Imenik lijepih vještina I-II

On the large and indented map of Jergović's literary opus, which is still in the process of formation and growth, equally on all its genre and thematic isohips, a special place belongs to the discursive text. Even with his first newspaper texts, for which he received the Veselko Tenžera Award in 1990, at that time the most powerful recognition of its kind in Yugoslavia, Jergović demonstrates a distinctly individualized style, which easily breaks through the typological boundaries of essays, columns, comments, personal memories and narrative prose, merging everything into a specific amalgam of Jergović's essayism. Over time, the thematic register of his interests expands in huge concentric circles: literature and books above all, but also film, painting, music (all: classical, new, folk...), comics, football, nascent reality with all its wonders, rarely good, most often evil, political history, identity dramas of the post-Berlin era, with a special sensitivity to the social position of all kinds of minorities... Jergović's essay: a testimony to an insatiable spiritual hunger to encompass, or at least touch the totality of reality, the entire world with a text. It is an astonishing and somewhat terrifying hunger, magnificent and, of course, futile. Futility? It is to be assumed that the author is also familiar with it, because he himself gives numerous indications of it in his texts, and his intransigence in the daily execution of the aforementioned plan and his faith in the Text as the last stronghold of meaning, suggest something of a stoically mastered reconciliation. But all of this would be secondary if it weren't for the immense power of writing, of language, through which Jergović's text engages us, disturbs us, provokes us, and, above all, arouses genuine reader excitement. — Ivan Lovrenović