“Compartments” reviewed on Strange Horizons

Here is an excerpt from Andy Sawyer’s review of The Apex Book of World SF, posted on Strange Horizons:

Finally, there is “Compartments” by Zoran Živković, first published in Serbian in 2004. Živković, another World Fantasy Award winner and a writer who has been frequently published in Interzone has a Kafkaesque quality of surreal and often humorous strangeness and it’s here to the fore in “Compartments.” The carriages visited by the narrator are venues for non sequiturs, mystery, and bizarre logics. In them he meets (among others) chess-playing monks, an old gentleman who ate his first wife “but not all at once, of course . . . otherwise he might have been sent to the gallows,” and the conductor who is overwhelmed by the simple message “not to lose hope.” It ends the anthology on a high note, and our only disappointment is that it has ended. As in the last sentence of “Compartments,” we pause, hope that more will be said, and when it isn’t we move on…

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