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Anomaly
New Year’s Eve. The last day of the last year of human existence.
A high-ranking minister criss-crosses the city with blood on his hands, a dying necrophile attempts to go clean before God, and a traumatized nurse is pressured into keeping a powerful secret. With undisguised glee, a nameless narrator unravels these twisted tales of moral turmoil, all of which are brought to an abrupt close by a cataclysmic collision of time and space. What will remain on New Year’s Day? In a cabin in the Alps, the last people on earth – a musicologist and her young daughter – search for a five-hundred-year-old musical score that might explain the catastrophe. Outside the cabin, hidden in shadow, a sinister figure waits for them to accept their fate.
With dark humour and remorselessness reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anomaly is an exhilarating, provocative carnival of a novel, from one of Europe’s most distinctive literary voices.
A high-ranking minister criss-crosses the city with blood on his hands, a dying necrophile attempts to go clean before God, and a traumatized nurse is pressured into keeping a powerful secret. With undisguised glee, a nameless narrator unravels these twisted tales of moral turmoil, all of which are brought to an abrupt close by a cataclysmic collision of time and space. What will remain on New Year’s Day? In a cabin in the Alps, the last people on earth – a musicologist and her young daughter – search for a five-hundred-year-old musical score that might explain the catastrophe. Outside the cabin, hidden in shadow, a sinister figure waits for them to accept their fate.
With dark humour and remorselessness reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anomaly is an exhilarating, provocative carnival of a novel, from one of Europe’s most distinctive literary voices.
144 pages, Paperback
Published April 16, 2024
16 people are currently reading
1159 people want to read
About the author
Andrej Nikolaidis
26 books45 followersAndrej Nikolaidis was born in 1974 in Sarajevo, to a mixed Montenegrin-Greek family. Until the age of six, he lived in the city of Ulcinj, where he returned in 1992 after the war in Bosnia erupted. Since 1994, he has written for regional independent and liberal media, as well as for cultural magazines. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential intellectuals of the younger generation in the region, known for his anti-war activism and for his promotion of the rights of minorities.
Nikolaidis also publicly defended the victims of police torture, which resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance. He has often stated that he considers freedom of speech to be the basis of freedom.
He has worked as a columnist in the weekly magazine Monitor and for publications including Vijesti (Montenegro), Dnevnik (Slovenia), Slobodna Bosna (Bosnia-Herzegovina), E-novine (Serbia), and Koha Ditore (Kosovo). Since 2010, he has been employed as an advisor for culture and free society in the parliament of Montenegro.
Nikolaidis also publicly defended the victims of police torture, which resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance. He has often stated that he considers freedom of speech to be the basis of freedom.
He has worked as a columnist in the weekly magazine Monitor and for publications including Vijesti (Montenegro), Dnevnik (Slovenia), Slobodna Bosna (Bosnia-Herzegovina), E-novine (Serbia), and Koha Ditore (Kosovo). Since 2010, he has been employed as an advisor for culture and free society in the parliament of Montenegro.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
July 11, 2024
Such a weird book but I really enjoyed it. The premise is that it's set during the last day of the last year of human existence and on New Year's Eve everyone is going to be wiped out. Each chapter focuses on a different person or group of people, but they are all absolutely wild like a Minister who has just murdered someone, or these two friends where one is a necrophiliac and chopped his own leg off and one has got leprosy and uses it to get free dinner at restaurants. It was such a surreal book but each little story in it kept me hooked with how odd and strange it was. There wasn't really a resolution at the end but it's one of those books where you just go along for the ride and remember it for the experience.
March 4, 2024
I think I could sit forever, looking up and into the distance, where all secrets are inscribed, and I think I could see the stars going out one by one until, in the end, everything is black and motionless, the way it was and the way it ought to be; I think I could see all that as I saw the lights of the planes disappeared from the sky — and still nothing would be clear to me; nothing except that Nothing is a principle, while Something is just an incident: an anomaly.
'Anomaly' is Will Firth's translation of 'Anomalija' by the Montenegrin-Bosnian author Andrej Nikolaidis, perhaps better known as a provocative political columnist, but a highly accomplished author.
This is the latest novel from by subscription to the wonderful Peirene Press, founded by Meike Ziervogel and now co-run by Stella Sabin and James Tookey:
And a novel I was delighted to see on their list, after reading the outstanding The Olcinium Trilogy (The Son, The Coming and Till Kingdom Come) also in Firth's translation.
