Svetislav Basara's THE CYCLIST CONSPIRACY (Tr by Randall A. Major)

Did you know, Pavel Kuzmich," Vartolomeyich said to his neighbor, "that I got here on a bicycle and that one man prophesied that I would end up behind bars.

One of my favorite things in reading translated literature is little passages like the above in which a good English pun comes at me out of nowhere and I get to ask myself a question like, so is 'behind bars/handlebars' a pun in Serbian* like it is in English? And I disappear down a linguistic rabbit hole trying to find out if it's the original author or the translator who gave me a good belly laugh. 

Svetislav Basara's delightfully weird The Cyclist Conspiracy is also the second book I've read in this weird little translated literature project I've got going on this year to give me powerful Illuminatus! Trilogy vibes, though it gives even stronger Foucault's Pendulum vibes because Basara writes international literature where Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote weird hippie pulp, by which I chiefly mean, there's not a lot of porn-y sex scenes in The Cyclist Conspiracy -- because it's got much weirder and more erudite stuff to show us.

The titular conspiracy, more properly called the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, is a secret society so esoteric and occult that you could be a lifelong member without knowing it until another member reaches out to you by oblique means (a random postcard from an exotic locale, for instance) and you are informed that henceforth your dreams at night will be used to instruct you in the goals and practices and lore of your new seekrit club. Which has some even stranger beliefs than communicating oenerically, but we'll get to that.

The novel presents as a kind of scrapbook (a form also taken by War of the Newts) or dossier on the conspiracy, meaning it contains a hodge-podge of points of view and styles, a centuries-old parchment here, a newspaper clipping there, a lesser-known Sherlock Holmes story somewhere in the middle... needless to say, Basara's and translator Randall A. Major's command of all of these forms is brilliant and usually darkly, drily funny, but if you're looking for well-drawn characters or a coherent story arc, look elsewhere than The Cyclist Conspiracy. 

The Little Brothers of the Evangelical Order of the Bicycle believe themselves to have been organized in the wake of the scrambling of tongues at the Tower of Babel, whose architects the Little Brothers believe still exist in a form like their own, and seek to once again build that mighty, God-bothering edifice. The Order opposes this, though in a way their goal is somewhat similar since their own occult program aims to establish, at the end of history, a giant "World Insane Asylum" in which mental illnesses are not treated or cured but given free reign to be expressed and enacted, i.e., if you think you're Napoleon, you're given a uniform and a battlefield and an army against which to fight the army of a guy who thinks he's Wellington. 

There is a complex and theological justification for why this establishment is the preferred end of human society that is difficult to summarize, partly because it only made sense to me while I was reading it and partly because it is extremely, extremely complex and theological. But fun, if you're the kind of reader who enjoys Umberto Eco, or wishes Shea and Wilson had taken themselves a little more seriously.

What keeps the book from becoming a boring theological tractate is the variety of storytelling devices employed, the eccentricities of the characters introduced, and the interesting locales in which their adventures take place, from an undiscovered island in the North Sea to a Soviet-era gulag to the mystical and holy city of Dharamshala. Oh, and the fact that the Little Brothers conspiracy is enacted backwards in time. For instance, for (again, complex and hard-to-explain here) reasons, the conspiracy really needs Franz Ferdinand to be assassinated in 1917 and they plan it from the future, communicating with members via the medium of dreams to pass on instructions to be given to the proper agents in the past, i.e. even Gavrilo Princep's visit to the sandwich shop was carefully coordinated and not the coincidental detail conventionally believed. And of course, since the rest of the world doesn't understand the Little Brothers or, mostly, even know they exist, none of the assassination's actual planners is ever caught!

The conspiracy's other activities include stunts like tearing around Victorian London on a velocipede shooting out public clocks and window displays of timepieces, thus inspiring the plot of Adrian Conan Doyle's and John Dickson Carr's latter-day Sherlock Holmes tale, "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks" and an organized group bicycle ride-cum-pilgrimage from Belgrade, Serbia to Dharamshala, India, as well as parchment messages in bottles sent from the aforementioned undiscovered North Sea island and the entire life stories of various eccentrics described in various fragments of text, including a selection of free verse poetry by one, and the accounts by another of how, during World War II, the Nazis almost managed, via a hastily assembled corps of dream warriors, to destroy the Dream Cathedral in which the Little Brothers meet outside of time and space.

It's a weird and funny read that demands a lot of its reader but rewards her richly, and someday I hope to see what other gifts this author has brought us. Am I 100% certain that I understood The Cyclist Conspiracy completely? Uh, no. But I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway, and I think you would, too.

My Radetzky March isn't quite over. I'm still hoping to squeeze in at least three more books! Will I succeed? Stay tuned, true believers. And meanwhile, if you know a hard-working literary translator in your actual life, buy them a drink for me. I met one on Mastodon while we were all watching the World Baseball Classic! And got tipped off to some new books I'll be reading, and telling you all about, in a different month later this year.

*It might be more correct to say Serbo-Croatian since I'm pretty sure that's what the language was still called in the mid-1980s when this book was first written and Serbia was still part of Yugoslavia and lots of linguistic hairs were still waiting to be split? But I'm already out of my depth on this subject. What matters to me is the language's word for "handlebars" (specifically those of a bicycle) is управљач ("upavlach") and for "bars" as in those of a prison cell is  решетке ("reshetke") so, no, it's not a Serbian pun but now I want to know what this passage said more literally in the original! Was it as good as the implied handlebars/behind bars that Randall A. Major gave us? Given the overall quality of the book and Basara's international reputation, I suspect it is.