Publication
Amsterdam De Bezige Bij 2002
ISBN
9023434498 / 9789023434498
Language
Collection
Description
Philip Latinowicz is a successful but disillusioned painter who returns to his hometown after an absence of twenty-three years. He hopes that revisiting his roots will inspire him to create the perfect work of art and thereby restore his faith in both art and life. Haunted by his troubled childhood, however, he falls in with shady characters and discovers the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative poverty of his own background.
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LibraryThing member thorold
This jolly romp through early-1930s Mitteleuropa starts with a mother rejecting her son, and ends in multiple suicide and murder. In between we explore the hollowness of art, politics and religion; of bourgeois, industrial and agricultural society; of nation, homeland and family, and of pretty much
The bleak tone isn't surprising, given the place and time (it's perhaps more surprising when we remember that Miroslav Krleža went on to become a major establishment figure and live to a ripe old age). And this isn't one of those bleak books where you feel entitled to give up and put it aside for "something more cheerful". There's an enormous vibrancy and humanity in the text, a vast curiosity about the world, even when it's at its most negative. You go on reading it for much the same reason that you go on reading Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Strawmen who are put into the book to stand for generalised ideas like "decayed aristocrat" or "jaded ex-revolutionary" always seem to turn themselves, almost against the author's will, into complex individuals. Romantic it isn't, but you do get the feeling that Krleža doesn't entirely share the nihilistic world-view he's projecting.
I read the book in German translation (by Klaus-Detlef Olof) on the recommendation of another LT member: I'm sure it must have been a difficult book to translate. Olof seems to have done a very good job at making his translation readable and unintrusive. Of course, I can't judge how well he has reproduced the original. In a book which is partly about the relation of the former, German-speaking, imperial power to its provinces, there must certainly have been some levels of meaning that were smoothed out in such a translation, just as there would be if you were reading a book translated into English from Urdu.
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everything else. The bleak tone isn't surprising, given the place and time (it's perhaps more surprising when we remember that Miroslav Krleža went on to become a major establishment figure and live to a ripe old age). And this isn't one of those bleak books where you feel entitled to give up and put it aside for "something more cheerful". There's an enormous vibrancy and humanity in the text, a vast curiosity about the world, even when it's at its most negative. You go on reading it for much the same reason that you go on reading Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Strawmen who are put into the book to stand for generalised ideas like "decayed aristocrat" or "jaded ex-revolutionary" always seem to turn themselves, almost against the author's will, into complex individuals. Romantic it isn't, but you do get the feeling that Krleža doesn't entirely share the nihilistic world-view he's projecting.
I read the book in German translation (by Klaus-Detlef Olof) on the recommendation of another LT member: I'm sure it must have been a difficult book to translate. Olof seems to have done a very good job at making his translation readable and unintrusive. Of course, I can't judge how well he has reproduced the original. In a book which is partly about the relation of the former, German-speaking, imperial power to its provinces, there must certainly have been some levels of meaning that were smoothed out in such a translation, just as there would be if you were reading a book translated into English from Urdu.
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Awards
Original publication date
1932