The Peacock Agenda

In the vein of Albert Camus’ great existential novels, The Plague and The Stranger, and JP. Sartre’s existential rite-of-passage, Nausea, M. Vignjevic’s The Peacock Agenda is the story of Ayda Ayduk, a man who is a sort of recluse, and who cannot accept that cannibalism is the dietary norm in his community while at the same time adhering, even enthusiastically so, to the practice himself. This odd man works during the day in the morgue as an assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner and a young man named Krot, all the while surreptitiously retrieving suicide victims for his own consumption from the city’s main river. This all changes when he gets a chance to leave his shell thanks to two new relationships that venture into his life, one with a Draga Lagrada and one more with a new friend whose life he saves and who happens to also work as a taxidermist.