Hidden Camera [Paperback]

In Context Magazine in 2003, John O’Brien, head of Dalkey, addressed one aspect of literature in translation:

“If we try to zero in on the question of how many ‘literary’ works (any kind of novel, poetry, play) were translated . . . my guess is that, including everything that comes from the smallest of presses and not paying attention to quality or genre, the figure is about 150 works of literature out of the 150,000 books published in the United States. . . Even if we eliminate textbooks, how-to books, et al. from this 150,000 figure, we still are looking at an infinitesimally small percentage of books that come from the 200 or so countries that exist beyond [U.S.] borders. In a quick check of catalogs from Knopf, Norton, Viking, Harcourt, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for approximately the past two seasons, there were thirty-one translations of contemporary foreign fiction and poetry. Thirty-one! From the New York houses forever championed as carrying on the noble tradition of serious literary publishing.”

In such a marketplace, the literatures of the former Yugoslavia don’t stand much chance of getting published in English, and less of getting read. As part of its mandate, Dalkey Archive Press puts into print, and keeps in print, translated works from all over the world. Things in the Night and Hidden Camera are quirky, readable, and funny novels. Part of the Eastern Europe series, they deal with the place and role of the individual in societies that have struggled, in one case peacefully, in another bloodily, to emerge from decades of oppression. Both novels feature an unnamed male first-person narrator. In Things in the Night, the narrator is a man whose bizarre imagination estranges him from others. In Hidden Camera, it is a man who hides behind proprieties and who fears the perceived, though never seen, “Authorities”. The first narrator is a type who, in a British or Irish novel, would easily be taken for a charming eccentric; but in a Baltic production, he’s not likely to be viewed in any indulgent light. The narrator of Hidden Camera is a timid Clumsy Carp, someone many people resemble at least a few times in their life on those days when everything they do, say, or think is inappropriate or ill-timed.
Hidden Camera takes place in an unnamed city. The narrator, an undertaker waiting for retirement, is without a loved one, family, or friends. His acute sense of civic responsibility barely masks an intense fear of everything and everyone. Early on we are given a glimpse of his aquarium.

“The fish were only aware of my existence during the brief moments when I fed them, and then only as some impersonal force that acted kindly towards them for some unknown reason. In all other circumstances they didn’t pay me the slightest attention.
I paid quite a bit of attention to them, however, although not as recognizable individuals with any feelings of attachment.”

The passage is given to us for a reason: it suggests an analogous relationship between the narrator and the fish, and the narrator and Big Brother.
Returning home one evening, he finds an invitation to a movie house, but believing it’s a marketing gimmick, he puts it aside. As he’s about to prepare his supper, “something suddenly snap[s],” and he rushes off to make the evening show. This impromptu action is in fact typical of the narrator; though he thinks of himself as calm and restrained, he is hasty and easily swayed by his emotions. This one night completely disrupts the narrator's small and narrow life. In the darkness of the cinema, sitting next to an attractive woman (the only other person there), he watches a short film of himself seated on a familiar park bench. This footage is cleverly merged with separately filmed footage of the woman beside him. He concludes that some television show has hidden a camera and observed him; that it has, in fact, targeted him. What happens next becomes increasingly peculiar.
I won’t detail the surprises that follow. What can be said, without giving much away, is that the realism with which the novel begins, slowly, naturally wanes and the narrative acquires a queasy, nightmarish quality before ending in fantasy. Slapstick humour, achieved through descriptions of the narrator’s clumsy physical actions, and his stubborn insistence on proper comportment at all times, keep the reader at a distance. This turns out to be a positive thing.
In the opening pages the reader feels either like an “impersonal force” or like an engaged observer, convinced that she’s smarter than the hapless schmo running around the city, trapped in one situation after another and worried all the while that he’ll be arrested by the police or sued by the show’s producers. Halfway through the book the narrator bravely, and foolishly, states, “Since I wasn’t about to give up, what else could I do but continue the game without getting involved in its meaning, regardless of where it took me?” Unbeknownst to the reader, the narrator has certain feelings and convictions which inform his actions, especially in the last pages, and these take him to a place the reader is unable to follow. Zivkovic isn’t interested in showing yet another victim of state machinery. Nor is he toying with his own creation. Something mysterious is visited upon the narrator-it can’t be said that he grows, although he does make some kind of transition-but nothing is allowed to reveal the nub of it to us.
At the end the reader feels considerably less sure of his or her own footing than the narrator-a reversal cleverly effected. Indeed, much of Hidden Camera-with its fish tank perspective of being utterly controlled by mercurial but not necessarily ill-disposed Higher Powers-is skilfully managed, with superb control of pace.
Hidden Camera, which benefits from the efforts of a sympathetic and proficient translator, presents English readers with a fine exemplar of a translated contemporary work that is well worth acquiring.
Jeff Bursey (Books in Canada)

Zivkovic surveys the shifting line between paranoid fantasy and legitimate threat in his mystifying novel. When the unnamed narrator, an undertaker, is invited to a private film screening, he's surprised to see that the movie is one sustained shot of himself sitting on a park bench. With this episode, a complicated dance begins between the protagonist and his anonymous puppeteers, who manage to send him careening from one wild incident to the next. Directed to a used-book store, he discovers a novel supposedly written by him years in the future; obeying another mysterious invitation, he ventures to the zoo, where he has a close call in a bear cage, and things get worse from there. "Undertakers primarily favor gentle, sentimental films," he says indignantly, but there's nothing gentle about his adventures. Readers are propelled along as effectively as the narrator is, but they may be just as confused. As the story progresses, the undertaker's increasing paranoia makes it impossible to say how much of the danger is real and how much is imagined. After making a name for himself as a fantasy writer, Zivkovic has stepped intriguingly into experimental prose. (Nov.)
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