Brown clouds of dust made the horizon hazy. Dry, round tumbleweed, like the skeletons of globes, bounced over the road and collected along the fences.Author Josip Novakovich was born in a Croatian area of Yugoslavia, emigrated to the United States at twenty to pursue his education, and after teaching positions at various American colleges, is now a professor of Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and a Canadian citizen. It seems obvious to conclude that his short story collection Tumbleweed is an effort at capturing this peripatetic life – rolling along like a tumbleweed, catching up on fences for a while before blowing away once again – and there's definitely something worthwhile in exploring the particular experiences that Novakovich has had. But as with any story collection, there were some I liked better than others, and in this collection, the long middle section (a telling and retelling of the same basic story) dragged everything down for me. I am pleased, however, that Tumbleweed's inclusion on this year's Giller Prize longlist introduced me to this author; I'd seek him out again.
Tumbleweed is divided into four parts by short “Tumbling” sections that see our narrator as a fish out of water in Belgrade (where he's preparing to write an English competency exam before immigrating to the U.S.), in Duruvar (where he's attending a cousin's wedding as a fourteen-year-old), in Maine (where he and his son visit an old friend), and in post-war Croatia (where he and a photographer attempt to capture the present). Each of these pieces feature the narrator drinking too much wine, usually followed by regrets. The first section of stories were witty and intriguing; Kafkaesque tales of a young immigrant trying to find his way in America. Right from the first paragraph of the first story, Tumbleweed, I was smiling:
Sleepy from spending a night at a truck stop near Rapid City, I stood on the shoulder of Interstate 90, sticking my thumb up. My arm began to hurt, and after an hour or so I sat on the side of the road, propping my arm on my backpack. Two hours later I lay on the shoulder and lifted my right leg, barefoot, sticking up my large toe.This story is followed by that of a young writer who takes on a house-sitting job that morphs into becoming the “country butler” for a rich man and his friends, and then a story of four immigrant musicians sharing a rat-infested apartment in New York City. This is followed by a story from a NYC rat's POV, and while in a way it was clever, it was also kind of obvious and began my downward journey. The middle section of stories sees the narrator and his wife take on a dilapidated farmhouse in America's Midwest, with a variety of un-neutered tomcats who kill small animals, brutally fight each other, and impregnate a variety of un-spayed female cats. These three stories are framed slightly differently each time – the farmhouse belongs to a different relative or the couple moves in for different reasons – but each time, the focus is on these cats and their goings-on, and I couldn't care less; sighed each time I saw that the next story would be more of the same. And while I was low-level annoyed by all the unwanted litters (fix your damn cats), in an interview, Novakovich explains why this is one of his favourite themes:
I’m in favour of total freedom, and when I was living in some of these isolated settings I couldn’t have it, but my animals could. They were living my dream in a way. We live such sublimated, unspontaneous lives, so it’s admirable to see an alternative – something that is actually in us, after all. We’re all animals inside.For the change if nothing else, I was happy when a story had the narrator buying a pair of lambs as pets for his daughter in Zidane the Ram; was happy that it gave me something to think about:
Each small-time farmer, especially European-style, eats his pets. The shepherd grows a few head of sheep and cows, and then kills his pets. That must be an extremely painful moment for him, but at the same time, a real moment. You kill a bit of yourself, of your love, your beautiful world, in order to eat, and a feast is a double kind of a thing – it's always a funeral.This is followed by another short story about drinking wine, another story of a stray cat, and a story about soccer hooligans, Crossbar, that returned to the nicely bizarre feeling of the first few stories. If all of these tales were an effort to capture a younger man's wanderings, I appreciated the maturity in the final two stories. In Prepaid Reservation, an author returns to Croatia, and while visiting an old friend, realises that the ethnic divides exposed by the Balkan War haven't quite been healed yet:
He calculated, probably, which factor was more important here – that I was an old friend, or that I was a Croatian with resentments about the Serbian destruction of Croatia in the '90s. Serbs kill their political opponents the old-fashioned way, with bullets in hotel lobbies, while Russians and Croats use radioactive chemicals and drugs.And in the final story, Café Sarajevo, a man in Montreal laments that these persistent ethnic divides probably explain why Yugoslavian restaurants can't stay in business there:
Perhaps that's why our ethnic restaurants and cafés close down in communities where there aren't large numbers of us. There aren't enough of us, of a single ethnicity, and we don't have a pan-ethnic ex-Yugoslav community to maintain a Balkan café. Quantity amounts to quality, to use the maxim of dialectical materialism, and there just aren't enough of us.So, overall, Tumbleweed was an inconsistent collection for me – I really liked the first three and last two stories – but I can't deny that Josip Novakovich has had unique experiences that make a valuable contribution to the CanLit mosaic. Happy to have read this.
The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:
David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck
After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):
I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit
