Cyclops

Начало книги

Making his way through a crowded Zagreb square one evening on the eve of World War II, Melkior Tresić catches sight of a priest with familiar, jutting ears. The priest, we learn, had taught him catechism during his childhood in Dalmatia. The fleeting glimpse of the Dalmatian priest in the opening pages of this quintessentially Zagreb novel is Ranko Marinković’s nod to his native Dalmatia. The nod tells us that Melkior Tresić is an outside insider, someone who, like Marinković, came to the city as a student, and who sees Zagreb as someone born there never could. Marinković captures Zagreb’s crowds, the shysters, the army barracks, and the seedy neighborhoods in one of the most famous fictional portraits of the city, yet he peoples the novel with a closely knit group whose playful jibes and cheerful ignorance of the portentous events taking shape around them have a certain resonance with the insular Mediterranean culture in which he was raised.

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