The novel opens with a film script. A minister, who presides over the murder of a woman (a political opponent? someone inconvenient?), then cruises around the town in his chaffeur driven car, before returning to his family, seemingly devoid of any guilt. His wife tells him she noticed the blood on his shirt:
MINISTER
Did you wash it?
WIFE
I burned it.
The author is hinting, for the first time, at the restlessness that engulfs the Minister. Even if they had slept, we learn, their calm wouldn't have lasted. There's no peace any more, not even for the righteous. The earth shakes, and a deafening noise comes from the sky. It's the sound of the world splitting, falling apart. A crack opens in the ceiling and glares at the Minister with a dark eye. He runs to his children's room and leads them out into the hall, where their mother is waiting for them. The Minister hugs all three of them. 'God will never forgive,' he thinks. He kisses his daughter on the head and says: 'God, how I love you all.' Immediately below this, in his untidy, barely legible hand, resembling a cardiogram, the screenwriter has noted: Yes: love redeems. God loves, God has a weakness for love. But... That was not God.
The omniscient narrator providing a commentary on the script appears to the devil. And the first part of the novel that follows has a series of similar stories, (im)morality tales set around New Year's Eve which typically end with some apocalyptic event.
You've noticed the pattern: our stories all take place on New Year's Day and each ends with an extreme: outside of the expected, the physically possible and the narratively justifiable. This one is no exception. But a little excessiveness, without which no true creativity is possible, never hurt anybody. Just like a little common sense. And yet people shun both like the plague: as if coming into contact with them would expose them to infection and lasting misfortune.
The stories are linked in that the characters in one often watch a TV report of the events in other stories, and a common theme in the improbable and apocalyptic ends which the characters meet is that people from the past suddenly intrude into the present e.g. one character is killed by a naval bombardment from hundreds of years earlier, another by a mammoth which suddenly drops from the sky.
There is a political edge to many of the stories - such as a side-swipe at novelist Ivo Andric - some of which may have passed me by as a British rather than Bosnian-Montenegrin reader.
But Nikolaidis's literary influences were clearer - Bernhard above all of course - particularly his view that tragedy should be written as a comedy (and comedy as a tragedy),e.g. as a key theme of this story, translated by Martin Chalmers.
And the novel really centres on the author's heterodox theological-political views. He has said, talking of this novel, that "Apokalipsa je najbolji od svih krajeva najgoreg od svih svjetova" - "The Apocalypse is the best of all ends of the worst of all worlds." (translation by Google).
Theologically the novel (or at least the rather dubious narrator) cites liberational theologist Jon Sobrino approvingly. And the story encapsulates the author's view that when people assume that their personal wealth and success, and/or their political causes, are backed by God, it's actually often the Devil to who they are praying instead. From an interview (google translated):
The final section of the novel, a Fugue, is set in a remote mountain hut in Obergurgl-Hochgurgl (picture from my own visit in December 2021).
A woman and her young child have been sent to the hut in search of a manuscript, a musical score hidden in original Book of a Thousand Chapters by the 'Revolutionary of the Rhine', a late 15th/early 16th century contemporary of the theologian and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer. (There is a real-life book of 100 chapters - Büchli der hundert Capiteln). Arriving on 30th December, she and her child seem to be the sole survivors of the end of the world, an event which is traced to a disastrous attempt to conquer time and create a life free of guilt, by offering people the chance to correct past mistakes and live different lives.
Impressive - and I look forward to more translation by Will Firth of Nikolaidis's work.
'Anomaly' is Will Firth's translation of 'Anomalija' by the Montenegrin-Bosnian author Andrej Nikolaidis, perhaps better known as a provocative political columnist, but a highly accomplished author.
This is the latest novel from by subscription to the wonderful Peirene Press, founded by Meike Ziervogel and now co-run by Stella Sabin and James Tookey:
Founded in 2008, we’ve been a key player in the thriving UK independent publishing scene for over a decade, publishing books from 25 countries and 20 different languages. Traditionally a publisher of European novellas in translation, we now publish writing from all over the world and are expanding our list to publish literary fiction of all shapes and sizes.
And a novel I was delighted to see on their list, after reading the outstanding The Olcinium Trilogy (The Son, The Coming and Till Kingdom Come) also in Firth's translation.
The novel opens with a film script. A minister, who presides over the murder of a woman (a political opponent? someone inconvenient?), then cruises around the town in his chaffeur driven car, before returning to his family, seemingly devoid of any guilt. His wife tells him she noticed the blood on his shirt:
MINISTER
Did you wash it?
WIFE
I burned it.
