Autoportreti s damama

After a long time, this is the first novel by Velibor Čolić that we do not have to translate into Croatian, which Gallimard's house author writes in his mother tongue. And somehow, regardless of his decade-long and already organic anchoring in French, the subject he chooses for this occasion can only be written authentically in the language spoken in his primary family, in which he learned to name and love the world in childhood. In Self-Portraits with Ladies, Čolić records the growing up of a sensitive and perceptive boy in Bosnia in the 1970s, he romances the later white-world adventures of a gifted writer, but also a streetwise rocker in exile. This is a book with a dazzling style and memorable pictures, full of fine humor and Mangup impudence, hedonism, but also lifelong suffering. It is the prose of a poet who has many and varied happiness, but also incurable wounds acquired in war and post-war, both in his homeland and in the white, but increasingly black world. The leading figures, actually the stars of this adventurous and sumptuous autofiction are undoubtedly women, from the opening shots when the childish protagonist-narrator curiously looks around, in the softness of his parents' home and the nearest neighborhood, long before the disaster that will follow in those areas. From mom, first crushes all the way to crazy loves that are larger than life, and which will most often burst for the same reason for which they were fatally seasoned, namely, because of otherness and otherness. French narrated and Bosnian dramatic!