Summary
Marina Šur Puhlovski: The Player
In the novel The Player, Marina Šur Puhlovski cuts deeply into malignant family relationships and exposes the hypocrisy of the society in which we live. The narrator comes to visit her mother-in-law Bernarda in the nursing home, finds her sleeping, so she decides not to wake her up, but rather wait until she wakes up on her own. In those fifteen minutes of waiting, an entire novel was packed in which the narrator virtuoso transcribes the relationships within her family, unravels all the key life 'endeavors' of her husband Max's mother and stepfather, shows how disastrously they imprinted themselves on their son's character, and how poorly she herself copes with Max's human weaknesses. Max's youthful autobiographical novel, as well as Bernarda's notes, are woven into everything, which complicates the perspective and gives a voice to each character in the text.
In short, Marina Šur Puhlovski wrote a complex, dense, dark and powerful novel.
“If Hieronymus Bosch were reborn and some powerful person commissioned him to paint the Seven Deadly Sins again, all about human nature and its perversions you would find in this novel: arrogance, miserliness, fornication, intemperance in eating and drinking, anger and laziness. Marina Šur Puhlovski illuminates the life of her protagonists in a metaphysical sense, she reaches the core of every fate and that which survives it, which exists despite death and nothingness saw their own destiny.
This novel will restore your faith in literature as an art, in the fact that there are authors who broaden our horizons, who give us the meaning of both being and writing."
Jadranka Pintarić
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