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John Toon in his review of Živković's Four Stories to the End, says of the work: "Something clever is going on here, but I don't honestly know what.", while others compare Živković's works to the likes of Kafka and Borges. Certainly one can read a great deal into Živković's story of an undertaker who comes home to find a mysterious envelope stuck in his apartment door, drawing him into a sequence of increasingly bizarre adventures, which he believes for some time to be a The Truman Show-Candid Camera-like reality show. There's a death-life thing going on, a critique of modern mediatized society, and plenty of paranoia to boot. What it exactly is intended to mean (if anything specific) isn't entirely clear to me either. Does water rushing through underground sewer canals represent the release of amniotic fluid through the vaginal canal, presaging the later birth? Who knows, nothing is explicit. Certainly Hidden Camera does have the sense of the intrusiveness and, at times, bumbling of authority figures, a hold-over of the cold-war era and typical of Eastern European writers from Karel Čapek (e.g., Krakatit, The Absolute at Large), Jan Weiss (The House of 1000 Floors). to Stanislaw Lem (e.g. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub)

Like Lem, Živković's Hidden Camera is told, as is much Eastern European literature, in the first-person style of a teller of tall tales you might meet and, were he Živković, share a few Jelen pivo — or more likely shots of šljivovica -- in some out-of-the-way basement pub in Belgrade. While Hidden Camera somewhat resembles a dream in its episodic nature, linked by quasi-non-sequitur shifts in the action, it at first is a fascinating trip to go along on. However, after awhile, one begins to wonder, "What's the point?" "Why are these people harassing this poor sod?" and the answers aren't really forthcoming. Perhaps there is some philosophical meaning or resolution in all this, the fact that the narrator is an undertaker and that the final scene is that of a woman giving birth might suggest this — but this interpretation certainly isn't explicit, and any number of others one might come with (Big Brother among us, societal voyeurism) aren't either. Yes, I realize not every work of fiction has to provide an explicit resolution, that would reduce everything to the level of blockbuster Hollywood movies, still, like Mr. Toon, while I would like to believe that Živković's work is deeply meaningful and high-brow, I just don't get it, which leaves me to rely on the more prosaic elements of the work. Hidden Camera reads well, is entertain, which, while entertaining on a first reading, leave me when I attempt to draw anything further from its pages, rather muddled.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.