Paul Mandelbaum Recommends
“I just finished reading Josip Novakovich’s wonderful novel April Fool’s Day,” Mandelbaum says. “It chronicles the life of one Ivan Dolinar, a Croatian whose knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time makes him a useful guide to that hauntingly perverse pocket of the world, the Balkans. Spanning fifty-plus recent years, the book naturally devotes some of its attention to war and its horrors (in a particularly chilling scene, Ivan comes across the crucified body of a Muslim friend from medical school), but the novel’s main focus is Ivan