Novel
Divota prašine
Not translated into English
Vjekoslav Kaleb · 1954
Synopsis
Two young partisans walk alone, after their brigade has been broken up: they are named only the Boy and the Naked One, the latter having lost his trousers crossing a river, so that his bare legs make him grotesque rather than heroic. They cross the karst and burnt, empty villages, come across the dead of typhus and a few old women; they are hungry, they are afraid, they do not know where their own side is. Nothing else happens but the march.
Context
The novel was published in 1954. Before the war its author had produced two story collections on the peasant poverty of the inland karst, then, after 1945, two war books written in black and white, with the charge that the moment demanded: Croatian critics judge them severely and treat this one as the exception. The book shows war as a situation in which man is trapped and delivered over to chance, with neither strength, morality nor intelligence of any use to him. Among the many novels of the partisan war published in those years, it remains the only one still read, and university research now reads it as an allegory. The same man wrote fifty-seven short stories and three novels in all, and gave Croatian children their Pinocchio.
Who it is for
A short novel, almost without dialogue, in which the action is reduced to a journey. No French edition exists. It is best to know what the partisan war in Dalmatia was.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by Croatian critics as its author's masterpiece and as one of the best prose works of the country in the twentieth century.
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