn compel you to attempt an alternative reading on the following day, such that soon all the hours of your life could be accounted for in the deciphering of Receding Rainfall, you would not sleep, you would not eat, you would lose all contact with the outside world until your stinking corpse was discovered by an old peasant woman who would wonder why you clutched these pages so rigidly. Rarely does a reviewer resort to issuing a public health warning, but on this occasion I feel it is an absolute necessity: if you are to read this book with the same level of serious intensity with which it was written, you will almost certainly die (I myself was only saved by a particularly annoying squirrel which had climbed in through my open study window and seemed to have an insatiable appetite for literature, chewing through all my books until it reached Receding Rainfall and forcibly ended my feat of interminable endurance.)

But perhaps this submersion of one’s life within the endless study of his book is part of Hoçe’s point: surely he is asking where the boundaries of life and literature lie, making an audacious claim for the supremacy of the latter. Or perhaps he has just alighted on a particularly intriguing way of reducing the world’s population problems – after all, who really needs the kind of vacuous intellectuals who read obscure European literature anyway?

Alternatively, one could argue that this outstanding novel offers a new kind of realism: the world and its inhabitants are messy and confused to the point of incomprehensibility so surely any book that attempts to represent it faithfully should be similarly incomprehensible. What is Receding Rainfall if it is not a kind of extreme truth?

The last word should perhaps go to Hoçe himself. I quote in its entirety the first paragraph of his novel to either whet your appetite for the path to death or to inoculate you against the further study of his work. What else can the honest reviewer do?

Against the tree                  it is in blood          the lollipop stick was raised threateningly         I am kneaded            punishment is the only truth         the thread frayed again like all the others  the contest for the monkey was interrupted by a bang.                       It is only in vomiting that man achieves his highest state                              Tomas cleaned the barrel of his gun with an opaque look in his eye          underneath the bunker the dead people lie.       Before my eyes, row upon row of machines for making sprinklers                       in his folder he had written down all he would ever need to know                        so we must drink, drink until we are head first in an empty bucket                                    one man had dangled a banana, another had sprinkled peanuts. They had had enough of tattered clothes                            written in blood I say

Review by Claude Sorgny-Beichveloff

Further Reading:

Receding Criticism