Ilićke priče

All thematic, stylistic and linguistic elements are wrapped in an aura of compassion for the victims. The author does not write from an ideological perspective, does not investigate the reasons for evil, does not seek revenge, and is not interested in the perpetrators of the crime. By romanticizing historical facts, she wants to save human destinies from oblivion and incorporate them into the foundations of the national identity of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With each of her novels, and especially this one, Anita Martinac follows the path from evil to good, from sacrifice to piety, from epic to lyric, from politics to ethics. As an intimately lovely place and as a historically terrible place, Ilići is in Anita Martinac's novel a metonymy of the fate of the Croatian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a monument to the spirit of the place (genius loci), to the men and women of Ilić, the Ilić region and the Herzegovinan homeland. But also something else: a poignant documentary, emotionally powerful and artistically vivid literary reading.