SOURCE: A review of The Cricket beneath the Waterfall and Other Stories, in The Antioch Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, Fall, 1975, pp. 234-35.

In the following review of The Cricket beneath the Waterfall, the critic comments on Krleza's narrative style.

The Croatian Miroslav Krleza is among the most neglected of the world's great writers. European critics have long paired him with Bosnian novelist Ivo Andríc, as deserving contenders for the Nobel Prize (Andríc won the Prize, in 1961).

Krleza's stories display the same panoramic density that enlivens Andríc's magisterial chronicles of sturdy Balkan subkingdoms emerging from centuries of oppression into the modern age. But Krleza is the more overtly "political" writer—and his pungent, unsparing studies of human isolation paradoxically resonate with a swooping sense of cultures struggling, strangely formed powers laboring to surface. A satirically observed complex of military-political careerists reveals "the immeasurable wretchedness of Croatian military...