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. 

Dijana Lovrić is travelling from Zagreb to the Šćit monastery in Rama, where Herzegovina and Bosnia meet. She is the editor of the Rama-Šćit monography, which will be published by a publishing house in Zagreb, in cooperation with the local Franciscans. It is the end of February. Roads are covered in snow and Dijana has to stay for a while in Duvno, located around fifty kilometers from Šćit, in the house of Marko Kelava with whom she has been living for the past year and a half in Zagreb. After he lost his job as a journalist, he found work in the kitchen of a well-known restaurant. Their relationship and their commitment to each other is much deeper than it may at first seem. Dijana is going to spend one night in a snow house with Marko’s mother Ruža, his sister Anka, paternal grandpa Mijo and grandpa’s sister Luca Meštrović. Here she will reveal or sense repressed family pain and embarrassment. She will reveal or sense deep secrets that have become part of this small city and the people living in it. She will resolve her strange relationship with Fr. Ljubo Pavlović, a young friar from Šćit who is, together with the old Fr. Ivo Džalta, determined to cooperate with Dijana on the monography, which has been two years in the making. Repetition by Ivica Đikić is a novel about love and the fear of love, disappearances, farewells, the known and unknown graveyards; they will recapture the voices of those missing or forever enraptured by their faith in a miracle.

Djikić’s heroes are led by instinct, love and their emotional relations are complex, solutions to puzzles usually elude them, and catharsis rarely occurs. They are fallible and miraculous, just like every other human being.

Adriana Piteša | Jutarnji List

Although the critics of Djikić’s first novel saw Fellini and Kusturica as influences, writers of Central Europe, such as Odon Von Horvath, have left a much more definite stamp.

El Pais

Ivica Djikić lets questions of truth and morality fly in space “en passant”, like danger and bullets.

NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG

In a refined way, Djikić constructs a novel about the traces of the past hidden behind the coulisse of contemporary Croatia.

LITERATURKRITIK.DE

Ivica Djikić, with a sarcastic tone, speaks about the dramas of individuals and the collective.

OSSERVATORIO BALCANI E CAUCASO

Meet The Author