An intelligent and exciting Zeitroman.
JÖRG PLATH | GERMANY RADIO CULTURE (DLR KULTUR)
I Dreamed Of The Elephants
Naklada Ljevak, 2011, 256 pages
complete translation available in German and Spanish
Translation rights sold: Spain (Sajalin Editores), Germany (Kunstmann Verlag), Hungary (Europa Konyvkiado)
A crime novel but also a great literary and social study of traumatic times in Croatia and its characters. A revealing story about the pathological affinities between the secret services and politics that have the elusive appeal of organized crime: typical social-pathological phenomena.
Andrija Sučić, a former soldier and a former member of the personal guard of the first president of Croatia, was executed in front of his own home. He talked too much: mass graves, the killing of civilians… and then there was the strange case of the elephants. It was insane and dangerous for those who had done business during the war and for those who tried to strengthen their political career in the new Croatia. His death does not seem to matter to anyone except to his secret son Boško, who works at the National Security Service and decides to investigate the death on his own. Boško’s inquiries lead him to the state’s criminal underground, where prosecutors and powerful politicians mingle with mobsters and then shamelessly return home after their reign in “the three streets in Frankfurt in which German is not spoken”. The second novel by Ivica Đikić describes, through the voices of several narrators, some dark times in a bright and sharp prose that affirms him as one of the greatest exponents of the new Balkan narrative. The novel won prestigious T-portal Award for the best novel published in 2011 in Croatia. Đikić depicts a dramatic and exciting side of the transformation; the transition from socialism to democracy.
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Apparition
Fraktura, 2018, 176 pages
In a godforsaken part of an unnamed country, near an unimportant village known only for its saffron production more than twenty-five years ago, suddenly and without an apparent motive, domestic and wild animals started to climb the hill G. and peacefully look at the sky. Electric fence is soon put up around the hill by the church authorities, along with other devices set to keep the animals away, and the miracle, like the nearby Marian apparition, remains forgotten until the suicide of reverend Leopold Hort. We learn about these events, their background and another suicide during the first apparition, in the last word at the trial against Albert Koc.
Repetition. A Love Story
Naklada Ljevak, 2014, 136 pages
20-page excerpt available in English
Set in one winter night, beginning with the arrival of a more or less unexpected passenger and ending with one of the most poetic scenes in contemporary Croatian literature, Repetition has the discursive traces of a love story, a detective story and an elegy of the victim’s character but it cannot be classified in any of the aforementioned categories; it has a story on its own.
Circus Columbia
Feral Tribune, 2003, 110 pages
complete translation available in Spanish and Italian
Translation rights sold: Italy (Bottega Errante), Spain (Sajalin Editores), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Civitas), Serbia (with other stories, Red Box)
A political and romantic saga that covers the end of a century which tragically announced the beginning of a new era in the Balkans. Written is prose typical of the best of Bosnian writers – as the Nobel prize winning author Ivo Andrić – in its method of storytelling, in its creation and development of character, its consistent plot and specific sense of calm when presenting even the most disturbing content.
Mallow Colour Of Nothing
Feral Tribune, 2007, 140 pages
Mallow Colour of Nothing is a collection of three stories (Green Castle; Please, Try and Sleep; As Nothing Ever Happened), in part relying on the Đikić’s novel regarding a subject that is once more, but not always directly, connected to the war; the narrative style here is focused on changes of narrative division, time perspectives and certain inherited traditions of oral Bosnian storytelling.
Srebrenica. A Story Of Evil
Naklada Ljevak, April 2016, 246 pages
60-pages excerpt available in English
Translation rights sold: Norway (Solum|Bokvennen), Italy (Bottega Errante), Sweden (Ramus), Czech Republic (Albatros)
Outstanding and unflinching documentary novel that follows the events that took place in the course of the three days and nights (between 13 and 16 July 1995) during which almost eight thousand Bosniaks were killed in the area of Srebrenica. The intention of this non-fiction novel is to research and to understand, using literary means, how was it possible for a JNA officer, raised in the spirit of Yugoslavia and genuinely devoted to the Yugoslav ideal and Titoism, to take charge of the operation to kill eight thousand people based exclusively on their ethnicity and religion.