Ivančić Hrvoje: Iza Mjesečevih planina - putopis iz Afrike

Hrvoje Ivančić: Behind the Mountains of the Moon - a travelogue from Africa

The travelogue Behind the Mountains of the Moon is the fourth book by Hrvoje Ivančić, who as a reporter and globetrotter honed his pen during a ten-year wandering in Africa and the Middle East, so before us is his best and most mature work.

Ivančić knows that he is on his journey alone, even though in his adventurous solitaire he meets dozens vivid characters and through them he gives us an insight into African tradition and the chaotic present, he also twists his inner self, so it can be said that he masterfully compiled a road novel and a series of essays, written in a superb reportage style, which is why this book does not let go of your hands. the goal is to survive. In the tense sequence of events, which seems to revolve around the author himself and his reporter's goals, the reader learns how this bare survival unravels, be it stories from the point of view of young warriors, old priests, prostitutes, UN people, entrepreneurs, fishermen, trinket sellers, women from orphanages or anonymous passers-by, assembling a rich mosaic that introduces us to a three-dimensional experience of the African street, but equally of the African powerful and rich of nature.

Everything is there: Africa as a postcard, as a distant exotic destination, a lion, a giraffe, a tall young man with a spear, armed young men on a pickup truck, dust, malaria, genocide, massacres with machetes, poverty, child soldiers, magical water, heated life in houses made of native bricks... while night birds on high heels bustle around the muzungu, in nightclubs that are the factories of their dreams and white fornication, which in Gomi, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, sublimates all the evil that soaked the African soil with blood and from which the flowers of a future freedom are just shyly sprouting.

-editor Ljiljana Pavlina

"I could spend the whole day in one place just observing what is happening and it would never, but never, be the same. Every minute is unique, every hour a different tension, every day passers-by like ants on this highway from the suburbs to town, from village to town, from town to village. We are looking for a place under the Sun... This town is a movie, there is no need to look for it or dig for it. It is tangible, the struggle is real, survival is the word of the day."