Expediter

Josip Pekic has spent his life waiting for the midnight knock that took his father, a victim of an old purge, and when it finally comes, his worst fear is confirmed. Dragged through a sleeping city by two silent security men, he is delivered not to a routine interrogation but into the orbit of Transbalkania's highest rulers, Zoran Jankez and Aleksander Kardelj. There, in a bizarre blend of menace, bureaucracy, and dark comedy, he is named the nation's "average man" and chosen to serve as its first "expediter," a supposedly practical reformer modeled on wartime efficiency experts. Given sweeping authority to travel the country and override officials, Josip begins exposing shortages, corruption, and absurd state projects, from missing consumer goods to wasteful backyard steel smelters and a disastrous bird-extermination campaign that wrecks the harvest. As he humiliates petty functionaries and challenges inflated claims of socialist success, the novel sharpens its satire of authoritarian planning, political favoritism, and the gulf between propaganda and reality. Beneath the comic surface lies a tense political drama about ambition, paranoia, and the fragile machinery of power in a modern police state. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.