Books by David Albahari

Displaced from his home more than twenty years ago as Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia descended into war, Serbian author David Albahari found safety in Canada, where this novel was written. In Globetrotter, Albahari deals with the bewilderments of exile and lost identity, themes he has investigated in earlier works. But in this unsettling experimental book he also enters new arenas, where sexual identity and the nature of blame and guilt attract his scrutiny. Narrated in a single uninterrupted paragraph, the novel takes place in the late 1990s at the Banff Art Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Three men-a painter from Saskatchewan and the narrator of the tale, a writer from Serbia, and a man whose traveling Croatian grandfather long ago jotted his name in a local museum's guest book-become acquainted, then attached, then fatally entangled. On a climactic mountain hike that seethes with jealousy, desire, shame, and guilt, each man must engage in a final struggle. Albahari seizes his reader's attention and never yields it in this remarkable, gripping tale.

It's Serbia, late 1990s. Our hero, a single man, writes a regular column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking weed and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping a beautiful woman.

Believing they were being taken to a better camp, Belgrade's Jews would climb into the truck with a sense of relief.