Facts and Fiction, Biography and Interpretation

Abstract

Mark Thompson’s Birth Certificate is the first biography of Danilo Kis in English, preceded only by Viktoria Radics’s Danilo Kis: palyarajzes breviarium, published in the original Hungarian in 2002 and in SerboCroat translation in 2005. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this book about this much translated and internationally famous writer is the author’s idea to structure it around a document, Danilo Kis’s brief ‘autobiography’. It is quite a Kisean device, and recalls Kis’s best novel Hourglass (1972), developed around his father’s unsent letter. It also promises a biography, or a ‘life and works’ overview, a genre which went out of fashion long ago, but which can still appeal to both a wider and specialist readership. However, after the opening pages of the book — an account of Kis’s family history and earliest childhood — this biographical determination disappears from Birth Certificate. Kis’s ‘Birth certificate’ is a brief and ironical award acceptance speech, in which the author fictionalizes and self-exoticizes himself, and should not be taken literally. Thompson’s Birth Certificate, however, takes it as a sujet, and comments extensively on things mentioned there only in passing. Hence an extended history of the Roman province of Pannonia, or of Jovan Cvijic’s and Vladimir Dvornikovic’s ideas — introduced by Kis’s mention of ‘ethnographic rarity’ — the relevance of which is not quite clear. On the other hand, Kis sums up in only two sentences the decades in which his books were written and, as a