Words Are Something Else (Writings from an Unbound Europe)

Set in the author's native Serbia, this collection of short stories reveals a vision transcending the narrow world of Serbian nationalism. David Albahari is concerned with the separation of people, but in a more universal sense than the tribal. He has the modern writer's obsession with our inability to express in words what is really meant; he even plays with self-reference, pointing to the inability of a reader to grasp the hidden context of literature. In the early stories, a claustrophobically close Jewish family struggles comically to communicate. In the later ones, it is a husband and wife who strive for an elusive connection.