Matija

The scene that Drago Hedl embarks on is unrecorded in our literature and film. It is not even in the much broader, conversational prose of our lives. And it is not there simply because it belongs to the unspeakable, that which people do not want to know about, because they think that if they do not know, it will never happen. A man goes to tell his ex-wife that their only son has been killed (...) “Matija” is a book about America, one of the better and more terrifying of our books about that great, imagined country.

It is a book about Osijek, about the war, about the efforts of so many of our parents to save their sons from becoming war heroes. A small sad book about Croatia, which, due to the war and post-war hopelessness, has scattered around the world. “Matija” is a book about crying and despair, about man’s need to articulate his despair, about that strange and unstoppable need for man to straighten up. It is a book about what living human lips cannot say. They cannot, but they must.