101 Detectives by Ivan Vladislavić
Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives is a sophisticated collection of short stories that delves into the intricacies of professional observation, the weight of personal and collective history, and the absurdities of modern corporate and industrial life. The narrative often centers on characters who are “detectives” in a literal or metaphorical sense watchers, auditors, storytellers, and archivists who navigate a world defined by surveillance, displacement, and the “pointless paper” of human existence. The Fugu-Eaters: Surveillance and the Bitter Smoke of the Past The collection opens with a story featuring two detectives, Klopper and Bate, who are engaged in a long-term surveillance operation from a tinted-window hotel room. The narrative is characterized by a stark contrast between the mundane physical discomforts of the present and the haunting memories of a more sinister past. Bate is recovering from a traumatic dental experience. His mouth is a “wounded” landscape of empty sockets where his wisdom teeth were recently “splintered” out by a dentist he views as a “sadist”. To pass the time, he reads a Reader’s Digest article about the fugu fish, a Japanese delicacy whose gonads contain tetrodotoxin a poison twenty-seven times more deadly than a green mamba. The article details the “arduously trained” …