Penguin, 1992, 343 p. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian Predeo slikan cajem (Prosveta, Belgrade, 1988) by Christina Pribićević-Zorić.

It is all but impossible to imagine a book like this being written by an anglophone author – not even those of African or Asian heritage. Experimental works are not unknown to the anglophone tradition but I would submit there is nothing to match this. At times it bears a similarity to magical realism – odd things happen and the bodies of some of its characters are subject to even odder anatomical configurations – but it manages to transcend even that. It is all but unsummarisable.

The novel as a whole is separated unevenly into two Books of which the shorter, Book One, A Little Night Novel (whose final passage is rendered entirely in German,) has each of its chapters prefaced by a passage printed in italics relating the history of a group of monks who wind up in the Monastery of Chilandar and are themselves divided into two groups, solidaries (otherwise called cenobites,) and solitaries (aka idiorrhythmics.) More or less failed architect Atanas Svilar (aka Atanas Razin – his origins, like those of many others here, are complicated,) travels to the monastery to try to find out what happened to his father who had fled there to avoid the Germans’ attentions during World War II. Svilar’s beliefs about himself changed by his trip, he takes a new (though old) name, plus his childhood sweetheart, Vitacha Milut, from her husband and daughters and goes to the US where he achieves fame and fortune as a pharmaceutical magnate.

This bears only a prefatory relation to Book Two, A Novel for Crossword Fans, where the monks and the monastery are forgotten but which still follows Svilar, though it focuses more heavily on his wife, and which is decidedly bizarre. This has four Sections of varying lengths denoted 1 ACROSS, 2 ACROSS, 3 ACROSS, 4 ACROSS containing chapters headed 2 DOWN, 1 DOWN, 5 DOWN, █ DOWN, 4 DOWN, 6 DOWN etc. In other words, crossword clues. (The █ DOWN chapters are apparently necessary to the whole book to bind it together, since without them, as in an actual crossword, the crossed words will fly apart.) But instructions on how to actually read this assortment, this new way of reading a book, are only given on pages 187-190, which is to say 88 pages after Book Two begins and so are, for all practical purposes, useless as the reader (unless forewarned) will have already read up to that point linearly. This same chapter at the last informs us that, “All readers of this book are entirely imaginary. Any resemblance to actual readers is coincidental.” Take that fiction fans.

Then, at the whole book’s end, there is an index containing all the words required for the solution but, as in all indexes, it is in alphabetical order and so requires further elucidation. This index is followed by two lined pages for the reader to write in for him- or herself the denouement of the novel or the solution to the crossword, and finally, printed upside down, we have the solution itself.

Not a straightforward read then, but for puzzle solvers an intriguing prospect. But what’s it all got to do with landscape painted with tea?

Svilar had a set of notebooks comtaining details about dwellings, residences, houses and summer houses lived in, worked in or visited by Josip Broz Tito, general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and whose covers were landscapes painted with tints from different types of Camelia sinensis – tea – showing those various buildings and their surroundings.

Throughout we are treated to incident upon incident of a magical realist bent, oddness upon oddness, plus addresses to the reader, but are also supplied with plentiful aphorisms such as, “‘All sexual acts are in some way connected, in some way they interact,” attributed to Svilar, as is, “‘All births are similar, and every death is different,’” which is yet another of those attempts common in literature ever since to echo Tolstoy. “People who are afraid of life leave their families belatedly and reluctantly and are disinclined to start their own,” and “People who are afraid of death stay with their families briefly and go into the world quickly and easily, leaving one another,” are in a similar vein.

A few of Pavić’s sentences are beyond enigmatic, though, “Their road, as all roads, did the thinking for them even while it was empty,” “… only a bird on a branch can understand silence. Man cannot,” though one does reflect life in a country where thoughts have to be circumscribed, “after so many decades, when only the clocks still tell us the truth,” though “Time can harm the truth more than lies,” is more widely applicable. Some are singular, “No undelivered slap should ever be taken to the grave,” but, “October has never come as often as this year….” a saying in the Minut family, is repeated several times.

Then there are the metafictional comments, “Critics are like medical students: they always think a writer is suffering from the very disease they happen to be studying at the time,” … “a writer is like a tailor. Just as the latter, when tailoring a suit, covers up the shortcomings and defects of his customer, so the writer, when tailoring a book, has to cover up the defects and shortcomings of his reader.”

These defects in the reader do not put off Vitacha Milut. We are told, “And so Vitacha Milut, the heroine of this novel, fell in love with the reader of her book.” “‘The heroine of a novel in love with the reader!’” she herself writes. “‘When has that ever happened?’ you will say, and you will not be wrong,” with a few lines later, “ ….isn’t it all the same whether you first fall in love in a book or in life? ….. Why do you think that only you have a right to the book, but the book has no right to you?”

In a comment which could be designed by Pavić to defray criticism he has Atanas reply to the writer of his testimonial (ie part of this book,) “It’s not just one story that’s escaped me from your book, but several,” and adds, “Anyone who reads finds in books what cannot be found elsewhere, not what the writer shoved into the novel,” and goes on to say in effect that you can find any story in the text of a book if you look hard enough.

