NOTHING IN THE WORLD is a war story unlike any other--at times dark, at times surreal, and at times surprisingly funny, it is a fable of madness, innocence and survival. Here is the story of Josko Banovic, a lonely schoolboy who, with the outbreak of fighting between Serbia and his native Croatia, reveals himself to be a gifted sniper and becomes an unwitting war hero. But when his camp is bombed, Josko is gravely wounded. He wanders away from the ruins to search for his sister, and for another girl whose mysterious, siren-like call guides him from village to village. Starving, exhausted and hallucinating, Josko must make his way through the front lines and back, confronting enemy soldiers, distrustful civilians, jumpy military police, and his own faltering mind. Drawing comparisons to the fierce, visionary writing of Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy, Roy Kesey's book debut is a colorful triumph of human endurance set against the panoramic landscape of the Adriatic coast and Yugoslav countryside.
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Editorial Reviews
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"A beautiful, powerful book: mythic, vivid, heart-rending." --GEORGE SAUNDERS, author of Pastoralia and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
"Beautiful, brave, and I will not soon forget it." --TOM BISSELL, author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. Petersburg
"A mesmerizing tale ... fearless and very welcome." --ANTHONY DOERR, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace
"Beautiful, brave, and I will not soon forget it." --TOM BISSELL, author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. Petersburg
"A mesmerizing tale ... fearless and very welcome." --ANTHONY DOERR, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace
About the Author
Roy Kesey's previous books include the award-winning novella Nothing in the World, a historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing, and a short story collection called All Over, which made The L Magazine's recent "Best Books of the Decade" list. His short stories, essays and poems have appeared in more than seventy magazines, including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and The Kenyon Review. Among other awards, his work has won a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and the 2008 Missouri Review Editors' Prize in Fiction, and has appeared in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He is the recipient of a 2010 prose fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Peru with his wife and family.
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More About the Author
Roy Kesey's books include his debut novel Pacazo, the award-winning novella Nothing in the World, a historical guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing, and a short story collection called All Over, which made The L Magazine's recent "Best Books of the Decade" list. His short stories, essays and poems have appeared in more than eighty magazines, including McSweeney's, Subtropics, Ninth Letter and The Kenyon Review. Among other awards, his work has won a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and the 2008 Missouri Review Editors' Prize in Fiction, and has appeared in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He is the recipient of a 2010 prose fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently lives in Peru with his wife and family.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
NOTHING IN THE WORLD by Roy Kesey,
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This review is from: Nothing in the World (Paperback)
From the first page NOTHING IN THE WORLD grabs the reader and inflicts its grand dilemma of not being able to put the book down yet never wanting for it to end.
At the top, NITW is a soldier's story, Josko's story, a Croatian boy in a blind-leading-the-blind army defending itself against the Serbs. It's a story of war and its horrors, but at its true and large heart, it's a story of the human spirit, the struggle to cope with that which can not be coped with; the mind, the will to survive and prevail, and the things that galvanize that will, in Josko's case, a mysterious siren song and an idealized and vaguely incestuous passion for Klara, Josko's older sister, married and living in Dubrovnik. Kesey has given us a complex and unflinching character in Josko Banovic, and, as a reader, you breathe the same air as every character in this novella, hear the lugging of their hearts along with your own. The setting is vividly imagistic and Kesey's prose is beautifully tight and precise, the pace, intense. What's unsaid resonates as vibrantly as what's on the page. Bleak fables lace the text; their grim and true lessons yield no false hope. Yet, for all its brutal truth, there is hope here, and jubilation in what heroism really is--flawed, often not pretty, atrocious, even. Josko Banovic haunts you, and you continue to hope for him long after the last page has been turned. Roy Kesey's novella is deserving of huge attention and celebration that literary fiction can punch and jab at all levels; that it can rock, that it can roll; that literary fiction is alive and well and necessary to feed what is human in us (and props to Bullfight Media and all the small presses that believe in art's sake). It's not to be missed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a gem,
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This review is from: Nothing in the World (Paperback)
I read this novella in one sitting last week, but the emotional resonance is still vibrating. A simple and yet powerful tale, the power greater yet because Kesey restrains it, shapes it, masters it as he tells the story of a Croatian soldier and hero who, wounded and taken for a deserter, wanders deeper and deeper into a hellish kind of dreamscape disguised as reality. It's on par with "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (even if it was the movie I saw) and "The Old Man and the Sea." It's a shame that literature of this quality gets drowned out by the dross.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great, compelling read.,
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This review is from: Nothing in the World (Paperback)
NOTHING IN THE WORLD lures you in as you read. The first paragraph is lovely, placing the reader solidly in Josko Banovic's world which manages to feel both familiar and exotic, no small feat given that his homeland is Croatia.
Kesey's attention to detail is consistent throughout the book, which is mesmerizing, even when Josko's world becomes darker and more violent, or perhaps especially when his world becomes darker and more violent (for this is when Kesey's matter-of-fact, detailed style really grabs you by the throat). Josko becomes a legend in his own country (albeit unknown to him)--a celebrated war hero. The trouble is, as Josko moves through the countryside alone, becoming 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 brutally beat him 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 because he claims 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, and aptly so, 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.
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