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 glory." A village boy dreams, romantically, of Paris—and a harsh sardonic vision descends, to shake him from his "sick illusion." (A favorite focus of Krleza's wit is the intellectual fop who rejects his own nationality and culture.)

A desperate young man, whose stubbornly narrow imagination betrays him into drunken nihilism, writhes suspended in mutual revulsion with his stolid peasant father: the son flaunts a truth intended to kill; the old man only shrugs it off. Their worlds never touch. The title-story's hero claims communication with the dead; this continuity, once established, withers into an acknowledgement of existential despair. These stories [in The Cricket beneath the Waterfall] derive their universal significance from Krleza's grave Olympian perspective. Sometimes mocking, sometimes gently probing, he views vulnerable, isolated lives within a context of expansive history that is itself a speck upon a swelling cosmos of constant dissolution and mutability. The force that drives each story is Tolstoyan, but Krleza's laconic complexity seems utterly distinctive.

Krleza's novel The Return of Philip Latinovicz was published in 1969 by Vanguard, which has announced for future publication another Krleza novel, On the Edge of Reason. If these are equal to his short stories, they are important reading.