The Fourth Circle
Zoran Zivkovic
Language: English
Pages: 204
ISBN: 8683741117
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
At long last, the brilliant first novel from World Fantasy Award winning author, Zoran Živkovic is being published in English. The Fourth Circle takes the reader on an amazing journey from frescoed medieval monasteries to Buddhist temples to different planets to a paralyzed scientist's bedroom in London to the edge of black hole at the far reaches of the universe to a place not all the dissimilar from 221 B Baker Street. Živkovic’s masterful voice cradles the reader safely from one place to the next and in the end deposits the reader carefully at the singular spot in which all the storylines coincide.
The Ministry of Whimsy edition of The Fourth Circle concludes with an afterword by Živkovic about the travails of writing his first novel, translating it into English, and then finding a publisher for it. All while war in Živkovic’s native Serbia surrounded him.
"In its rich tapestry of prose and compositional skills, as well as in its imaginative leaps and intellectual sophistication, The Fourth Circle must be considered, so far, as the author's masterpiece, an acclamation that extends well beyond a mere appreciation of Živkovic's own and singular work."
--SF Site.com
“Zoran Živkovic is a subtle, intelligent, wonderfully inventive writer who brings a fresh point of view, an idiosyncratic angle of attack, to everything he produces. He is one of the finest writers currently at work in the ‘New Europe.’ Read him and celebrate.”
spheres could not penetrate. Some of the shimpra travelers opted not to return from the Great Journey, to stay in alien surroundings devoid of herbs and fragrant winds, without the tribe. What drove them to do this the spheres who had not taken the Great Journey could not understand, and this mystery set them to constantly hunting for shimpra in the hope of finding the answer on some new Great Journey. For the vanished spheres might be stuck in some fetid alien environment, longing to come home
of song. If hunger greater than the famine of Lopur were the price that had to be paid to achieve this, the pack was ready to accept it. On the shore, the marked cubs were positioned at three equally spaced points in the circle. The black sand was damper than usual, wetting the fur where their limbs were tucked under them, but this only stressed the glistening whiteness of the marks. The arrival of the presences this time was not slow and gradual. The moment Tule touched its zenith, the air in
mute. The only hint that something unusual was in the offing was the sudden wriggling of the otherwise immobile baby, whose indifference to the outside world is such that even Sri might envy it. Against the latter's explicit instructions, I approached the baby just as its large eyes opened wide, and for a moment I had the idiotic impression that I was looking at the spitting image of a tiny Sri. Its gaze roved over the edge of the crib, and then it started to make incomprehensible throaty
malicious grin of an evil spirit gloating beforehand over my future torment? Torn by these twofold thoughts, I moved irresolutely after the Master, toward encounter with my unknown destiny. But our slow progress through the spheres that moved aside for us as one and closed again in a dense crowd behind us was not to last long. My Master had hardly gone but twenty steps when he stopped abruptly. I lacked any opportunity to wonder at this strange, unexpected halt amid another field of balls, for
hurried forward, overtaking Sir Arthur. I approached the lamp in the middle of the corridor while groping in my pockets in search of a lighter. I did not find it at once—on such occasions, one never finds anything at first try—and this unhandiness had a strange consequence. As I stood under the lamp, impatiently touching this pocket and that in the darkness, I lifted my gaze involuntarily, as people are wont to do when they are at the end of their patience or nerves. Two things then happened