The investigator by Dragan Velikić review 1600

The Investigator by Dragan Velikić

Serbian fiction

Original title: Islednik

Translator Christina Pribchevich-Zoric

Source – PERSONAL COPY

Now I had to pick a book as the 1600th review for the blog. I had been weighing up a number of books for this review, but only a day or so ago did I finally pick this one. From the moment I started the book, it has so many things I love in books: Central Europe, the Balkans, and the war of the 90s; history, family, and memory.  In the time I have been blogging, these threads or plots in books have been the ones I, as a reader, gravitate toward. It also shows how a book about a mother in Serbia can connect with a reader in the UK.  This book was the winner of the NIN prize in serbia it is like there version of the booker prize. A few of which I have read over the years. This is always a good place to look for new books from a country to go to their big prizes.For a list of writers, you will find a number of great writers here, a few of whom I have reviewed on the blog with other books.  This is the second time Dragan Velkić has won the prize.  I do have his other prize-winning book. HE IS. writer who should be better known in English, but I don’t know how many times I have said that over the last 1600 reviews.

A photograph of the bridge on the Rjecina, once the border between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Italy, taken from Sušak (Photo B. Fučić, 1947), one of the few pictures to survive the burglary of the train carriage in Vinkovci. It accidentally wound up in the small collection of family snapshots that I brought with me when I left Belgrade at dawn on the 24th of March 1999. In the early afternoon of that same day, a few hours before the first NATO bombs fell on my city, I stepped off the train at Budapest’s Keleti station; stretching out before me was the unending Fiumei ut – the Rijeka Road that passes by the Kerepesi cemetery. But people had started fleeing into exile well before that. The roads they had to take were traced long ago.

One of the photos that leads of to the tales in the story.

The book is a piece of autofiction, in a way, but in that very Balkan way of telling a story. This story is of Dragan, a man, a son, and his mother. His mother has recently died. This is the framing for the book as we see him look through a box of photos. As we do so, we see him as a young child and the local hotel; his mother loved hotels in Pula, where they grew up. This moves us forward and back in time, with Dragan talking about his mother’s childhood, then his own. We see both World War II and the Balkan conflict, and how they affected his mother, then him as a child. Then we also have Dragan meeting some of his fellow writers, like Aleksander Tisma, a fellow Nin Prize winner, and later on, he reads Dasa Drndric, one of the books we have yet to see in English. A son in grief as memories and history mix.

In the spring of 2012, he started working on the case of the woman employed at the Northern Adriatic Port Directorate and came upon Daša Drndić’s book “April in Berlin”. The part that mentions Raša made him think of the trumpet-player with two names. In the meantime, Marijan Milevoj had become the guardian angel of his town, a reliable chronicler.

His books could be found on the internet. He didn’t live in Raša anymore, he now lived in nearby Labin where his son ran a bookshop. He decided to look him up at the first opportunity. That was a quarter of a century ago. Meanwhile, the country where they lived was gone, like the Raša mine.

The mention of a yet unpublished Dasa book !!

For me, this is one of those books with a fluid timeline; it is like an ocean coming in and out on the tide as we go back and forth. I was reminded of something like The English Patient; this is like the part of that book where we see the ephemera of that character’s life. These pictures are Dragan’s ephemera: his Madeleine, his family memories. It is also a book about place and how that place has changed hands, names, borders, and even the people who live there over the last century. It is also a story about a son diving into his mother’s past, building a picture of her and then their relationship. This for me is what I liove in books that make you think of your life I looked back at some of my old pictures after putting this book down. The other reason I picked this book is that Istros, the publisher, has been a favourite and champion of my blog over the last 17 years, and that means the world to me. Do you have a favourite book like this one?