The Modern Classics Encyclopedia of the Dead
SynopsisPlot
A girl sees the hideous fate of her sisters and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since 1789 are recreated in the almighty Encyclopedia of the Dead. These stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings. Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this was Danilo Kiš final work, published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983. Kiš is one of the great European writers of the post-war period.
Story
About this book
The Encyclopedia of the Dead is a collection of short stories by Danilo Kiš, originally published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983. It was his final work of fiction. The stories move across different centuries and locations, blending documented history with invented detail. In the title story, an enormous encyclopedia records the lives of every ordinary person who has lived since 1789, people too unremarkable to appear in any standard reference work. Other stories follow a young woman who glimpses a terrible vision in a mirror acquired from a traveling seller, and a city shaken by unrest after the death of a woman on its margins.
Kiš was born in Subotica in 1935 and grew up in a region shaped by successive occupations and border changes. His writing often returned to the relationship between individual memory and official record, between what states preserve and what they erase. In this collection, he sets comedy beside horror and compresses large historical spans into brief, precise narratives.
The stories share a persistent interest in how the dead are remembered or forgotten, and in the thin boundary between factual report and storytelling. Kiš structures several pieces as mock documents or scholarly entries, giving fiction the surface texture of archival material.
