The title of Josip Novakovich's collection Heritage of Smoke is fitting. Its 16 stories swirl around in the head like smoke, pungent and wondrous, leaving a dizzy impression of the mutability and evanescence of all things.
Novakovich (Infidelities) has emerged as one of the most uncompromising short fiction writers of his generation. A Croatian expatiate who resides in Canada, Novakovich routinely delves into the often violent clashes of different cultures and ethnicities. Several stories in Heritage of Smoke explore the Yugoslav wars and their horrific legacy of ethnic cleansing and genocide. A gleeful contrarian, however, Novakovich breaks from the strictures of social realism to conjure stories full of ghosts, bizarre histories, moral paradoxes and deadpan irony. Religious themes of redemption and resurrection abound; such aspirational ideas work through various characters, though not always toward pleasant ends. Novakovich seems to savor the grit and dregs left in the wake of disillusionment and violence. His best stories, like "Dutch Treat" and "Acorns," analyze this human detritus and locate commonalities of shame and humiliation.
At its most unrestrained, Novakovich's prose turns disturbingly mythic, creating its own savage strain of magical realism. In the last story, "In the Same Boat," hunger and cannibalism bind two men in a relationship both primal and mystical: "They watched each other through a prism of blood, all the salty rainbows of the world collected in one color, rusty red." That Novakovich can find lyrical beauty in the macabre is his greatest feat. By rubbing wounds, Heritage of Smoke finds the other side of pain, luminous and transcendent. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist and fiction author.