From the 49 titles that have entered the Tportal competition for the best Croatian novel, the jury selected 11 titles which will further compete for the 50,000 HRK worth roman@tportal.hr award.
The jury of the Tportal Literary Award roman@tportal.h , comprised of three members: Katarina Luketić, Miroslav Mićanović and Jadranka Pintarić (president of the jury) decided that the following titles will stay in the running for the best Croatian novel published in 2013: 'Viljevo' by Luka Bekavac, 'Povijest instituta' by Ratko Cvetnić', 'Donjodravska obala' by Drago Hedl, 'Živjet ćemo bolje' by Maja Hrgović, 'Vrijeme koje se udaljava' by Mirko Kovač, 'Črna mati zemla' by Kristiana Novak, 'Povratak Filipa Latinovića' by Boris Perić, 'Stanje sumraka' by Sibila Petlevski, 'Hakirana Kiti' by Andrea Pisac, 'Nije ovo Twin Peaks' by Karmela Špoljarić and 'Umjetne suze' by Milko Valent.
In the course of October, the jury will select five finalists, and by the end of October, we will know the seventh winner of the roman@tportal.hr literary award.
The last year's winner was ‘Budi Hamlet, pane Hamlete’ , the first novel by Tahir Mujičić (AGM 2012.), and other winners were 'Adio kauboju' by Olja Savičević Ivančević (Algoritam 2010.), ‘Tri’ by Drago Glamuzina (Profil, 2008.) and 'Anastazija' by Dalibor Šimpraga (Durieux, 2007.). Among the winners are also Ivica Đikić with the novel 'Sanjao sam slonove' (Naklada Ljevak 2011.) and Sibila Petlevski for the novel 'Vrijeme laži' (Fraktura, 2009).
MORE ABOUT THE SEMIFINALISTS of the roman@tportal.hr 2014 literary award
Luka Bekavac, Viljevo, Fraktura
Viljevo is a lot of things: it is a new place on the author's map of a possible Slavonia, another tangle of secrets and possible interpretations, in comparison to Drenje (his first novel) – an energy point of the opposite prefix, maybe even his reflection in a cracked mirror. Viljevo is also a triptychon novel, a text which conquers its space and time in three voices. Designed by a monologue copied from a poor recording, by a lonely voice which opens the panorama of an almost uninhabited Slavonia, it end with an obsessive comment of yellowed pages from someone's memoirs from WW2, while in the dark space in between a raw transcript of a dialog is waiting, where a suspenseful trial of strength is going on.
Ratko Cvetnić, Povijest instituta, Mozaik knjiga
In 2011, the Institute will celebrate its 100th anniversary, and for this occasion, Velimir Košnik, without doubt the number one Croatian journalist, is preparing an extensive monograph dedicated not only to the academic aura of this significant anniversary, but also to the facts of the Institute's infamous other side. A sudden accident and Košnik's death remains unsolved for many even today, offering an opportunity for his best friend, the historian Buco Stupar, to complete this brilliant work, but also to tackle, against his will, with many little chests full of dark secrets and their guardians who are still alive. In a series of mostly adverse private and public circumstances, Stupar – the delta-male, as he describes himself – strives to repay the debt to his friend and to show the woman he loves that a man must take care of his garden, no matter what dangers are hidden there.
Drago Hedl, Donjodravska obala, Ljevak
Everything at Hedl's address Donjodravska obala 11 is exactly how we expect it to be in a Central European village on the Drava river at the beginning of the Fifties. This backyard, above which Drago Hedl is hovering in a precise and tender manner, like an angel from Wenders, houses many colonies of little people who long for an irrelevant everyday life. Who long for the most common illusions. Who, in this new time, are ready to get away with as few scars on their sandy souls as possible. But, instead of blessing them with this simple human desire, life has thrown them into unexpected mixers. On the bottom of these crushers, they will assume unexpected roles.
Maja Hrgović, Živjet ćemo bolje, Arteist
What is left if you take away a newborn baby from a harmonious marriage, if you take away the dignity and sanity from an old woman who has lived to see war and displacement, if you take away the family from a woman who, for her whole life, has been working for others? In the setting of a hot and muggy Mediterranean summer, the novel ‘Živjet ćemo bolje’ is a multi-layered story about metamorphoses of a family stumbling under the weight of unprocessed war traumas, personal fatal mistakes, unsettling memories of childhood and imposed care of a disabled grandmother. Memories outgrow reality when the grandchild becomes the person looking after the sick grandmother, while the mother, the hero and victim of modern labor migration from the Balkans, is looking after the parents of some other families. This prose is like the coffee grounds in the cup after drinking coffee: a bitter, thick, dark and grainy concentrate leaving an unpleasant aftertaste in the mouth which will not go away.
