This starts out looking like a simple collection of essays about narrative, where stories come from and what writers do with them, with particular reference to the writers of the Russian avant-garde. But then we gradually seem to slip back into the world of fiction (where we have really been all the time), when Ugrešić starts telling us about writers we are sure we wouldn't find if we tried to Google them, and about incidents we can be pretty sure she wouldn't be telling us about if they had really happened that way.

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. ( )

I loved this book. Ugresic, a Croatian writer, currently living in Amsterdam has written a novel which appears to be based on her personal journeys, studies and experiences. "We are all walking texts, we stride through the world with invisible copies adhering to us, numerous versions of ourselves, and we're ignorant of their existence, number and content".

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 whom 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. ( )

‘’We are all footnotes, many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle.’’

This is one of the strangest, most unique, most poignant books I’ve ever read. A fascinating, dark, witty mixture of Fiction, memoir, literary criticism. A work where meta-fiction and biography form a graceful dance, a book where reality and fiction are not two clearly distinguished notions. A work where despair, pain, loss, love, and expectations find their domain in Literature.

In six chapters, Ugrešić leads in the world of a writer wounded by a terrible war, confused and troubled by the fact that there seem to be no clear lines between victims and criminals, haunted by the ghost of failure. The writer in Ugrešič’s novel talks of stories that contained characters undeveloped and neglected. What of the stories that were written and what of the ones that never came to be? Two women. A betrayed wife in Kyoto. The widow of a Russian writer, who seems to reach the status of a modern literary goddess in the eyes of the readers despite the fact that she never wrote a word, meeting our writer in Naples,, offering her wisdom.

‘’I don’t remember when I last saw stars,’’ I said.

‘’The stars are all we have here,’’ he laughed.

‘’Stars and landmines’’, I added.

In a village in beautiful Croatia, our writer meets Bojan, a fascinating man whose job is to detonate the mines left from the war in the 1990s. A man of the law, a philosopher, a lover of Literature, a man who refuses to conform or identify with a particular country. Bojan was my favourite character in the book. He reminded me of a person very close to me (minus the risky job, thank God) and I loved him fiercely.

Then, our literary journey takes us to Russia during the nightmarish era of Stalin, as we witness the rising of the great Russian avant-garde writers and the Great Purge that would be the cause of their tragic demise. We move to the United States to meet a woman in Nabokov's life and then to Italy in front of young, know-it-all aspiring writers who have no idea what Literature actually is…

The fox stands as a symbol of intelligence and secrecy. Of being a loner, a seductive force, an alluring adversary. A watcher in the night, an outsider. Ugrešić uses the beautiful animal as an image of the writer that sees her work scrutinized because of artificial perceptions. Are we all citizens of the world by choice or have we retreated into a subconscious self-exile, fed up with everyone’s stupidity? What happens when your views don’t correspond to the mob’s ideals? And what about war, the source of all evils in our world?

‘’War is a time when the worst of humankind floats to the surface. Whoever survives must face the consequences.’’

The claustrophobic feeling of being a stranger in your own country, the conviction that you don’t belong anywhere, the isolation, the cruelty of the ignorant. The time when people lose their jobs (or worse) because of the ethnicity written on a piece of useless paper. When fanatics demand blood when censorship destroys a nation’s cultural heritage. When the long-term consequences of war become the cause of the separation of two people who see-to-eye, who had the misfortune to fall in love with each other…

From Kyoto to Naples, from Zagreb and Moscow to Amsterdam, Nottingham, and Milan, Ugrešić writes in witty, raw, powerful language. What is Fiction and what Reality? I wouldn’t dare to guess and it doesn’t matter. Fox is the work of an exceptional, brave writer, a book for brave readers.

‘’People were expelled, people were murdered, people fled in groups or singly to neighboring countries, to distant countries, families were broken up, parents found themselves in one country while their children were somewhere else. And I, too - having earlier inscribed on my inner map a random trajectory- found myself living abroad, becoming a person with two biographies, or two people with one biography, or three people with three biographies and three languages.’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )