Freelander
"Freelander" by Miljenko Jergović is an interesting combination of road novels, Bildungsroman and raw melodrama, and is one of the author's most successful books.
Only one telegram about his uncle's death is enough for Karlo Adum to embark on a real journey to Sarajevo, but also on a metaphorical journey into his own past. Adum, a retired history professor, a widower, maladjusted like many who once came from Bosnia, lives in Novi Zagreb as if in some kind of voluntary exile, and treats the pathos of his own loneliness with mockery and cynicism. He travels to Sarajevo in an ancient Volvo, bought in the mid-seventies at a time when loans were being taken out or cottages were being bought.
His journey to Bosnia is somnambulistic, fragments from his childhood and later life in Zagreb coincide with landscapes of Bosnian entropy, fragments of the last barbarisms, suspicious conformisms, unspoken prejudices. Even quite banal events such as a football match, a meal in junk restaurants or the torture of animals in a stadium take place in a strange haze, on the verge of fantasy, deep in the Balkan post-festum, this time, it seems, really at the end of history. Adum's life, although not at all ordinary, ultimately turns out to be unimportant and meaningless.
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