The author is hinting, for the first time, at the restlessness that engulfs the Minister. Even if they had slept, we learn, their calm wouldn't have lasted. There's no peace any more, not even for the righteous. The earth shakes, and a deafening noise comes from the sky. It's the sound of the world splitting, falling apart. A crack opens in the ceiling and glares at the Minister with a dark eye. He runs to his children's room and leads them out into the hall, where their mother is waiting for them. The Minister hugs all three of them. 'God will never forgive,' he thinks. He kisses his daughter on the head and says: 'God, how I love you all.' Immediately below this, in his untidy, barely legible hand, resembling a cardiogram, the screenwriter has noted: Yes: love redeems. God loves, God has a weakness for love. But... That was not God.
The omniscient narrator providing a commentary on the script appears to the devil. And the first part of the novel that follows has a series of similar stories, (im)morality tales set around New Year's Eve which typically end with some apocalyptic event.
You've noticed the pattern: our stories all take place on New Year's Day and each ends with an extreme: outside of the expected, the physically possible and the narratively justifiable. This one is no exception. But a little excessiveness, without which no true creativity is possible, never hurt anybody. Just like a little common sense. And yet people shun both like the plague: as if coming into contact with them would expose them to infection and lasting misfortune.
The stories are linked in that the characters in one often watch a TV report of the events in other stories, and a common theme in the improbable and apocalyptic ends which the characters meet is that people from the past suddenly intrude into the present e.g. one character is killed by a naval bombardment from hundreds of years earlier, another by a mammoth which suddenly drops from the sky.
There is a political edge to many of the stories - such as a side-swipe at novelist Ivo Andric - some of which may have passed me by as a British rather than Bosnian-Montenegrin reader.
But Nikolaidis's literary influences were clearer - Bernhard above all of course - particularly his view that tragedy should be written as a comedy (and comedy as a tragedy),e.g. as a key theme of this story, translated by Martin Chalmers.
And the novel really centres on the author's heterodox theological-political views. He has said, talking of this novel, that "Apokalipsa je najbolji od svih krajeva najgoreg od svih svjetova" - "The Apocalypse is the best of all ends of the worst of all worlds." (translation by Google).
Theologically the novel (or at least the rather dubious narrator) cites liberational theologist Jon Sobrino approvingly. And the story encapsulates the author's view that when people assume that their personal wealth and success, and/or their political causes, are backed by God, it's actually often the Devil to who they are praying instead. From an interview (google translated):
Man is never so open to the Devil as when he asks God to give him strength and power to fulfill his desire. To pray to God to help us achieve our goal, to ask him to participate in the realization of our desires, ambitions and revenges, to ask God for such power is to call upon the Devil. A God who fulfills all our desires - doesn't that sound like the perfect definition of the Devil? And when he gets power, and when he achieves what he set out to do, a man does not know who, God or the Devil, actually helped him. "With God's help we will defeat the enemy" – that sentence is the chorus of the song that humanity sings to the Devil. Croatian author Igor Grbić wisely says that where man turns God into "an extended hand of human claims and deterrence, human justice and guilt, human good and evil" - that is where man abandons God.
The final section of the novel, a Fugue, is set in a remote mountain hut in Obergurgl-Hochgurgl (picture from my own visit in December 2021).
A woman and her young child have been sent to the hut in search of a manuscript, a musical score hidden in original Book of a Thousand Chapters by the 'Revolutionary of the Rhine', a late 15th/early 16th century contemporary of the theologian and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer. (There is a real-life book of 100 chapters - Büchli der hundert Capiteln). Arriving on 30th December, she and her child seem to be the sole survivors of the end of the world, an event which is traced to a disastrous attempt to conquer time and create a life free of guilt, by offering people the chance to correct past mistakes and live different lives.
Impressive - and I look forward to more translation by Will Firth of Nikolaidis's work.
June 23, 2024
In this exhilarating novel, Nikolaidis uses a blend of sci-fi, horror, thriller and comedy, to offer a beguiling combination of the mundane and the outlandish.
With evident glee, an unnamed narrator tells twisted tales of terror, all taking place of New Year’s Eve, and abruptly finish with catastrophe. Blood raining from the sky, necrophilia, plane crashes, horror may seem to be at the forefront, but in the background is Nikolaidis satirical commentary on post-Yugoslav societies, exposing the politics, culture and toxic nationalism suffused into the countries today.
Though Bosnian originally, Nikolaidis lives and works from Montenegro, and is one of several writers from the country to be harassed and targeted by the authorities in recent years.
