Summary
Namik Kabil: Isijavanje
In the novel "Isijavanje" by Namik Kabil, the emigrant Besim returns from Sweden to his native Herzegovina, in the setting of old memories that he believes can no longer do anything to him. The house is in place and intact, but it radiates as if it were burnt. That crane has nothing to do with a fire that can be extinguished, but with an unquenchable one - the fire of belonging and one's own creation that smolders always in the same place, where a person was uprooted to be transplanted elsewhere. And while the house seems smaller than before to this returnee because of the overgrown cypress, each of the loves left there now seems even bigger: both the love for the mother who did not return from exile in her lifetime, and the once forbidden love for the woman who today wears black for her brother who died in the war, and all those smaller but equally unquenchable loves for landscapes, smells, tastes and other sensory codes of the homeland and growing up. It was only necessary to blow into those ashes from up close for the flame to revive again, for the story of one return to deserve a novel about a man who wants to sell a house - and the house won't let him sell it. Writing about our universal life fires and intimate fires, Namik Kabil skillfully balances on the border of film, life and fiction, translating the creative material into a language without excesses and a story without deficiencies, which carries exceptional strength and artistic persuasiveness.
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