LEAFING THROUGH DANILO KIS’S OLD BOOK OF REFLECTIONS, I feel I’m back in a bistro near the Trocadero, with him across the table talking in his loud harsh voice as if he were bawling me out. Of all the great writers of his generation, French or foreign, who lived in Paris in the 1980s, he was the most invisible. The Goddess of News had no reason to train her klieg lights on him. “I’m not a dissident,” he wrote. He wasn’t even an émigré. He traveled freely between Belgrade and Paris. He was only a “bastard writer out of the swallowed-up world of Central Europe.” Swallowed up, yes, but over the course of Danilo’s life (he died in 1989) that world had been the condensation of the European story. Yugoslavia: a long bloody (and victorious) war against the Nazis; the Holocaust that murdered mainly the Jews of Central Europe (among them Danilo’s father); the Communist revolution, immediately followed by Tito’s dramatic (also victorious) split from Stalin and Stalinism. As affected as he was by this historic drama, Danilo never sacrificed his novels to politics. Thus he was able to grasp the most harrowing aspects: individual fates no sooner born than abandoned; tragedies with no vocal cords. He agreed with Orwell’s ideas, but how could he have loved 1984, the novel in which that scourge of totalitarianism reduced human life to its political dimension alone, exactly as the Maos of the world were doing? Against that flattening of existence, Danilo called Rabelais to the rescue, with his drolleries, and the Surrealists, who “delved into the unconscious, into dreams.” I leaf through his old book and I hear his loud harsh voice: “Unfortunately, the major-key tone of French literature that began with Villon—it’s disappeared.” Once he understood that, he became still more faithful to Rabelais, to the Surrealists “delving into dreams,” and to a Yugoslavia that, blindfolded, was already on its way to disappearing as well.