Matijino stoljeće rata
Matija's Century of War is an epic, so Croatian story about the 20th century written in a superior narrative and style, which you will not read, but swallow!
By intertwining fiction and real events, not caring about literary-theoretical laws and rigid genre molds, about which according to his own admission he knows little or nothing anyway, the obviously well-informed author brings testimonies about people and events in a really wide temporal and spatial scope, thus tragic fate convincingly places the titular heroines in the historical context that actually decisively determined that fate. To that extent, this book is simultaneously a Chronique du xxe siècle, as the subtitle suggests, but also a moving story about a woman who survived as many as three wars, losing in each of them one of her closest relatives.
The first chapter - via Imotski, Split and Trieste - takes us on an exciting journey from Herzegovina to New York, where we follow the failed attempt of Matija's father Mata to move to America (this failure is a kind of capstone of a series of later family misfortunes), the second tells about Matina tragic fate in the First World War, from fighting and capture in Galicia to imprisonment in deep Russia, and the third and fourth about the fate of his descendants through two new cataclysms, from Herzegovina in the Second World War to Sarajevo in the last war in the nineties.
Our Matija, the main character of the novel, was born in 1912. That woman's father was killed in the first of her three wars, her husband was killed in the second, and her son and grandson in the third. Matija died in 1995, after all these tragedies through four generations.
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