The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš review – a fitting tribute to a master storyteller

I urge you to read this resissued collection from a writer who reinvented and invigorated the short story

I suppose there may have been a joke in the back of Danilo Kiš’s mind when he gave this, his final collection of stories, such a title, seeing that the book as a whole runs to a mere 166 pages, and the title story is only 24 pages long. But it is not a joke itself: the story is one of the most moving I have ever read, a testament to both the power and the weakness of literature and human memory; it’s both an elegy and a howl of impotence, resonating in more dimensions than the two of the printed page. It tells of how a scholar on a cultural visit to Sweden is let into a library late at night in Stockholm (after a performance of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata; I think that’s significant). There, she finds a volume in which her father’s entire life is written, even though he had died only two months before. There is every conceivable detail:

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