Apricots from Chernobyl is a collection of beautifully crafted narratives on life in the former Yugoslavia, and subsequently in America, by widely published author and essayist Josip Novakovich. Exploring topics that include emigration, definition of borders, societal diversity, and the decay of religion, Novakovich's narratives are approachable and engaging. Whether describing his feelings of apprehension upon approaching a boarder, or the difficulties encountered when writing in a second "tongue," Novakovich is fresh, wry, and consistently entertaining. Apricots from Chernobyl offers a candid portrayal of global existence, skillfully blending its sometimes brutal but often ironic and humorous realities.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The bloody rupture of Yugoslavia has stained this past half-decade with ethnic hate, and the blood still flows. The Western conscience seems to have numbed and newspapers are increasingly stingy with the copy they expend on the region. Novakovich resurrects the experience, describing, with almost clinical accuracy, the dormant chauvinism in the Croatia of his childhood and the wrenching details of the malignancy's spread. We are indebted to these accounts for revealing the stark facts of life there, the unnamed tragedies too mundane for media attention. The seeming triumph of cruelty over humanity reawakens compassion, but why are there only four such stories, a miserly fourth of this collection of 16 previously published essays? The remaining 12 are indulgently detailed remembrances--of passports and border crossings, dreams of rock-stardom, hippie crash pads in Switzerland and cliches of American life: a mugging in New York, life on the Great Western Plains and the escapades of a farm cat. Each event may well be meaningful to the author, but a larger sense is missing--perhaps what astonishes an immigrant is too obvious for a native. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Leaving your motherland for the first time is a rite of passage, a sort of birth: You establish your being-on-your-own. Abroad you find a precise, concrete, artificial, alienated fantasy land in which the trains run punctually and without clanking, in which all the reality as you know it has been scrubbed away, the friction of matter is gone, and gloss shines and glares at you. You drift and slide like a child left on a hockey rink for the first time."--from Apricots from Chernobyl
"It is the devoted accuracy of Apricots from Chernobyl that gives this book its nightmarish surreality. Calmly, almost diffidently, Josip Novakovich displays for us the wrenching despair that results from the dissolution of societies. These pages are powerful and important."--Fred Chappell
"It is the devoted accuracy of Apricots from Chernobyl that gives this book its nightmarish surreality. Calmly, almost diffidently, Josip Novakovich displays for us the wrenching despair that results from the dissolution of societies. These pages are powerful and important."--Fred Chappell
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