Hidden Camera
by Zoran Živković
Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection
A quiet, somewhat neurotic undertaker spends his days caring for his exotic fish, and of course his silent bodies as they arrive. One day, quite out of the ordinary, he receives a ticket to the movies. The movie, however, turns out to be of him, apparently filmed without his knowledge! Convinced that he is being targeted by a TV reality show, he plays along, only to be dragged from one adventure to the next, in a fantastic journey that evolves into a story of love, of death, and of ultimate creativity.
And through his travails we discover new perspectives on our own roles in an increasingly insensitive and scripted world.
Hidden Camera was nominated for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Reviews
- Živković surveys the shifting line between paranoid fantasy and legitimate threat in his mystifying novel. When the unnamed narrator, an undertaker, is invited to a private film screening, he’s surprised to see that the movie is one sustained shot of himself sitting on a park bench.
—Publishers Weekly - A short, meaty book, this is an antimodernist parable heavy enough for you to know you’ve absorbed real substance, yet ironic enough to ensure you don’t want to kill yourself when it’s over. [A] wonderfully sardonic writer whose idiosyncratic vision so thoroughly serves his bleak, absurdist sense of fun.
—Michael Moorcock, The Guardian - …a work of unexpected beauty and surprise. Živković is seeking to communicate something about the nature of life and death, of existence and non-existence, which bends perception into new and challenging shapes.He marries the comic to the melancholic with an enviable balance and lightness of touch.
—Dan Hartland, Strange Horizons - Hidden Camera is a love story, a story of love and death; it is also a parable of creativity. Hidden Camera is typical of Živković’s circular narrative style: like a serpent swallowing its own tail, the last sentence of the story draws one straight back to the first. For Živković, the act of creation is an act of love.
—Tamar Yellin, Infinity Plus - An inherently compelling, exceptionally thought-provoking, and consistently entertaining read from beginning to end … unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections.
—Midwest Book Review
Details
- Pages: 198
- Trim size: 5″ x 8″ (127mm x 203mm), with dj
- ISBN
Hardcover: 978-4-908793-37-0
Ebook: 978-4-908793-38-7 - List Price
Hardcover: US$26.00
Ebook: US$5.99 - Cover: Youchan Ito （Togoru Art Works）
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