Marko Dinićs debut novel : hostage to the nostalgia

A Euroliner Bus cuts through the night, Salzburg, Vienna, through Hungary in the direction of the East, the Terminus of Niš, Serbia. "Guest Express" is, in Austria the cost-effective connection to Ex-Yugoslavia. In the Bus, a young man sits back on the way – Yes, to where? In the home? For him, this is a poisoned term. Because the I-narrator of Marko Dinićs debut novel, "The good days" is broken up years ago from Belgrade to Vienna to start over, far enough away from all of this, what has determined his previous existence. Away from this sticky mixture of self-hatred and Aggression, and Sacrifice, and nationalism, the erosion after Tito's death, the state of Yugoslavia first, and finally, in a way implode, no one can imagine was in Europe at the beginning of the nineties.

There are sentences that shoot the man through the head, and describe a socialization, which is basically just damaged people can bring: "I knew little of the culture. I was born at a time when the culture was just preparing to leave the territories of the former Yugoslavia.“ Or: "I had become the hostage of a strange Form of nostalgia."

unmistakably Dinićs debut, has an autobiographical Background. Like his main character, he was born in 1988 in Vienna, spent his Childhood and youth in Belgrade, to exit the mid-noughties years of Serbia and to study in Austria. "The good days" is a book of great linguistic fury. It is written with anger, what works as a inner engine is excellent, the novel is a sharpness that helps in trouble-over clichés. But: Maybe there are no clichés. Maybe it is the truth that is here.

Dinik las 2016 in Klagenfurt

Maybe it gives you up to today, these Alpha characters, these muscle men and violent Bully, the need to recover within a short period of time even in a coach, a pecking order, on top of which you yourself are.

The I-narrator from out of this, good reasons. Instead, he has a seat neighbor with the bad teeth, the electrician presents and as a kind of Yugoslav world-spirit turns out to be; as a history of meandering, rhetorically articulate, to no answer embarrassed beings, the Dialog with the narrator, and in the ping-pong with the expressed sensitivities of the Bus, the psycho-pathology of a Nation aufblättert. An art figure, a Chimera perhaps. You can. "The good days" as a parallel to nationalism and chauvinism in General, read But above all, Dinić digs in the collective Serbian primordial Ooze. One understands after reading it better, how it could come to the Balkan wars of the nineties.

At the Klagenfurt Bachmann read 2016 las Marko Dinić an excerpt from his novel. At the time, the Jury contended that the Text of a third, distant view time, level good. On this level the novel; it is the bus situation is back to Serbia, located in the present. The reason for the involuntary return of the death of the grandmother of the narrator is, and when you see that Dinić has dedicated the book to his grandmother, is all the more obvious that the Dead is one of the Central figures.

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One of the other father, a civil servant in the Ministry of the interior; it can keep up with an Opportunist and Milošević-admirer, now retired, but the son still glowing despised, and in the course of the novel with a highly imaginative range of swear words wisely, with the originality of the obdurate figure, as the father turns out to be then, not at all. A projection surface, but a good one.

The second and strongest narrative level of the novel is that in which the narrator in his school time in the neglected Belgrade city evokes, in a neglected neighbourhood in a slum school, the teachers-most of the matter seemed to be. "The good days" is to be by the way, thought of a very interesting city portrait, in the geography and mentality of Belgrade. Above the city, the Košutnjak forest, the Dinić magical-mythical charging times as a protection zone, as a dark raunendes creepiness territory, as the adventure Playground.

There are striking images in this novel, in which the residents of Belgrade show the Rest of the world, literally, the bare butt, while they are being bombed. The new Jews, the President says it is so it to talk to the mother and the father, we, the Serbs are.

Not everything is literary elegantly solved; some of the narrative strands, but others are not, to be guided brachial to an end. Nevertheless, The good days, "" a remarkable novel, because it makes the conflict of identities is visible. In Vienna, I arrived-narrator as a Stranger and alien has remained "to this day, I felt that something could not break me, of this wretched patch of earth, Serbia, which had saved many idiots in my new environment as a Land of incorrigible mass murderer and a Muslim-hater: well neglected Bobos and Hipsters from the seventh district, Packed full of the prejudices of their bourgeois homes." A native novel, a darker.

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Marko Dinić: The good days. Roman. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 2019. 240 pages, 22 euros.