Baretić Renato: Hotel Grand

Renato Baretić: Hotel Grand

The author who, after the great success of "The Eighth Commissioner", probably publishes each new title with enormous trepidation, recently published his third novel. "Hotel Grand", as well as "Povjerenik", fascinates first of all with its rare storytelling quality - a multitude of themes and genres, and even several levels from which the interpretation could start, are skillfully folded into a tense and seductive, readable whole in which a complex story is told in a simple way. childhood, if he would not find traces of the past and with it at least partially clear up. This part, one of those that connects the plot, is nevertheless a background story, because at the center of it is the story of the boy Filip growing up, in the early nineties in an unnamed Dalmatian town, where his parents, exiles from war-torn Bosnia, run a brothel in the "Grand Hotel" as just one "link in the chain" of such a typical combination of crime, mafia, smuggling and politics. trying to live normally, Ukrainian prostitutes with good hearts and unfortunate fates and a motley gallery of characters made up of various "workers" and "customers", ranging from the security guard Martin whose life is marked by an intimate tragedy, to the Spanish UNPROFOR colonel who finds the love of his life in a brothel or a mobster who "evolves" into a politician.

Filip, an intelligent and somewhat old boy, compared to the revelation of the world in which he lives, unusual and different, no matter how much his parents tried to protect him from it, he is also experiencing a stage of development of his own sexuality in which the lack of friends certainly makes up for the atmosphere in which he lives.

Baretić has "transferred" to his new novel one of the important formulas for the success of his debut - the extremely colorful linguistic characterization of the characters and the juxtaposition of "corrupt" Ukrainian, English, and Bosnian, Dalmatian, and Zagreb idioms, which in the entire story, in the central part based on dialogues, gives an interesting color. Within the main story, with an affected atmosphere and a suggestive slow narration until the dynamic and tragic end, side episodes and developed relationships between the characters are skilfully "sown", for which the novel certainly deserves additional points.

The unusual warmth of Filip's father towards his own "female workers", family attachment, bathing scenes on a nearby beach, attention to details such as women's palms, and especially the episodes in which the girl Halja, the daughter of one of the prostitutes, the novel is directed far ahead of another story from the dark nineties, seasoned with crime and war in the background - in the direction of one that is not unambiguously defined by genre, but at its center is the aspiration to "remain human" despite everything, as Filip's father would say.

However, "Hotel Grand" also brings a very significant innovation - its main framework is the blog on which the novel is created, as a result of a blogger's intrusion on someone else's blog on which he will write the novel we are currently reading. Excellent, actually "fictitious" comments by bloggers on chapters in the making, in which you can read the seeds of literary criticism, but also typical blogger nonsense, their ability to direct the story and reveal the identity of the writer (someone thinks that it could be Baretić himself), are a significant addition to the novel in the direction of questioning the status of literature, the possibilities of new media, but also almost a small study of novel writing. No one would wish that to the "Grand Hotel", with which Baretić returns to the level of "Commissioner".