Globetrotter

In Globetrotter, Albahari deals with the bewilderments of exile & lost identity, themes he has investigated in earlier works. But in this unsettling experimental book he also enters new arenas, where sexual identity & the nature of blame & guilt attract his scrutiny.
 
Narrated in a single uninterrupted paragraph, the novel takes place in the late 1990s at the Banff Art Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Three men—a painter from Saskatchewan and the narrator of the tale, a writer from Serbia, & a man whose traveling Croatian grandfather long ago jotted his name in a local museum’s guest book—become acquainted, then attached, then fatally entangled. On a climactic mountain hike that seethes with jealousy, desire, shame, & guilt, each man must engage in a final struggle. Albahari seizes his reader’s attention and never yields it in this remarkable, gripping tale.