I found this book on my quest for more books by male authors. I’ve noticed that female authors prevailed in my recent reading list and I wanted to balance this out. Checking Out also promised to be lighthearted and fun while at the same time focusing on a deeper theme of a terminally ill person who’s readjusting his perspective due to the diagnosis.

In reality it was the silliest book I could possibly stand. Slightly sillier than that and I wouldn’t have been able to read it at all. In fact, had this book happened at a different time I would have deleted it straight away. This time though it functioned as a sitcom some people watch when they want to de-stress and distract themselves.

The book is a very quick read. It took me just several hours to finish it. My eyes easily hopped along the lines, unhindered. The writing is all right.

The characters are comfortably predictable silly dummies. They behave as if they had been given a storyline to follow but weren’t shown how to, so they improvise the best they can but fail. Everything about them feels overplayed and artificial.

There’s lots of humor in this book, but it is all quite shallow, the cake-in-clowns-face type of humor. Also, I had a feeling the jokes would be better in a movie but didn’t work as a text. The same way Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t work as a text.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnlyIIMrZuk&w=560&h=315]

The plot is absolutely transparent, although the protagonist is in denial about it, which becomes obvious when he starts talking to the reader:

“Surprised?”, he says

Nope.

“I bet you were expecting a different ending to this story, weren’t you?”

I wasn’t.

“My life […] is not predictable”

Yes, it is.

“Not in the slightest.”

It is! Sorry mate but you are a character in a very predictable book, so you are predictable like an alphabet. But hey, the world needs that sort of characters too. Everybody needs to unwind sometimes and that’s when you come along.

I can’t give more than two stars to Checking Out even though it served its purpose. If you are looking for a super light reading this might be the book for you.

April Fool’s Day is about the life of Ivan Dolinar.

The book starts with Ivan’s childhood during Tito’s times. Although a childhood during a communist regime doesn’t seem to be a good setting for a comedy, the book is often very funny in the beginning even though the humor is mainly black. Novakovich is an amazing writer. He looks deep into things and he’s able to show them to you from an angle you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. His writing is perfect. That’s why I continued reading the book even when it turned gruesome. There’s not much laughter allowed under a regime, and Ivan soon learns this for himself. Then Tito dies and the wars of ex-Yugoslavia start. Those wars were extremely scary. They were happening between neighbours, classmates, friends or even members of one family. The nature of what was going on then is conveyed really well in April Fool’s Day . That part of the book is also very well written but hard to read because of what it describes so I had to take often breaks.

The final part of the book is philosophic and even surreal although still written in the same style. The ending of the book is one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever seen but I don’t use the word “beautiful” and “happy” interchangeably.

The events in the book are horrifying, the protagonist is often despicable, but the book is perfectly written. In my system of values the writing is the most important so if you can go through graphic scenes for the sake of reading good literature I would definitely recommend April Fool’s Day to you.