8) Hidden Camera, by Zoran Živković

I think this may be my favourite Serbian writer’s first attempt at a full novel. Our unnamed narrator, an undertaker, finds himself the victim of a compulsion to follow a trail of surreal summonses to a cinema, a second-hand bookshop, the zoo, a mysterious ecclesiastival building reached only by a sewer and so on. The writing is pretty sparse but lyrical with it. I found myself wondering whether we were being set up for an ending where the narrator turns out to have died at the beginning (a la The Third Policeman) or else where he dies at the end (a la The Trial). But in the end I was pretty satisfied with what we got.