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Nothing in the World

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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.

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.

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.

In his hypnotic and chilling debut, "Nothing in the World: A Novella" (Bullfight Media, $8 paperback), Roy Kesey introduces us to the young Josko Banovic, who lives in Croatia just below his kinsmen's radar and prefers it that way.

As his parents argue about politics and Croatia's growing tensions with Serbia, Josko pines for his newly married sister, Klara, who has left Jezera to begin a new life in Dubrovnik. Josko collects abalone shells for Klara, hoping to give them to her when she returns home. In school, the "teachers rarely called on Josko, 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." And Josko keeps his distance from the other students because it "was easier simply to be alone."

He is, in a word, anonymous.

But Josko's unassuming existence takes a dreadful turn when the Serbs escalate the conflict with Croatia with attacks on the towns of Krajina, Tenja and Dalj: "For the first time in his life, Josko had someone to hate." Josko enlists in the army, beginning a journey that will take him from heroism to the more ambiguous terrain often traveled by soldiers who commit and suffer from acts of violence that attend war.

Kesey seamlessly weaves the gruesomeness of battle with a dreamlike, almost fabulist style as we follow Josko in his transformation from hero -- he is a brilliant sniper -- to physically and emotionally wounded fighter who abandons the war to find Klara. Josko wanders from town to town, each ripped apart by battle, the few remaining inhabitants numb to violence. He encounters near starvation, exhaustion and hallucinations. He hears a girl's voice, calling him, leading him, somewhere, perhaps to Klara, guiding him on his quest: "She sang ballads and folk songs and at times only his name, and he wondered if she was beautiful."

At one point, Josko is arrested as a deserter and sent to a prison where, he is warned, "Sooner or later you sign your confession and then you disappear."

When interrogated, Josko honestly tells the guard who he is. But truth is met with disbelief and mockery: "Ah. So you're the famous Josko Banovic, the man who shot down two jets over Sibenik, who left the head of that Muslim sniper on a café table in Split." Josko realizes that he will undoubtedly face death unless he escapes. And escape he does, in a flurry of brutal, premeditated and bloody acts against his own countrymen.

Interspersed throughout the narrative, Kesey offers three fables, each beginning with "What happened was this" rather than the usual "Once upon a time." The first concerns an old woman whose home is attacked, "bullets from a far hill poured into her house, sizzling and popping all around her." She survives at first. Upon her eventual death, the townsfolk revere her as a saint and eventually turn the old woman's home into a shrine, which is soon desecrated by soldiers. The other two fables similarly demonstrate the struggle between the sacred and the profane, hope and destruction.

Kesey has created a quietly brilliant protest against war, an exquisitely rendered tale in the absurdist spirit of such classics as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Catch-22." It is a tale whose heroes and villains, through the course of battle, often change places until their roles blur.

It is a tale that sadly remains relevant and in need of telling today.

[This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]

Roy Kesey's Nothing in the World is a novella set in Croatia, opening just as the recent war with Serbia begins. Josko Banovic is a young man with few friends who daydreams about being noticed by the local girls. When Serbia invades, Josko eagerly signs up for the army only to find it a mess of poor training and misinformed orders. Abandoned by their superior officers, Josko's anti-air unit unwittingly becomes first war heroes and then war casualties. Injured and alone in the wreckage of his unit, Josko begins a journey across Croatia, where he discovers his gift for sniping as he follows both the siren song of a strange woman and the trail of his sister Klara, who he has a vaguely incestuous obsession with.

Nothing in the World is divided into four parts, the first three ending with short fables that are seperated from the main narrative but set within the framework of the war. It's these fables that provide the novella with much of its thematic weight, allowing Kesey to illuminate for us what Josko experiences firsthand, specifically the way in which war breeds both kindness and cruelty in equal measures without consideration for either saints or sinners.

Throughout the war, Josko is more often alone than in the company of other human beings. Increasingly, his interactions with others begin with misunderstandings and end in violence, but Josko never gives up his quest for his sister and for the other, more mysterious woman. His longing for both steadily increases, leading him onward with a desperate hope that infuses not only Josko but all the other inhabitants of his ravaged country. It's this hope that dwindles and swells skillfully throughout this short narrative, and its redemptive, purposeful promise is what Kesey finally leaves us with in the end.

The novella as a form has seemingly fallen on hard times. Too long to publish in magazines and too short to stand alone in book form, the novella is most often relegated to the task of bulking up short story collections, where it rarely does more than show how gifted short story writers too often struggle at the longer forms. Lucky for us, Bullfight Media has taken a chance on Nothing in the World, which shows how powerful the novella is when done right. Kesey's written a great debut book here, one that's as beautiful as it is brutal. Not to be missed.