5 ideas
In the title story, a woman visiting Stockholm finds a vast encyclopedia that admits only people who appear in no other reference work. She reads the entry on her recently dead father, an unremarkable Yugoslav official.
'The Book of Kings and Fools' traces the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back to its source. The forgers lifted it largely from Maurice Joly's 1864 satire against Napoleon III, a dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, and turned its lines into an alleged Jewish plan for world domination. The Times exposed the plagiarism in 1921, yet the text kept spreading and killing, because belief in the book did not depend on its truth.
Simon the Gnostic preaches that the world was made by a tyrannical false god and that a truer freedom lies beyond it. To prove his power he stages a miracle. Kiš gives two rival endings: in one Simon flies and then falls to his death, and in the other he is buried alive expecting to rise after three days and is found rotting. Doubling the ending lets rebellion and orthodoxy both fail against the plain fact of mortality.
The collection proposes that a person's afterlife lies in the complete record of their particulars, not in any doctrine of immortality. The recorded particulars are their routes, habits, and small obsessions. Each human life is treated as unrepeatable and therefore worth exhaustive documentation. Leaving someone out of the record is presented as a second death.
Kiš builds his stories from real and invented sources, chronicles, and citations placed side by side, often without marking which is which. A text in documentary style gains trust through the texture of footnotes, dates, and sources rather than through verified fact. The book's own method therefore reenacts the mechanism that made forgeries like the Protocols believable.