Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis

Anomaly Reviews

• 
  Rachel Louise Atkin

  Such a weird book but I really enjoyed it. The premise is that it's set during the last day of the last year of human existence and on New Year's Eve everyone is going to be wiped out. Each chapter focuses on a different person or group of people, but they are all absolutely wild like a Minister who has just murdered someone, or these two friends where one is a necrophiliac and chopped his own leg off and one has got leprosy and uses it to get free dinner at restaurants. It was such a surreal book but each little story in it kept me hooked with how odd and strange it was. There wasn't really a resolution at the end but it's one of those books where you just go along for the ride and remember it for the experience.
• 
  Paul Fulcher

  I think I could sit forever, looking up and into the distance, where all secrets are inscribed, and I think I could see the stars going out one by one until, in the end, everything is black and motionless, the way it was and the way it ought to be; I think I could see all that as I saw the lights of the planes disappeared from the sky — and still nothing would be clear to me; nothing except that Nothing is a principle, while Something is just an incident: an anomaly.
  
  'Anomaly' is Will Firth's translation of 'Anomalija' by the Montenegrin-Bosnian author Andrej Nikolaidis, perhaps better known as a provocative political columnist, but a highly accomplished author.
  
  This is the latest novel from by subscription to the wonderful Peirene Press, founded by Meike Ziervogel and now co-run by Stella Sabin and James Tookey:
  
  

  Founded in 2008, we’ve been a key player in the thriving UK independent publishing scene for over a decade, publishing books from 25 countries and 20 different languages. Traditionally a publisher of European novellas in translation, we now publish writing from all over the world and are expanding our list to publish literary fiction of all shapes and sizes.

  
  
  And a novel I was delighted to see on their list, after reading the outstanding
  The Olcinium Trilogy (The Son, The Coming and Till Kingdom Come) also in Firth's translation.
  
  The novel opens with a film script. A minister, who presides over the murder of a woman (a political opponent? someone inconvenient?), then cruises around the town in his chaffeur driven car, before returning to his family, seemingly devoid of any guilt. His wife tells him she noticed the blood on his shirt:
  
  MINISTER
  Did you wash it?
  
  WIFE
  I burned it.
  
  The author is hinting, for the first time, at the restlessness that engulfs the Minister. Even if they had slept, we learn, their calm wouldn't have lasted. There's no peace any more, not even for the righteous. The earth shakes, and a deafening noise comes from the sky. It's the sound of the world splitting, falling apart. A crack opens in the ceiling and glares at the Minister with a dark eye. He runs to his children's room and leads them out into the hall, where their mother is waiting for them. The Minister hugs all three of them. 'God will never forgive,' he thinks. He kisses his daughter on the head and says: 'God, how I love you all.' Immediately below this, in his untidy, barely legible hand, resembling a cardiogram, the screenwriter has noted: Yes: love redeems. God loves, God has a weakness for love. But... That was not God.
  
  The omniscient narrator providing a commentary on the script appears to the devil. And the first part of the novel that follows has a series of similar stories, (im)morality tales set around New Year's Eve which typically end with some apocalyptic event.
  
  You've noticed the pattern: our stories all take place on New Year's Day and each ends with an extreme: outside of the expected, the physically possible and the narratively justifiable. This one is no exception. But a little excessiveness, without which no true creativity is possible, never hurt anybody. Just like a little common sense. And yet people shun both like the plague: as if coming into contact with them would expose them to infection and lasting misfortune.
  
  The stories are linked in that the characters in one often watch a TV report of the events in other stories, and a common theme in the improbable and apocalyptic ends which the characters meet is that people from the past suddenly intrude into the present e.g. one character is killed by a naval bombardment from hundreds of years earlier, another by a mammoth which suddenly drops from the sky.
  
  There is a political edge to many of the stories - such as a side-swipe at novelist Ivo Andric - some of which may have passed me by as a British rather than Bosnian-Montenegrin reader.
  
  But Nikolaidis's literary influences were clearer - Bernhard above all of course - particularly his view that tragedy should be written as a comedy (and comedy as a tragedy),e.g. as a key theme of this
  story, translated by Martin Chalmers.
  
  And the novel really centres on the author's heterodox theological-political views. He has
  said, talking of this novel, that "Apokalipsa je najbolji od svih krajeva najgoreg od svih svjetova" - "The Apocalypse is the best of all ends of the worst of all worlds." (translation by Google).
  
  Theologically the novel (or at least the rather dubious narrator) cites liberational theologist
  Jon Sobrino approvingly. And the story encapsulates the author's view that when people assume that their personal wealth and success, and/or their political causes, are backed by God, it's actually often the Devil to who they are praying instead. From an
  interview (google translated):
  

  Man is never so open to the Devil as when he asks God to give him strength and power to fulfill his desire. To pray to God to help us achieve our goal, to ask him to participate in the realization of our desires, ambitions and revenges, to ask God for such power is to call upon the Devil. A God who fulfills all our desires - doesn't that sound like the perfect definition of the Devil? And when he gets power, and when he achieves what he set out to do, a man does not know who, God or the Devil, actually helped him. "With God's help we will defeat the enemy" – that sentence is the chorus of the song that humanity sings to the Devil. Croatian author Igor Grbić wisely says that where man turns God into "an extended hand of human claims and deterrence, human justice and guilt, human good and evil" - that is where man abandons God.

  
  
  The final section of the novel, a Fugue, is set in a remote mountain hut in Obergurgl-Hochgurgl (picture from my own visit in December 2021).
  
  
  
  A woman and her young child have been sent to the hut in search of a manuscript, a musical score hidden in original Book of a Thousand Chapters by the 'Revolutionary of the Rhine', a late 15th/early 16th century contemporary of the theologian and revolutionary
  Thomas Müntzer. (There is a real-life book of 100 chapters -
  Büchli der hundert Capiteln). Arriving on 30th December, she and her child seem to be the sole survivors of the end of the world, an event which is traced to a disastrous attempt to conquer time and create a life free of guilt, by offering people the chance to correct past mistakes and live different lives.
  
  Impressive - and I look forward to more translation by Will Firth of Nikolaidis's work.
• 
  Andy Weston

  In this exhilarating novel, Nikolaidis uses a blend of sci-fi, horror, thriller and comedy, to offer a beguiling combination of the mundane and the outlandish.
  
  With evident glee, an unnamed narrator tells twisted tales of terror, all taking place of New Year’s Eve, and abruptly finish with catastrophe. Blood raining from the sky, necrophilia, plane crashes, horror may seem to be at the forefront, but in the background is Nikolaidis satirical commentary on post-Yugoslav societies, exposing the politics, culture and toxic nationalism suffused into the countries today.
  
  Though Bosnian originally, Nikolaidis lives and works from Montenegro, and is one of several writers from the country to be harassed and targeted by the authorities in recent years.
  
• 
  Vesko Jovović

  Znatno slabije od svega prethodnog od Nikolaidisa.
• 
  Marinka

  Okrutno
• 
  Ειρήνη

  Σαγηνευτικά αλλόκοτο
• 
  Anirban

  A waste of time.
• 
  Kamryn

  What was that. 😳
• 
  Sofia

  such a weird little book! i enjoyed the style of narration and the mysterious glimpses of each character