Garden, Ashes

Danilo Kiš · 1935–1989 · Yugoslavia / Serbia

Originally Bašta, Pepeo (Serbo-Croatian)

Why it matters

A boy remembers his eccentric, doomed Jewish father through fragmented, lyrical memory as the Holocaust closes in. Kiš's autobiographical novel of a vanished Central European Jewish childhood.

At a glance

Fragmented, lyrical child's-eye memory sequences resist a straightforward chronological reading.