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"With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, notions of betrayal, and the randomness of human lives and biographies. Using the duplicitous and shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over and over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha Dorothea Dorothea butterfly after the woman who drove him cross country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown and find love to magical effect. Propelled by literary footnotes and "minor" characters, Fox is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that's impassioned, learned, and hilarious."--… (more)
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The central image of the fox as a symbol of the creative writer's status in the world is taken from Boris Pilnyak (who did exist, of course, and several of whose books Ugrešić translated): Ugrešić looks, amongst other things, at the writer as someone who steals other people's lives to turn them into stories, at the writer as someone to blame for holding the wrong opinions — she draws on the deaths of many Soviet writers under Stalin and on her own experience of being hounded by the nationalist government in Croatia — at the writer as a cheap resource to be summoned to entertain students or conference delegates, and at the difficulty of coming up with stories that satisfy her young niece. Imagine the trauma of having an aunt who knows too many fairy-tales and is happy to switch cultures and tales in mid-stream...
Good mind-bending fun.
In sections called, A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written and The Theocritus Adventure she focuses on a group of Futurists, Russian avant guard artists called OBEIRU, many of him get caught up in the Stalin purges of the late 1930s , either killed or sent to Siberia. Lost manuscripts works of art, novels never published she focuses on the plight of artists living “behind the wall”. Amongst these writers she focuses on Boris Pilnyak’s Chinese Story, partially borrowed from a lesser known Japanese writer. Other writers may or may not be real or are fictional characters. “real literary fun begins the moment a story slips an author’s control” seems to summarize the goal Ugresic has for herself.
Other sections focus on Croatians as they deal with the remnants of the war that broke apart Yugoslavia: “war is a time when the worst of humankind floats to the surface…whoever survives must face the consequences.”
Another section is about Nabokov’s travels to the American West in which he captures butterflies and finds new genus, her depiction of this event is sparkling in imagination and discovery.
While reading this I often thought of both Borges and Vila-Matas as similar writers. This is a special book that deserves wide praise and recognition.