On the Edge of Reason

``As far as I could gather until I was fifty-two, no one ever heard a disparaging or malicious statement about me. I was, in fact, quite nameless and invisible, so discreet that nobody ever took any notice of my existence.'' The narrator of Croatian novelist Krleza's 1938 novel is a prime example of a successful homo cylindriacus or ``top-hatted man'' until, overwhelmed by the self-assured inanity of his peers, he mutters a truth about a prominent industrialist at a dinner party. That truth becomes the ``fatal experience'' that overturns his comfortable existence but also breaks the strictures binding him. As the report of the narrator's attack spreads through the town, he is called lascivious by a thrice-divorced profligate, insane by the aged representative of a long line of madmen. Refusing to withdraw his ``slander,'' the narrator undergoes a trial, imprisonment, self-imposed exile and finally a whole new slew of lawsuits. Krleza (1893-1981) was a convinced communist, and his disdain for the robber-baron capitalism of Croatia between the wars is pervasive, sometimes a little deadening. But Krleza (The Return of Philip Latinovicz) is a shrewd observer of man as social animal, and his wry, sardonic style fits cleanly into the Eastern European tradition of bureaucratic satire by the likes of Kafka, Karel Capek and Jaroslav Hasek. (Nov.)