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LITERATURE
ponent, the fascist soldier Carlo, who had the even with a surname, the current tendencies
most beautiful eyes, however in an outburst of and turmoil in the Croatian society. She has
military anger, he previously harassed Neda’s quite a specific writing vocabulary also about
brother, Krsto. Krsto never forgave him about Sicily’s mafia past. I would say that in a small
this, becoming a grouch. Carlo himself fell in novel, quite compactly, she masterfully weaves
love with Neda, deeply denying his previous fas- the two threads. Both the psychological-sym-
cist orientation and fighting to the end of the bolic layer, depicted through the fullness of the
war in the Italian anti-fascist brigade. characters and their urges, passions, choices in
life, but also the social-engaged layer, through
Due to the rejection, Carlo, regardless of how a clear image of the past and the current, even
much he transformed himself ideologically, he documentary events.
had to leave Split, despite of his great love for
Neda, ending in his native town in Sicily, where The narrative experiments, which she slightly
Neda bravely joined him. With this, the physi- robustly made in the previous two proses, have
cal bond with Split fades, and the family was been completely overcome here, they enrich the
formed in this mafia province. text, and they do not protrude. The frames of
the novel touch in a circle, same as the two fe-
The dualities, the repetitions and the con- male characters form a whole. For the purpose
trasts are the favorite rhetorical figures on of easier receptiveness, some segments of the
the basis of which Dimkovska builds her novel narration are repeated, even when there is no
on several levels. Hence, there is repetition, displacement of the perspective or the charac-
duplication of the two characters, of the two ter who narrates, that is, the segments sum up.
women named Nedjeljka, the grandmother and The narrative position is constantly transferred
the granddaughter. They are similar in many from the granddaughter to the grandmother,
ways, however the spirit of the epoch separates clearly separated. The language is rich, meta-
them. The grandmother who is in love, against phorical, with situations and phrases which re-
the granddaughter whose love is empty. Char- main. This includes the characteristic language
lotte and Nedjeljka are once again identical. idiom that the grandmother uses, “ajme”, the
However the young Neda differs from her sister one that the daughter-in-law uses “out of spite”,
Margerita. Carlo and Krsto are charismatically the repeatability of Nedjeljka’s expression “fas-
built. From strong contrasts to variances. In the cists” (something like “nevermore” by Edgar Al-
work of Lidija Dimkovska, the female characters lan Poe or thelyrical passages about Carlo’s eyes
are always strong. Even the marginal characters or the colors of the Adriatic Sea and the Tyrrhe-
such as the Romanian daughter-in-law Mirela. nian Sea. Of course, Carlos’ telegraphic love for
Men are more passive, more fragile, more prag- Nedjeljka is the ironic “highlight” in the novel.
matic. Still, both male and female characters
are represented through an obscure view. The This is a book about Split and Sicily. About the
epoch, the time, the social turmoil, the misun- Croatian and the Italian situations. The Euro-
derstandings, are so strong, that they oppress pean attitudes resonate in this book. Macedonia
people. The elderly end up with sever diseases is only marginally mentioned, about it being
and mental disorders, and the young people “swamped” by immigrants, as agency news. I
tangle in their powerlessness to do something would like, and while I think that there is space
more of their lives. for this, Macedonia to be localized in the narra-
tion. However Dimkovska chose not to do this
In the novel, Lidija Dimkovska sharply estab- directly. Or course that some of the social tur-
lishes the two social ideologies, fascism against moil of Croatia and Split is very typical for the
anti-fascism. Her evocation of the anti-fascist Macedonian post-communism as well. On one
epoch is obvious, and the type of people she hand, this story is European, even global, al-
created, against the fascist ideology which once though it has the colors and the scramble of the
again revives in the modern neo-Nazi groups. Ex- Mediterranean (and not of the Balkan). Probably
cept that again, she gives the contrast at a fam- it contains too much data for a film scenario. I
ily level – one of Nedjeljka’s grandsons becomes would like Dimkovska to enter this industry as
an antifascist who renounces his grandmother well. The novel has potential, and the European
and does not recognize his bad blood, becom- cultural policies are compatible to support the
ing one of the leading politicians of the fascist transformation of the novel into a film.
right wing. Dimkovska very specifically displays,
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