Praise for
Svetislav Basara
“A complicated take on the obsession that sees Rosicrucianism or freemasonry or the Illuminati everywhere, capturing both the talismanic appeal of the secret list and its satisfactory arbitrariness.”
—Daniel Soar, London Review of Books
“Chinese Letter is often hilarious and always readable, even as Basara insists on asking big questions about life and death, art, and representation, the conflict between world and spirit.”
—Ethan Nosowsky, Bookforum
“Serbian author Svetislav Basara’s Chinese Letter is, first and foremost, a comic novel… The novel’s charm and inventiveness is due, in part, to the way it manages to combine elements of the Oulipian and postmodern comic novel.”
—Brian Whitener, Chicago Review
“Basara is brazen in his borrowings, not trying to hide that this is a text built on the familiar. But he has a fine ear for creating just the right echoes.”
—Michael Orthofer, Complete Review
Other
Books by
Svetislav Basara
Chinese Letter
Copyright
Originally published in Serbian as Fama o biciklistima by Prosveta, Belgrade, in 1988
Copyright © 1988, 2008 by Svetislav Basara
Translation copyright © 2012 by Randall A. Major
Published by arrangement with Geopoetika, Belgrade, Serbia
First edition, 2011
First digital edition, 2013
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-934824-61-0 / ISBN-10: 1-934824-61-5
This book was published with support of the Ministry of Culture, Media and Informatic Society of the Republic of Serbia.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
The Messiah will come at the point when he is no longer necessary.
He will not come on the last day.
He will come on the very last of all possible days.
—Kafka
EDITOR’S PREFACE
Endless are the secrets of provincial libraries. Filled with untouched volumes of classics and frayed copies of pulp fiction, in their unexplored cellars they also conceal books that it would be impossible to find in the bookstores of a metropolis or even in the catalogues of the university and national libraries. Just as one does not search for gold at the jeweler’s but rather buys it there, while one finds it in distant canyons and alchemists’ laboratories, so it is that one searches in vain for wisdom in the libraries of Babylon, where it is worn and discolored from use, where, as Berdyayev says, “The spirit is objectivized, fossilized, tied to the sinfulness of the world and the disintegration of its parts.”
Books have a life and death of their own. Those whose authors did not believe in death have a life after the grave as well. Others, again, whose authors believed in reincarnation, get written again. It is impossible to separate the destiny of a book from the destiny of its author, and the destiny of the reader is also mixed into all of this. In other words, it is not the reader who is looking for a book, he is the one who is sought after, and there are manuscripts that hide in distant places for ages until they fall into the hands of the person for whom they were intended. Not being aware of this, one autumn in the cellar of the Municipal Library in Bajina Bašta (where I had taken refuge from a sadness the cause of which I still cannot mention), rifling through dusty copies of periodicals, I came across two little books. One was (in a crude paperback edition of “Slavija,” Novi Sad, 1937) entitled A Tale of My Kingdom, without the usual publication data. The second, a first edition in German, The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale, printed in 1903 in Zurich, in a limited run of six copies. The copy I was holding carried the number 3. Interested in how a book of such a limited run, printed so far away in time and space, might come to Bajina Bašta, I asked a friend, a scholar of German, to translate the rather short text. I was surprised to learn that Captain Queensdale mentioned Charles the Hideous, whom I considered to be a completely fictional character. Then, I was even more surprised when two years later, in the magazine Oblique, I read the authentic text of Majordomo Grossman “A History of the Diabolical Two-Wheeler.” To cut the matter short. I started doing research, the goal of which was to ease the boredom of rainy days, and which in the end – guiding me like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of history – ended up in the form of a voluminous almanac dedicated to the secret of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross.
In handing this collection over to the reader, I realize that several years ago, searching for colored pebbles, I came across a pearl, but also that the pearl had been awaiting a proper owner and found an improper one instead, who would turn it into a glass bauble by reduplicating it in an insufferably large number of copies. The only justification is that, in our time, which falls within the autumn of the year of years (about which Captain Queensdale speaks), even the sparkle of a glass bauble shines through the darkness gathering on the horizon.
S. B.
Charles the Hideous
A TALE OF MY KINGDOM
(Apocryphal)
Although the square kilometer as a unit of measure has not been invented yet, my kingdom stretches over 450 square kilometers. But no one knows that. Not even Grossman. I never desired to have a large kingdom. The size of a kingdom contributes nothing to the greatness of its king. On the contrary. Large empires gather all sorts of riffraff, and the emperor has all the shortcomings of his subjects. After all, I did not inherit my kingdom. I created it myself, with my bare hands and a lot of hard work. I spent all my savings. With the help of Grossman my majordomo, I even made my own throne from well-seasoned beech. Into the back of the throne, from behind, we nailed spikes in the shape of a cross, and then we hung the throne with thick rope from the ceiling like a swing. Nothing was left to chance, everything roils with symbolism. When I sit on the throne, the points of the nails drive into my back and I thus crucify myself; the pain does not allow me to relax. I think of the sufferings of our Savior and that forces me to be just and to be forgiving. And the fact that the throne swings indicates the inconstancy of Fortuna, of human life in general. You see, I began as a normal village boy. No one knows who my father was. Perhaps not even who my mother was. This will be interpreted in three hundred and fifty years by Sigmund Freud, when he arrives in the world of the living: the conditions were right so that I never overcome my Oedipus complex, of which Grossman does not even dream. He thinks that Freud is a figment of my imagination. He does not realize that he himself, the majordomo, is a product of an imagination so powerful that he is tangible. It does not matter, if he knew, the flatterer he is, he would immediately come running, tuck his tail and cry out: “Sire, what an important prophesy! What a great prophesy!” Imagine what he would do if I were to tell him something about quarks and quantum theory! Never mind. I overcame my Oedipus complex with ease, possibly