I am finding Novakovich’s first novel very enjoyable. The language is not high imagery, yet there is enough description to put the necessary grounding base, although a constantly moving one, beneath the feet of the main character, Ivan Dolinar.
Ivan, born in Croatia on April 1st, 1948, is a victim of changing times. Political and social structures are still being shaped by the aftereffects of war and the emergence of nationalist feelings in the Balkans. As a young boy, Ivan terrorizes his younger brother Bruno, who in keeping with the acceptance and resignation to life emphasized in the book, pays for Ivan’s existence and studies at a later time in their lives. Ivan goes quickly from brat to medical student (where he excels) to political prisoner (from a mistaken jest at an attempt on Tito’s life) to where he is currently in the story, a teacher of the basic sciences who puts a philosophical twist in his lectures which totally confound his students. Ivan’s questioning nature has been a force in his life leading him both into and out of the rather mad situations in which he finds himself.
Finally he is earning a decent living in translating marriage and theology text from German into Croatian, freely interpreting as he goes, but eloquently enough to gain the respect of the Protestant churches that employed him.
Novakovich weaves a story that is tense with conflict, yet it is easily absorbed by both the characters and the readers as being merely facts of life. Indeed, there is much similarity in the near absurdity of the situational events in the tale to Voltaire’s Candide, and Novakovich gives us the same half-ass hero that we cannot help but become interested in enough to root for him.
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