Lets go home ,son by Ivica Prtenjača

Let’s go home, Son by Ivica Prtenjača

Croatian fiction

Original title -Sine, idemo kući

Translator – David Williams

Source review copy

I move on to a prize-winning novel from Croatia and one of the first novels I have read dealing with COVID-19 and living through the lockdown. I think this will be a literature theme for years to come, whether it is about the pandemic or uses it is a starting point for a novel. Ivica Prtenjača is a well-known figure in Croatian literature both as a writer himself, where he has one of the biggest book prizes in Croatia twice, first for his novel The Hill and then for this novel. He has also tirelessly promoted Croatian literature and is a radio host in Croatia (I love that a well-known novelist is a radio host, not some Z-list celeb like here ). He is also a prize-winning Poet.

I remember Dad trying to plaster the ceiling of our bungalow. He mixed some runny concrete and tossed it in the air with a trowel, hoping it would stick. He stood on an upturned tin drum, while I filled the concrete bucket down below.I was twelve years old, and I remember that winter morning because before we settled into our work, I’d watched Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey for the first time, wonder-struck, and in near ecstasy at what I’d seen and barely understood.Dad couldn’t get the hang of the hand movement, the secret angle you needed to toss the runny mix in the air, spread it out, and have it stick to the ceiling. He tossed it up vertically.And vertically it fell back down on his head, getting in his eyes. Not wanting to hide, I remained at my father’s side, sharing his torment, so it fell on me too. He tossed two full buckets up, and when it all fell down, I’d faithfully pick it up, add a bit of water, and dump the lot back in the bucket. He eventually got down, lit a cigarette, and parked himself up on a concrete block, staring at his watch.

He watch his father make the home and there is some humlour along the way like here

What happens when your father is seriously ill and you know the only hospital that can treat him is in Zagreb, where there is a slim chance he can get better. But this means you, his son and your mother all making the trip to be with your father away from your Dalmatian home by the coast. A baker has suffered after years of breathing flour has left him ill. But whilst this is happening to you and your family, the world is seeing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, you end up living in Zagreb under the lockdown, unable to return to the coastal home. This is all made worse when the treatment for your father starts to falter. As your father is recounting with you all the past the meeting, how they meet a recounting of love and marriage and having a son as he does this, he is all the more driven to want to be at his home by the coast. What to do? This is a bond between father and son. What would you do for your father? How far will a son go to help his dying parent|?

On a small plastic table, the photographer set out a bunch of retouched photos, children, old folk, children, even a few group photos where he’d used a ballpoint pen to draw outlines around everyone’s eyes and coated their faces in sepia, to increase the contrast. The pictures looked like they’d been taken in a circus. Posing for God knows who, these poor people had become dead clowns, playthings in the hands of a provincial hawker, who reckoned that he’d breathed new life into them. When my grandad saw the people in the pictures, he almost shuddered.

His fathers memories are brought back by the pictures of their lives together

This is a personal novel, almost auto-fiction. It seems the heart of the novel came from Ivica’s own experience of losing his father, a baker, and this also happened around the pandemic. It is a pandemic, but more so a novel of death and life and the bond between father and son. The sorrow and love in this book drips off the page. What happens when death is near and all you want is to be in the home you built with those you have loved and lived with? Bugger, the pandemic he needed to get home the call of the home and the sea that special place is at the heart of the book. We all have those places so intertwined in our lives that they live as spirits in us a house a view, a smell and this is at the heart of this. His home is that to his father a place he built but also a place that is so close to him he is almost part of the home. Subtle work of a man dying a son greaving and trying to help his father. This is one of those quiet books that linger in your mind and for anyone who has lost some close but also has a place close to the family’s heart like this is! Do you have a favourite book about a father-and-son relationship?