About this Event
Capturing the invisible hand of yesterday's fascism for today's readers
"Celebration"
In four fragmentary chapters set in the mountainous Lika region of Croatia, Mijo's life unfurls not with the chronology of time but in episodes, each in flow with the textural grain of this remote earth. With sparest of prose, Karakaš has crafted an exquisite sense of place. But with that comes terrifying violence and the evolution of a fascist. As an unwilling combatant on the run in “The House”, Mijo has not strayed far from home. From his hiding place in the woods above their cabin he observes through the cross hairs of his rifle his beloved wife go about her daily routine. Autumn is advancing and Drenka has agreed that at night it might be safe for his return to the crawl space beneath the house. In “Dogs” Mijo is a child working on his family’s land the day the local authorities pass an edict that all dogs in the valley must be killed. Around the table, his father and mother evaluate a warm life in terms of raw pragmatism, and the journey Mijo decides to make will become his pilgrimage to adulthood. Mijo arrives at the door of his girlfriend, Drenka, on a day of festivity in the third, eponymous chapter, “Celebration”. The couple plans to walk through summer fields to the revelry in town. With her brother as chaperone, the two lovers lag behind. The contours of the horizon have shifted with the seasons and their direction becomes as uncertain as the events that will unfurl at the festivity awaiting them. “Father” concludes the work with devastating finality.
"Blue Moon"
Meet Čarli, a young rockabilly fanatic at the end of the Eighties. A failed student, he cares deeply about his pompadour hairdo, symbolic of his desire for an identity shift away from his peasant roots, and he wears it with obsessive, vain pride. The quiff is his crown, his best self. Čarli searches for mirrors in the street in order to admire the quiff at all times, has located shop windows that reflect the quiff at particularly good angles, spends much time grooming it, and has even devised a way to sleep (with three carefully positioned pillows) to minimize quiff “ruffle”. And it is this very hairstyle that his father, a man so violent that he borders on psychopathic, hates with a vengeance. Following a bloody fist fight between father and son, it is clear that the claustrophobic and violent darkness that looms over Čarli’s childhood home, and Yugoslavia at large, will eventually devour him and those of his generation. BLUE MOON delves into the inability of a world that is approaching a new war, to self-reflect. Through Čarli's unlikely relationship with Eli, a capable city girl and Leonard Cohen fan, the arteries of the novel are themes of masculinity and violence, and the traditional, conservative preference, in the face of difference, towards selfpreservation. A doubling down into homogeneity. Karakaš is a master of escalating conflict. He draws a stifling darkness around the edges of BLUE MOON building mounting pressure in ways simultaneously surreal, humorous, and suffocating. And it is this dark comedy which is the novel's extraordinary watermark, a first indicator of his writing to come.
Translator
Ellen Elias-Bursać is an award-winning translator of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, who has served as the president of the American Literary Translators’ Association. Between 1972 and 1990 she lived in Zagreb and for six years she worked in the English Translation Unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. Her recent translation from the Croatian into English of Celebration by Damir Karakaš was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize and was a Best Book of 2024 for The Paris Review. Her translation last year of Karakaš' widely popular second novel, Blue Moon, won an English PEN Award.
Author
Damir Karakaš is a Croatian author, playwright, musician and journalist, winner of the prestigious Meša Selimović award, among many others. Born in 1967 in the remote, mountainous region of Lika, he later studied law and agronomy in Zagreb. During the 1990s he worked as a war reporter from the front lines in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo for national daily newspaper Večernji list. His novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Arabic. His plays have been performed across Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Chile and Ivory Coast.
Event venue & nearby stays
Masaryk room, 14-16 Taviton street, London, United Kingdom
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