Stanišic's prose captures the official narrative and the myth, the dream and the rumor, the hearsay, all of it. Only seldom does a work of literature embody the lyrical and the realistic simultaneously, the specific and the universal simultaneously, the body and the soul of the world, simultaneously. “We are glad. We are ecstatic, actually. We have an honest-to-God wordsmith in Saša Stanišic'. In Before The Feast, this villagetells its own story―a novel as compelling multi-voiced chorale put in prose.” “A village fully in the present, yet rife with legends. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells―the only problem is that the bells have gone.

Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. It’s the night before the feast in the village of Fu¨rstenfelde (population: an odd number).

Before the feast sasa stanisic