Martinović Stjepo: Kap krvi s lovorova lista - Konavoske priče II

Stjepo Martinović: A drop of blood from a laurel leaf - Konavoske priče II

The twelve new Mediterranean stories from the pen of Stjepo Martinović - literary images of the southern Dalmatian, Dubrovnik and Konavoc climates, spanning from antiquity to the 21st century - have a peculiar common denominator: an experiential-value and mental
ambiance in which their protagonists live their unique and, at the same time, archetypal lives.

Whether it is a preacher of trichotomy - a heresy that, through political manipulation, became the ideology of the last rebellion of the Illyrians against Roman rule in Dalmatia - or an emigrant from the second half of the 20th century, their code of fate is common: it is about a dare that simultaneously inspires and fatalistically directs, restrains with its insurmountable limits and frees creation as a response to distress, curse, death itself...

Martinović's stories - as much as their language and style were deliberately adapted to the aura of the time in which they take place - are impeccably modern, very readable in the contemporary context of the dilemmas of individuals and communities in a world sown with ultimate trials.

These twelve stories are a tribute to the Eternal Mediterranean, homo prudens and homo ludens, the creator of a very special story of a very special part of the universe, which regularly remains without a landmark in the world that it has created since the dawn of time. of his civilization.

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Stjepo Martinović (Duba Konavoska, 1945), a philologist and political scientist by education, and a journalist by vocation (and two-thirds of his work biography), a long-time reporter, commentator and editor in the publications of the former Vjesnik house, only started writing fiction in his early sixties - so that, as he himself explains, the influence of Kaliopi and Polyhymnia, the other hundreds of stories would go unrecorded what he heard or found out about them in other ways, and which he "carried in his head" for decades in order to one day (perhaps) give them written clothing.
 
Already with his first collection of short stories, "The Eyes of Saint Lucia", Martinović - as stated in the explanation of the "Slavić" award for the year 2009 - erected a literary monument to the people and the region from which he comes, affirmed the layers and complexity of the Konavo region environment... by writing an extremely valuable literary debut.

"A drop of blood from a laurel leaf" is his third title - after the first seven "Konavo stories" and the novel "Okovani snima" - in which the author writes a kind of debt letter to those whose written and interpreted stories he heard and who passed on to him a passion for (both spoken and written) Mediterranean history in which the eternal clashes of eros and thanatos are broken.