The Legend of the Sleepers By Danilo Kiš
Eerste verhaaltje was een beetje onsamenhangend maar wel heel mooie beschrijvingen!! Tweede verhaaltje was zwaaaar fucked up en wel echt vlot om te lezen!! 64 1/2 The Legend of the Sleepers ★★★☆☆
2/2 Simon Magus ★★★★★
“When a lie is repeated long enough, people start believing it. Because people need faith.” - Danilo Kiš on religion 64 This one caused me pain.
Heavy on the biblical references, it seems my lack of piety was my downfall here. I’m sure if I had more (or any) faith, or had spent any time at all on the scriptures, I’d be able to find more meaning and impact here.
But the true fact is, I have no interest in anything holy, including these two short stories. A blasphemous statement indeed, but after reading them, the notion of being struck down by an errant lightning bolt would be a more than welcome outcome. 64 The Legend of the Sleepers:
Some people wake up in a cave after a few years and get carried to another cave. Lots of thinking, their bodies have become almost like stone.
The Magus:
Look I Can do special magic tricks.
DEAD! 64 I had wanted to read the stories of Danilo Kis for many years, ever since I heard he was the 'Borges of the Balkans'. This little book of two stories seemed an ideal introduction to his work. And yet I really disliked the first story, the title story. It didn't engage my attention at all, my mind kept wandering and I found it difficult to focus on the action (what little of it there was) and the ideas (if there were any they mostly passed me by)...
But the second story, 'Simon Magus', is tremendous. That second story is why I have given this book four stars and why I intend to seek out more of Danilo Kis' work. It certainly belongs in the top division of all the short stories I have ever read. So for me this book was one of two very distinctive halves, and the second half was vastly better than the first... 64
I wasn’t a fan of this one, it felt like reading the Bible except at least then perhaps I’d get to understand Christians more. I can’t imagine ever wanting to read more Kiš.
64 Video review coming soon.
Too blasphemous for religious people, too many religious references for non- or anti-religious people. What audience was he trying to appeal to? Was it just to create a noise?
The imagery was horrifying but the plot was boring because we don't care about anyone or anything? It's almost like he uses Biblical references to forgo the effort of writing characters, which is odd given he does nothing with the words that he does use to build a strong story or message. The writing seems weirdly nihilistic like the kind of person who might go looking for a fight with strangers... Morbid and introverted without any insight to the actual way people think or feel.
Like an anti-Christian, slow-motion version of Kafka that occurs mostly without dialogue or events.
Like an emotionless, joyless, sexless version of Chuck Palahniuk, but based on alternative retellings of the Bible.
No real message here, just mess. From the way that he writes, I imagine that his face would be very punchable. 64 I'd never heard of Danielo Kis before reading this entry in the Penguin Modern Classics set, but it's clear he's an excellent writer, and it was a pleasure to read these two short stories.
Both of the stories, The Legend of the Sleepers and Simon Magus, read a little like fantasies, and Kis plays with a sense of unreality in both. In the former, a sleeper awakes after centuries of slumber, unsure if what is happening is a dream or reality – or is it memory? The reader isn't sure either – and in the latter, the story provides two versions of the fate of the maligned Simon Magus, enemy of Christianity's earliest apostles.
The sense of unreality and the poetic style reward less an effort to picture exactly what's being described than the reader simply allowing the flow of words to rush over them. To his credit, Kis makes this clear from the start of The Legend of the Sleepers, when he repeats the same scene three or four times in slightly different language, each building on the previous. It's an odd, slightly off-putting way to begin a story, but it at least lets you know what you're in for.
Overall, though, Kis seems like the kind of writer who deserves more attention in the West, but writing from Yugoslavia in the mid to late 20th century likely made that difficult. I'm glad he was included in this collection. 64 Two plodding stories rife with mysticism and biblical references. No doubt there is more meaning in them than my puzzled brain can glean.
Penguin Modern Classics
#1 - Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
#2 - Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber by Allen Ginsberg
#3 - The Breakthrough by Daphne Du Maurier
#4 - The Custard Heart by Dorothy Parker
#5 - Three Japanese Short Stories (3 authors)
#6 - The Veiled Woman by Anais Nin
#7 - Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
#8 - Food by Gertrude Stein
#9 - The Three Electroknights by Stanislaw Lem
#10 - The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh
#11 - The Legend of the Sleepers 64 I thought this would be more mythical. Not quite my cup of tea though. 64
'For once there had been false idols and asses' heads drawn on the walls...'
Sleepers awake in a remote cave and the ancient mystic Simon Magus attempts a miracle, in these two magical, otherworldly tales from one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe. The Legend of the Sleepers