Crnac
The novel The Black Man begins with the sentence “The house we lived in was wooden.” Wooden houses are reserved for fairy tales and stories for children.
The author does indeed write about childhood, a childhood that could be hers, but the narrator has no name, nor does the village she lives in, nor the city she goes to study in. The novel is composed of short fragments that sometimes read as short stories, sometimes as flashes of memory, and sometimes as prose poems. There are no elements of a fairy tale in the narrator's childhood, quite the opposite. In the suburbs of a provincial town known for its heavy industry, the child grows up surrounded by poverty, provincialism, and the subtle terror of people living empty lives. Going to study in a big city doesn't change anything either. The streets are bigger, a little better lit, but people with "empty gazes" still follow her. Gromača writes about the same Eastern European poverty described by Slavenka Drakulić, the same attitude towards women that Dubravka Ugrešić wrote about, but her prose fragments are closer to Danilo Kiš's novel The Garden, Ashes, Milan Kundera's The Joke, Agota Kristof's The Great Notebook, and Szymborska's poetry. Tatjana, like all good poets, knows how to say a lot with few words.
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