With evident glee, an unnamed narrator tells twisted tales of terror, all taking place of New Year’s Eve, and abruptly finish with catastrophe. Blood raining from the sky, necrophilia, plane crashes, horror may seem to be at the forefront, but in the background is Nikolaidis satirical commentary on post-Yugoslav societies, exposing the politics, culture and toxic nationalism suffused into the countries today.
Though Bosnian originally, Nikolaidis lives and works from Montenegro, and is one of several writers from the country to be harassed and targeted by the authorities in recent years.
August 25, 2024
I'm clearly not I intellectual enough for this book, but it felt like I was reading the rambling of a schizophrenic person from the start. Don't ask what this book is about, because I don't know either
July 15, 2025
I *think* this was good, and I *think* I liked it. I'm sure there's a lot I missed, and it's the kind of book I wish I had the opportunity to discuss with others or to hear from the author or translator about in an event.
November 11, 2025
3.5/5
i thought whilst reading this that i was gonna say that it was mostly saved by the snarky omnipotent narrator in the first half, as the short stories were eh, if not a bit melancholy (said positively). but then the second half happened - why couldn’t the whole book be that!! that was really good and i really enjoyed the feelings of doom and dread and all that it gave!! god
i thought whilst reading this that i was gonna say that it was mostly saved by the snarky omnipotent narrator in the first half, as the short stories were eh, if not a bit melancholy (said positively). but then the second half happened - why couldn’t the whole book be that!! that was really good and i really enjoyed the feelings of doom and dread and all that it gave!! god
September 5, 2024
Het voelde niet echt als een roman aan, eerder een bundel kortverhalen die zich dan accumuleerden tot een conclusie. Het las zeer fijn en is bewust zeer maatschappelijk en kritisch ingesteld, dus ik raad het aan.
September 29, 2024
Rätt säker på att jag är för intellektuellt förtappad för att faktiskt fatta denna boken.
August 18, 2025
As mordantly funny as Nikolaidis' other books available in English - the maddening but frequently brilliant Olcinium trilogy. This short novella is a little more structurally coherent, though it has the same feeling of being lectured at by the a world-weary cynic: at its best a gleeful howl of rebellion, at other times a grotesque and meandering pub rant. Buyer beware: Nikolaidis has a touch of the edgelord about him, and he's not much interested in plot. Still, there's more than enough wry observation about the human condition to justify the couple of hours it'll take most readers to get through this book. It's just not one to read on the beach. Or on an empty stomach.
November 8, 2024
Byrjaði ekkert sérstaklega vel, mikið raul og kannski óspennandi - mikil áhersla á “shock value”. Var næstum því búinn að gefast upp á henni fyrr en seinustu kaflanna, þar sem bókin sýnir sína sönnu liti (e.) og það er ekki fyrr en þá sem maður veit hvað bókin er í raun um. Ekki bara voru þeir frábærir heldur réttlættu’ restina af bókinni.
“This is how the world ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but in menstrual discharge”
“This is how the world ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but in menstrual discharge”
August 21, 2025
I really did not enjoy this. Was very intrigued by the blurb and the first couple chapters but I couldn’t follow it at all, which I think is almost the point? But it just didn’t work for me. I hated that the book seemed to glorify this idea of “the sublime beauty of terror”, to me, terror is the least beautiful thing to exist.
September 2, 2024
The stories are very absurd, and the narrators very pessimistic (neither of those is a bad thing). The book can be reduced to this line halfway through: "Happiness is final proof of a person's absence of taste."
February 28, 2025
Have no idea what I just read to be honest. Very literary, thematic and philosophical in a way utterly inaccessible to me. I could accept a book is above my intellectual understanding if there are at least fun and interesting things done elsewhere to keep me going, but I didn't even have that.
October 17, 2025
2.5. All the puzzle pieces were in place for me to like it. At first I blamed my lack of enjoyment due to having just read haunted by chuck palanuk which was a more enjoyable version of this. And than it became skimming.
When I turned the page and saw part 2, I sighed. I guess that explains it.
When I turned the page and saw part 2, I sighed. I guess that explains it.
October 30, 2022
Znatno slabije od svega prethodnog od Nikolaidisa.
December 6, 2022
Okrutno
July 31, 2024
A waste of time.
August 13, 2024
What was that. 😳
August 18, 2024
such a weird little book! i enjoyed the style of narration and the mysterious glimpses of each character
August 22, 2024
This book is weird but in the best way possible
September 22, 2024
Beautiful and weird. Short and to the point. A perfect little anthology with alot of fun elements
March 16, 2025
Weird little stories that left me wanting so much more. At the same time I feel I completely did not understand this book?
June 5, 2025
The end of this had me flashing back to my dissertation.
August 22, 2024
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