April Fools Day (Paperback)

Like Aleksandar Hemon and Ha Jin, short story writer Novakovich (Salvation and Other Disasters) manages the feat of writing vibrantly and inventively in a second language, shaping English to the dictates of his satiric, folk-tinged storytelling. His debut novel tells the story of Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian Everyman born in the town of Nizograd in 1948. As a boy, Ivan is a bully and a patriot (as one chapter title puts it, "Ivan loves the state apparatus"), and he grows up longing to serve his country. After a buffoonish but successful stint in medical school, he's about to become a doctor when a foolish joke gets him arrested and sent to a labor camp on a desolate Adriatic island. He's released three years later, but his criminal record makes him unfit for everything except graduate school in philosophy. Demoralized and hapless, he's drafted into the Serb-heavy Yugoslav army to fight his fellow Croats; he soon deserts and is hustled into uniform on the other side. Novakovich gives a pithy, biting account of the Balkan wars, following it up by an even more caustic account of Ivan's marriage to a woman he raped during the war. The story culminates with Ivan's first-person account of his own death and afterlife. Novakovich's English is foreign-tinged and brash, giving a jolt of chaotic energy to this dark Balkan comedy.
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Politics turn personal for Ivan Dolinar, born April 1, 1948, in Croatia, as the ricocheting course of his life reflects the tumult of his home country. His medical studies are cut short when he's imprisoned after a classmate jokes about assassinating Tito, who--along with Indira Gandhi--visits the labor camp and offers Ivan a Cuban cigar and a longer sentence. Released but barred from medicine, Ivan is drafted into the Yugoslav army just before the Croats organize their own defense force, putting him into an absurd and horrific war with his own countrymen. Finding his captain raping his former classmate Selma, Ivan rescues and later marries her, raising her daughter as his own. But marriage, fatherhood, hypochondria, and adultery fail to bring the peace Ivan finds in life after death. Novakovich has recycled some of his earlier stories-- Milan's war experience in "Crimson," from Salvation and Other Disasters (1998), becomes Ivan's, and sculptor-headstone carver Marko Kovachevich in "Rust," from Yolk (1995), reappears largely verbatim--to form this ultimately sardonic view of getting by in the Balkans. Michele Leber
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"Delightfully neurotic . . . Novakovich brings a deft touch to his ambitious and unconventional first novel." (Columbus Dispatch )

"Wickedly funny and deeply harrowing...Novakovich knows how to tell a story...Strange, lyrical beauty abounds here." (Maud Casey, New York Times Book Review )

"APRIL FOOL'S DAY is a wonder...[It] has an economy of style and narrative that all good readers will relish." (Republic of Letters )

"An agreeably eccentric first novel from one of the more interesting and unusual contemporary writers." (Kirkus Reviews, starred )

"[Ivan] is a fully rounded character, the type of protagonist...that we rarely find in fiction." (Chicago Tribune )

"A heartfelt novel about the war-torn Balkans that's actually quite funny...and touching." (GQ )

"Both humorous and horrifying as it traces one man's misadventures." (USA Today )

"Disturbing and frequently beautiful...the novel is a Balkan conflation of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Gogol's DEAD SOULS, and SLAUGHERHOUSE FIVE." (Minneapolis Star Tribune )

"[A] laugh-while-you-grimace novel...[Novakovich] writes with dark wit, and a touching sympathy." (Newsweek International )

"Rife with dark humor [and] notable for its witty reflections on politics, literature and the vicissitudes of the human heart." (San Diego Union-Tribune )

"An ambitious first novel ... The magic realism of the final sections is exemplary; Novakovich has found his groove." (Washington Post )

"There are very few native-born English speakers who write as well. (Tibor Fischer, The Guardian )

Ivan Dolinar is born in Tito's Yugoslavia on April Fool's Day, 1948 -- the auspicious beginning of a life that will be derailed by backfiring good intentions in a world of propaganda and paranoia. At age nineteen, an innocent prank cuts the young Croatian's budding medical career short and lands him in a notorious labor camp. Released on the eve of civil war, Ivan is drafted into the wrong army, becoming a pawn in an absurd conflict in which the rules and loyalties shift abruptly and without warning. But even in a world gone mad, one course of action remains eminently sane: survival.

Told with bitingly dark humor and a deep tenderness, April Fool's Day is both a devastating political satire and a razor-sharp parody of war.

Josip Novakovich's stories have appeared in many publications, including The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares. He teaches at Pennsylvania State University and lives near State College, Pennsylvania.