Sometimes a reader may wish not to have to look hard but the experience is usually better when that requirement is there. As the above all indicates, Landscape Painted with Tea may not be immediately accessible but it is a remarkable work and would certainly bear rereading.

Pedant’s corner:- bureaus (bureaux, please,) the Ukraine (Ukraine, no ‘the’,) “off of” (just ‘off’, no ‘of’ required,) Bosporus (usually Bosphorus,) Skoplje (Skopje.)

Stalin’s War With Germany, Volume 2. Grafton, 1985, 1199p – including 223p of references and sources, 78p of bibliography and a 38p index.)

I read the previous volume on Stalin’s war with Germany, The Road to Stalingrad, last year. Like that, this too is blighted with an alphanumeric soup of Army and Front names. The Red Army had variously:- Shock Armies, Guards Armies, Guards Tank Armies, Air Armies, Artillery Armies, Motorised Divisions, Rifle Divisions, Guards Cavalry Corps etc – designated by prefixes such as 1st, 2nd – all organised into different Fronts – Southern Front, South-Western Front, Leningrad Front, Steppe Front, Voronezh Front, Bryansk Front, four Ukrainian Fronts, three Baltic Fronts, three Belorussian Fronts, which morphed and changed or merged as the war progressed. Added to this is the proliferation of German units some of which are delineated in words (Sixth Panzer Army) or Roman numerals (XLVI Panzer.) Keeping track of it all is well-nigh impossible. Best to go with the flow as the narrative is very broad brush and consists mostly of plans to attack here or there with the various Soviet forces available to whatever Front is being discussed at the time.

The book gets out of these difficulties when it comes to the diplomatic area, being lucid on the various discussions with the Western Allies on Poland, Greece, Romania etc. In the matter of discussions Tito was unusual among the resistance leaders in German-occupied territories as he stood up to Stalin. The Western Allies were hamstrung in their dealings with Stalin as regards the post war settlements as they had no armies in Eastern Europe. A surprise to me was that there had apparently been a German plan to kidnap President Roosevelt from the Big Three conference in Tehran. Otto Skorzeny (who did rescue Mussolini from his mountain top imprisonment after the Italian change of sides) had a look at the possibility but dismissed it. Seemingly an aeroplane did land some German agents but the plot was foiled as the Russians had a spy in their midst. How much of this was genuine, how much a Soviet fabrication is debatable; Erickson says he has seen no documentary evidence.

This volume starts with the aftermath of the encirclement of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Thereafter it describes an almost consistent series of Soviet victories, though there were occasional holdups and slight reverses along the way. The emphasis on the Stavka is lessened here compared to Volume 1, perhaps because there were little or no crises for the Red Army to endure from 1943 on, only extremely bloody slogging. The role of the artillery in reducing German positions prior to Soviet attacks is made obvious – plus the importance of holding back the tanks until the infantry had made the breakthrough.

By this account the halting of the Soviet armies in front of Warsaw was not entirely an exercise in cynicism. They had just made a rapid advance, were at the end of long supply lines, with depleted forces and worn equipment and had suffered considerable losses (nearly 300,000 casualties over the two Fronts concerned in the relevant campaign.) Despite a wide exposure to World War 2 histories I had not been aware till reading this that there had also been an anti-Nazi rising in Slovakia as well as in Warsaw. Then again matters on the Eastern Front have tended to be skimmed by US or British accounts.

It is notable that in this book the war in Italy, D-Day, the breakout from Normandy, the crossing of the Rhine etc are incidental, off-stage, barely mentioned except in terms of co-ordination of attacks. The scale of the Soviet effort comes through loud and clear. In their terms, theirs was the only war. Even some of the German units involved in the Battle of the Bulge were later moved east.

The savage nature of the fighting for Reich territory in East Prussia and in front of and inside Berlin is given note. The 1st echelon of Soviet troops was well-trained, even clean-shaven, and relatively disciplined. The 2nd echelon was a complete contrast, made up either of POWs released by the advance and hurriedly retrained or conscripts from the various recently liberated Soviet republics – all of whom had suffered at German hands (Erickson’s description is “brutalised”) and some of whom may have resented both sides equally.

There is less sense in this volume of Stalin’s controlling hand on the armies, again perhaps due to the victories being won. His impatience comes through, though, and his possible vengefulness.

At one point Erickson gives the figure of over 1,500,000 Communist Party members being casualties in the Great Patriotic War. This underlines the magnitude of the Soviet Union contribution to winning the war as not every soldier would have been a party member. And there were of course the civilian casualties. The final attacks were pushed through with huge losses. Still, even at the end, there were German armies in the field capable of resistance, though some others were going through the motions.

Erickson had the benefit of speaking to some of the Soviet generals involved in writing his history of “Stalin’s War,” It was however written well before the demise of the Soviet Union and may well now have been superseded.