Summers with Maria

Fraktura, Sep 2022, 176 pages
English, Spanish and French sample available

Translation rights sold: Serbia (Booka), Slovakia (E. J. Publishing)

With effortlessness reserved only for the most talented, with warmth and empathy, Savičević takes us through a century of female struggle for freedom and history, a history of our own. 

Summers with Maria takes us through five generations of women in one family, all sharing some variety of the name Maria – while our surnames are inherited from our fathers, our first names come from our mothers, explains the author in the prologue. The novel, in its non-linear, fragmented structure, spans throughout the XX century and, rather than chronicling the lives of girls and women (pun intended) in detail, it captures the heroines in crucial moments of their lives. Moments of emancipation, girlhood, freedom, heartbreak and young love, private, intimate moments often overlooked and overshadowed by the History. A Yugoslavian housewife in the sixties taking the plane for the first time to meet her husband at the other end of the world. A hardworking Dalmatian girl at the dawn of the 20^th century who realizes she is pregnant. A young woman whose surname turned her into a target of nationalist rage over night, after Yugoslavia fell apart and the Croatian war for independence broke out.

History of the Eastern coast of Adriatic was a bloody one: in little under hundred years, two world wars and one war for independence ravaged this corner of Europe. With incredible narrative skill and political shrewdness, Savičević glimpses at those events, but the center-stage is reserved for solidarity, strength and antifascist values that kept the war-torn families together. Love, as she writes in one of her poems, is the only spectacle left to those who dislike war.

Last but not least, her style is impeccable: Savičević is a poet who knows how to craft a story. And nobody captures the essence of the Mediterranean like she does.