Summary
Robert Međurečan: Domovina to go
"Šimun Nikolić, an unemployed professor of the Croatian language, disillusioned with the Croatian judiciary and the economy, decides to go to Munich to work as a builder, in order to collect money for the resumption of the court case regarding the traffic accident in which his wife and child were killed. His relatives will place him in a building, a Kafkaesque limbo, where foreigners of all nations live, a lively bustle of languages and trouble, and soon there will be murders, and Šimun will find himself in the middle of a criminal investigation in which all the residents of the hotel are suspicious, which reinforces their fears that they carry with them from their homeland. The homeland of Robert Međručan is partly an epistolary novel, because Šimun writes letters to his unborn daughter, and during the reconstruction of the old building, he finds letters that Jakob wrote to his fiancee in the 1930s, which are disturbingly reminiscent of contemporary political radicalization a story that forces the reader to keep his eyes wide open, just like Šimun, the author presents a gallery of characters and traumas, examines European identity, multicultural society, the painful and uncertain process of the melting pot, narrates the germs of terrorism and fears war in Europe. - Kruno Lokotar
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