Bait By David Albahari, translated by David Agnone Northwestern University Press, 136 pp., $49.95 cloth, $14.95 paper Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

The mother's life stories, recorded over a decade earlier after her second husband died, provide the more interesting riddles of the text and would sound almost like Zen koans if they weren't so tragically real. "When the Germans entered Zagreb, they trampled through the flowers and the chocolate," she says cryptically over the squeaking noises of the recorder; or later, describing the Belgrade Jewish community in 1938 (which she had married into): "I was standing at the window and watching people change." At length, she goes on to explain each statement—telling the story of her first husband, who was transported to a Nazi death camp, and their two children, who were killed in a train accident; and her second husband, who, like her, knew great loss. ("He was an emptiness, and I was an emptiness, and we knew we didn't have time enough to fill that which was no longer in us.")

Her life spanned catastrophe and destruction; she withered away, in fact, watching the new wars of the '90s on television. Unfortunately, her story (and that of her region's bloody history) is drowned out by the narrator's own self-absorption, adrift as he now is in a land "where nothing is more than a few weeks old." Beneath the noises of David Albahari's metafiction is a powerful tale of woe straining to be heard.