Blesok review of Escher’s Loops

Escher's LoopsMy latest book, Escher’s Loops, has been reviewed in the Macedonian-based Blesok:

The four large threads are woven on more than three hundred pages, each with its own characters who, not by accident, are characters from the previous thread, characters and events that had been mentioned and are interconnected. In the first thread the connection is via an unusual memory, so where one starts, the second continues, the latter being part of the third and so on until it comes back to the first one, and in the second there is telling of stories which are also connected, each story being a story within a story, and so on until the next thread. The third thread is directly connected with suicides, more specifically the stories on suicides and the old lady in green, who, together with the gentleman in white would be the key to resolving the riddle, which would be hinted in the fourth thread, fully led by dreams. Taking into consideration all of these four elements – memory, stories, suicides, dreams, and the characters of the lady in green and the gentleman in white, we have the opportunity to only start the weaving, because somewhere at the end of the novel Zoran Živković returns us to the beginning again, without giving us the chance to make sure if we had undid ourselves in the proper way or not. Or maybe it does not matter how and if we had undid. Maybe it is more important to accept the game, and similarly to Escher’s graphics, one thread leads to another, and the latter leads to a new and unknown one.

Link to the full review.

New reviews of The Last Book

The Last Book has been receiving some nice attention recently. It seems my “meta-fictional thriller” is making quite an impact.

Here are four reviews of the German edition of the book, published by DTV in November 2008:

http://www.schreib-lust.de/leselust/rezension.php?id=758
http://www.kripo-online.at/portal/0812-buch-todimbuch.asp
http://www.hinternet.de/weblog/2008/12/zoran-ivkovi-das-letzte-buch.php
http://www.titel-magazin.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7685

Here is a Finnish review of the book:

http://marremakro.blogspot.com/2008/12/tv-julkalendrar-och-en-sista-bok.html

And Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen mentioned The Last Book in his 2008 roundup of translated fiction:

Serbian author Zoran Živković has been a favorite of mine ever since I read the 2004 English translation of his The Fourth Circle. Although most of his stories that I’ve read have been short, thematically-connected “story suites,” The Last Book is a suspense novel about why people are dying after they open a particular book. As is fitting for his tales, Živković’s tale is in turns surreal and poignant, with a twist ending that, while not surprising for those familiar with his writing, is a fitting conclusion to a playful mystery.