Checkpoint

From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is assigned to a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless and the radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the enemy is unknown. Refugees arrive seeking safe passage to the other side of the checkpoint, however the biggest threat might be the soldiers themselves. As the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, he isn’t sure whether he’s fighting a war or caught in a bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

“A Kafka for our times” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), David Albahari was born 1948 in Péc, Serbia. He studied English language and literature in Belgrade. In 1994 he moved to Calgary, Canada with his wife and their two children where he still lives today. He mainly writes novels and short stories and is also an established translator from English into Serbian. He is member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His collection of short stories Description of Death won the Ivo Andric Award for the best collection of short stories published in Yugoslavia in 1982 and his novel BAIT the NIN Award for the best novel published in Yugoslavia in 1996. His latest collection of stories, Every Night in Another Town, has won the important Vital Award, one of the most significant literary awards in Serbia. His books have been translated into sixteen languages by the most prestigious international publishers, among them Harcourt, Harvill, Eichborn, Gallimard, Cossee and Einaudi. English translations include a selection of short stories, entitled Words Are Something Else, as well as four novels Tsing, Bait, Snow Man, and Götz and Meyer. He has translated into Serbian many books by authors such as S. Bellow, I.B. Singer, T. Pynchon, M. Atwood, V.S. Naipaul and V. Nabokov as well as plays by Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill and Jason Sherman. He was a participant in the International Writing Program in Iowa (1986) and International Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary, under the auspices of Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Program (1994-95). Between 1991 and 1994 he was president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating fiction and non-fiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s. The AATSEEL translation award was given to her translation of David Albahari’s short-story collection Words Are Something Else, ALTA's National Translation Award was given to her translation of Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer in 2006. Her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War was given the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.