Inšallah Madona, inšallah

The variety of destinies and plastically individualized characters in these stories by Jergović is inexhaustible, just as the richness of the material world is inexhaustible in them. Motivically, this richness is drawn from the wide cultural-geographical area of ​​Bosnian and Dalmatian writing with its elusive borders, from that oriental-Balkan-Mediterranean lyrical cosmos of astonishing creative depth and strength. (Lyrics, lyrical - here it is crucial to keep in mind the original unity of poetry, singing and music in this term.) What, however, makes these stories correspond most truly and artistically most to that world and that art is the tonality in which they are "tuned in", and the empathetic experience of human destiny with which they are permeated.

In the ancient East, there were masters who carved chess pieces of a special kind from hard ivory. After shaping the piece, they would hollow out lace patterns across its entire surface. Then, with their precise and sharp micro tools, they would go inside: separating and shaping the same, concentrically reduced figure, and then again carving lace through it. And so on, down to the smallest possible figure in the center. All these shapes are connected by a common root into a complete structure, both solid and flexible at the same time. Jergović's story grows, branches out, multiplies within itself and shapes itself similarly: within a story a story, within a story a story, within a story a story..., so that in the end each one returns to its root, in which both its end and its beginning are. In this characteristic, each of these stories approaches the structure of a novel, each one is actually a novel in nuce.