Kamen, cvijet i amen

A family man works a boring and dull job, but one day he receives a message that jolts him out of the lethargy of (petty) bourgeois life and takes him directly to prison, for life. On an island, a group of children grow up who gather in the Band of Big Smokers and dream of a different life, far from the heat, the stone, the smoke of secretly purchased cigarettes, the local priest, the teacher and the family who are anything but happy. Criminals, dealers, prostitutes and corrupt lawyers do what is expected of them. And love, of course, remains ideal and unattainable. All this, seemingly incompatible, is skilfully incorporated in Stone, flower and amen - a novel of great contrasts.

After the notable novel Letters from Vinogradska, Boris Škifić presents himself as a writer who doesn't care about the boundaries of genres, so he combines a novel about growing up with crime, island with urban, love with brutal. Somewhere in the background, you can read the legend of the sea nemana, which is becoming less and less a metaphor and more and more a part of everyday life. The novel deftly combines this time now with reminiscences of the past with deep dives into the spaces of the subconscious.

Kamen, cvijet i amen is a novel in which one dreams of another life and escape, a novel about a world in which there is no place for those who are sensitive and an island whose sunny idyll is only an illusion, and superstition and primitivism strike where we are thinnest. It also raises the question of crime and punishment, the balance of which is never fair. Triple-marked by the words from the title, written in an eruptive and energetic style, this is a prose of naturalistic scenes of the harshness of the real world and the soft parts of daydreaming and longing, and between this great contrast lies a great story.

• Jagna Pogačnik