Novel · A way to begin
The Return of Philip Latinowicz
Povratak Filipa Latinovicza
Miroslav Krleža · 1932
Synopsis
A painter of about forty returns to the small town in Croatia from which his mother drove him out twenty-three years earlier. He comes looking for what he lacks in order to paint again. There he finds his mother, the canon who is perhaps his father, and a provincial society preoccupied with money and bed-hopping.
Context
The book was published in 1932. Its author already dominated the letters of his country through the theatre and through polemic, and he made it hold the question that preoccupied him: what art is worth when the milieu that produced it is disintegrating. The French version, by Mila Djordjević and Clara Malraux, was published by Calmann-Lévy in 1957 with an introduction by Zlatko Šušić, and was reissued in 1988 and then in 1994; the English one, by Zora Depolo, dates from 1959. The French translator had sided with Tito's Yugoslavia and visited the country twice in the late forties. Croatian critics see in it the first fully modern novel of this literature, and French critics read it as a river in spate, gradually bringing this name closer to that of Proust.
Who it is for
Two hundred and fifty dense pages, with long sentences, made accessible by a French translation since 1957. It is better to know what the Croatian provinces were like between the two wars.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's novelistic masterpiece, translated into French as early as 1957 and reissued twice since.
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