Josip Novakovich, who read from his latest novel, “April Fool’s Day,” at the Russell House on Wednesday night, came to the United States from Croatia when he was 20. Now 48, he has spent time in both medical and divinity school, authored or edited over eight books and been the recipient of numerous writing prizes and grants. He currently teaches in the MFA writing program at Penn State.
On Tuesday evening, Novakovich also led a workshop for the Advanced Fiction Workshop, taught by Matthew Sharpe, Assistant Professor of English.
Sharpe and Novakovich worked together one summer at Bard College.
“There are many, many things that I admire about Josip’s writing. One is he’s a great aphorist,” said Sharpe, introducing Novakovich’s Wednesday night reading. “Another thing that I really admire…is the way he is able to, in a single sentence, capture…the complex simultaneity of experience.”
Novakovich himself is a modest-looking man with a perceptible Croatian accent who has the air of an absent-minded professor but holds a quick-witted tongue. Unlike past writers who have carefully planned out the sequence of selections they were to read, Novakovich was spontaneous, seemingly choosing chapters at whim to share.
“I haven’t read anything dirty yet, have I?” he asked before choosing his last selection, a sex scene between the protagonist and his ex-wife.
Novakovich read various passages displaying the vices of his protagonist, Ivan Dolinar, which include extramarital sex, smoking and drinking.
“It’s a picar novel,” Novakovich said. “The picar is always there to ridicule the system in which he lives more than himself. He is apparently a baffoon but it turns out the society is more of a baffoon than he is.”
“April Fool’s Day” is a sarcastic look at the Balkans through the eyes of Ivan Dolinar, who, born on April 1, 1948, leads a life that seems like a practical joke. As a young man, Ivan is sent to a labor camp for two years after making an innocent joke about assassinating ex-Yugoslavian President Tito.
“My [hero] of the novel is not a very good humorist, so one of his jokes [puts him] in a prison colony,” Novakovich said. “I think many of our humorists should be there. Jay Leno, for example, but he’s not.”
Ivan goes on to have a deeply flawed marriage and is one day presumed dead of a heart attack, though he is only paralyzed. After his funeral, he is dug up from his coffin by gravediggers and the novel ends with Ivan wandering his hometown like a ghost.
Amidst these dark themes of absurd political systems and broken relationships, there is a very present sense of humor in the novel. For example, one passage Novakovich read describes Ivan perusing the book “The Joys of Sex 2.”
Novakovich admitted that he consciously stuck to good-humored selections when reading.
“I have very serious parts in the book, but I know they don’t come across very well, so I just read the silly ones,” he said.
Sarah Suzuki ’07, who is in the advanced fiction class that Novakovich guest taught, was surprised at all the comedy in the novel.
“[His other] stories we read in class were all very serious,” she said.
Novakovich appeared relaxed in front of the audience, which included mostly students. He frequently noted the heat and apologized for his soft voice.
“If I had an orthodontist like you guys do, I would have a sonorous, booming voice. But it didn’t happen, so, it’s something I’m self-conscious about,” he said.
Novakovich interspersed his reading with anecdotes from his life and from his friends’ lives, one of which he heard from a Cuban friend.
“In Cuba, on the first day of school, [the children] would all starve all day,” Novakovich said. “The teacher said, ‘Maybe you’re hungry, why don’t you pray to God?’ So they would pray and pray for an hour and no food arrived. Then the teacher said, ‘Maybe you could ask Fidel Castro,’ so they prayed to Fidel Castro and then a little later there were these muscular guys bringing in steaming, wonderful loaves. My friend said in one moment he became an atheist and a firm-believing socialist.”
In the question-and-answer session after the reading, Novakovich said that certain elements of his novel came from his own life experience. He himself had once made a joke about assassinating Tito; wondering about the possible consequences of such a joke in a communist society led him to write “April Fool’s Day.”
“Usually if I stay just with the facts I write an essay or a memoir,” he said. “I like it when I bend that mode and imagine, ‘What if?’ What if it went further?’ Then it becomes fiction.”
Sharpe asked Novakovich about the experience of writing in English, which is not his first language.
“English is very mesmerizing because it’s so fast,” Novakovich said. “In ten parallel texts, the English translation is always the shortest. So coming to this language, instead of feeling like a retard, suddenly I feel like a genius because I can say everything so fast.”
Novakovich was brought to Wesleyan by Anne Greene, Director of Writing Programs and the Visiting Editor’s Project.
“[The Editors Project] brings selected writers and editors to work with students in innovative ways in the classroom,” Greene said.
Although Novakovich attended medical and divinity schools, he came to writing because, as he said, it was what he knew how to do best.
“I was studying theology at Yale divinity school,” he said. “The language was so dead and so boring that when I picked up a novel, it [seemed] alive and I thought, ‘This is it, I have to do this’ and I started writing fiction.”
Novakovich did not show remorse at having given up a medical career.
“Somebody else is killing patients,” he said. “I still dread to think if I were absent-mindedly doing something to the patients, taking an organ out, it would be awful, so I’m glad.”
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