The Coming by Andrej Nikolaidis

Published in Montenegro in 2003; published in translation by Dzanc Books and Open Road Media on December 17, 2013

"What is history but a crime story with humanity as its cast?" A character in The Coming asks that question while discussing predictions of the Apocalypse made by some of history's famous figures, but the question serves as a statement of the novel's primary theme. The Coming takes the guise of a detective novel, but it has little in common with the genre's ordinary conventions. It takes place in the midst of worldwide apocalyptic events: earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches, rising sea levels, frogs raining from the sky, and a mid-summer blizzard in Ulcinj. Most people in Ulcinj (where the novel is set) have given up work and are waiting for the end times, but since they didn't do much work in the best of times, the difference is barely noticeable. When we hear about the MTV Apocalypse Awards, it becomes clear that The Coming will work elements of satire into the story, but this isn't a light-hearted comedy. The characters tell ironic stories of difficult lives (their own and others they have known), lifelong suffering to which they were condemned because of their birthplace and because they "are all victims of our parents' inability to resist the reproductive urge." Their lives are crime stories of a different sort.

Perhaps the Apocalypse will finally reveal the truth that people crave. The nature of truth is another of the novel's themes. One of the novel's two central characters is a private detective, hired to find the truth about the violent murder of a family in Ulcinj. While the detective tries to project the image of a hard-boiled Sam Spade (because that's what he assumes his clients want), he's actually more of a philosopher-storyteller. His job is not to discover the truth but to invent the truth that the client needs to hear.

Point of view shifts back and forth between the detective and Emmanuel, who reads about the murders in the newspaper and believes he understands the crime's true purpose. But is Emmanuel's understanding of the truth reliable? Emmanuel is confined (for his own good, he repeatedly tells us) in an institution. He is convinced that his actions and thoughts have terrible consequences for people he doesn't know. Many of Emmanuel's far-ranging thoughts focus on Sabbatai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah who lived in seventeenth century Istanbul, attracted followers (as prophets tend to do), converted to Islam to avoid execution while continuing to claim he was the Messiah, and was exiled (accompanied by his followers) to the pirate city of Ulcinj, where he became obsessed with the "false" (and competing) prophet Fra Dolcino. Emmanuel tells of a battle of books that tell competing truths, one authored by Dolcino and two by Zevi, one filled with "just about as much truth as the world can bear" while the other, The Book of the Coming, tells the real truth.

The Coming is a brief, thought-provoking novel written in prose that is engaging and clever. In part, it is a book about books: their importance, their symbolic value, their role in the life of a society, their relationship to truth, illusion, and deception. In part, it is about the relationship between parents and their children. The novel covers a large amount of ground with relatively few words. The detective and Emmanuel are both philosophers of a sort, opining about the human condition from their own unusual perspectives. The detective's view is understandably jaded while Emmanuel's might be the view of a madman, but they both shed light upon the mysteries of life.

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