Mirko Kovač, Vrijeme koje se udaljava, Fraktura
‘Mirko Kovač, the last big writer of the big sunken, vanished Yugoslavia, lets us have his last written pages, his literary testament. He opens a window to the past – in his unique and captivating way. While reading the manuscript of Vrijeme koje se udaljava, I felt the same kind of excitement which I had felt reading Kovač's first book, Gublište, and each following book. In his overall work, Kovač maintained a high literary level, one of the highest in the literature of this part of Europe. Thanks to Mirko Kovač, the departing time has become a time which is not lost in the mists and darkness of the past, it has become a time which is close to us, a time which is returning, wrote Filip David.
Kristian Novak, Črna mati zemla, Algoritam
‘Črna mati zemla’ is a novel about a successful young writer, Matija Dolenčec, who strives to remove the creative and love block, reaching out for his own story, pushed aside almost to the point of amnesia, the one he compensated for by making up all other stories. The suppressed story of his life is a traumatic story about his childhood in a village in the Međimurje region, about his father's death, about eight suicides, two demons, the loss of a friend, about big myths and local legends, about the open historical break of 1991, about the feeling of guilt, about cruelty, loneliness and love. Intimate scenes, excruciating episodes of violence and pedophilia, humoristic flashes and fine reflections make this novel a rural panorama and gallery of unforgettable portraits, of horror with candles lighted in the dark forest, wrapped into a mist of the cold riverbanks.
Boris Perić, Povratak Filipa Latinovića, OceanMore
Filip Latinović from this novel set in present Zagreb, is not a reincarnation of Krleža's Latinovicz, although he not only shares his name, but also a mysterious congeniality, learning about him in an indirect way, experiencing more or less unconsciously certain moments from his life which are characteristic of the masochistic patterns of experiencing the world. Therefore, the intention of ‘Povratak Filipa Latinovića’ was to tell a story, by detection of the overlappings and fusions of significant semantic layers of Krleža's prose with the ones from Masoch's novel ‘Venus in Furs’, about the modern man, seemingly devoid of standard existential neuroses of the 20th century.
Sibila Petlevski, Stanje sumraka, Fraktura
‘Stanje sumraka’, the final part of the ‘Tabu’ trilogy, connects the destinies of the characters and all narrative forces from the novels ‘Vrijeme laži’ and ‘Bilo nam je tako lijepo!’ The character Viktor Tausk, also a real person, was a visionary, a man before his time, who dared to pose questions to himself and to others. All questions to which we have no answers go back to Tausk's tragic and interesting life. Past and present, interwoven at the most incredible points, show that the dusk status is a constant, where people full of inhibitions live. ‘Stanje sumraka’ will most of all challenge the reader by making them think about themselves and their close ones, about the world we live in, about the time which is permanently dusky and which has no master who would light a torch, as everyone needs to bring light into the darkness by themselves.
Andrea Pisac, Hakirana Kiti, Algoritam
‘Hakirana Kiti’ is a romance-science novel about an Eastern-European female writer who is about to finalize her doctor's thesis in Anthropology at a London College, a professional in switching perspectives, in analysis and putting oneself in a certain position, and in all other methods used by Anthropology if needed. Particularly sensitized for minority statuses and treatments, Kiti will not shy away from exposing and sentencing hypocrites she clashes with in her attempts to realize life in the very liberal and leftist circles in England. She strikes back against the ‘colonists’. Above all, her love affairs are weird, from erotica to mental striptease in the described relationship with Mitja and Rodge. We get to know this thanks to hackers who illegally enter Kiti's de facto life and nose around like addicts.
Karmela Špoljarić, Nije ovo Twin Peaks, AGM
Although we are introduced to the storyline by the voice of a narratress, the novel's main character is Gradić, a little town on a nonexistent Island, which, by means of various characters and events, is gradually transforming into something that makes us shiver. But this transformation is going on in a playful and unintrusive manner, through the round of characters and events, some of them depicted in a very realistic way – this level was necessary in order to convincingly build the other two levels of the novel, one being the ironic, caricatural level picking the central theme of small-town life, the other being the fantastic, somewhat mystic level symbolized by the old woman Agneza, in the beginning a kind of alter ego to the narratress, but actually a woman standing on the crossroads of worlds.
Milko Valent, Umjetne suze, Profil
Like in all of his other novels, in his novel ‘Umjetne suze’ as well, Milko Valent follows the responsible discourse of innovative novelist reading matter, but for the first time tackling the topic of reality in transitional Croatia, at the same time dunked into a broader context: the reality of recent European transition processes and unifications. Umjetne suze is a novel of a period; in its essence, this novel is an existential diagnosis of early 21st Century and at the same time a psychotic fresco of the malicious process of banality which has penetrated all pores of life in modern Europe. This novel courageously dives into a world of the increasingly problematic institution of the contemporary monogamous marriage. It is a novel about love falling apart, about the impossibility to have children or, respectively about the partner's infertility, about passion and revenge, but at the same time a novel about the stressful position of the investigative journalist.