Book of apparitions
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[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI--COLUMBIA AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Book of Apparitions is an account of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, narrated by one of the assassins, Vaso Cubrilovic. On the eve of World War II, Cubrilovic has exiled himself to a small sleepy town in Bulgaria. There, recuperating from gunshot wounds in a hospital room while trying to write his autobiography (thus a double act of recovery), he is confronted by ghosts--haunted by women he's mistreated and men he fearfully resembles, ghosts from his past but also by the ghost of history--as he recounts the assassination and his motivation behind it, in the process turning personal events into historical facts and vice versa. Tormented and tormentor, alternatingly elegiac and parodic in tone, a reckless confessor yet defiantly elusive, Cubrilovic exhumes certain truths of his past while burying others, trying to simultaneously prove both his guilt and innocence regarding his role in the assassination plot. Part coming-of-age narrative, part historical inquiry, a tale of both public retribution and personal redemption, Book of Apparitions attempts to not only offer a penetrating portrait of its narrator but as a multifaceted meditation on brotherhood and misogyny, terrorism and martyrdom, and history and myth.
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