Karahasan Dževad: Noćno vijeće

Dževad Karahasan: The Night Council

Selected works - Book 5

novel

Dževad Karahasan's works have seen numerous editions over the past fifteen years and received a number of prestigious international awards. However, Karahasan was and remains strongly connected to the Croatian cultural environment, which is why his latest novel "Night Council" is having its premiere edition (before being translated into foreign languages) in Zagreb.

Dževad Karahasan's latest novel is situated in eastern Bosnia, in the small town of Foča, known - among other things - for the great crimes committed there by Chetniks against Muslims during World War II. world war. The action of the novel takes place in 1991, just before the beginning of a new inter-ethnic conflict in which Bosniaks from Foča will again suffer heavily. Karahasan is alien to cheap politicization and superficial narrative effectiveness; therefore, he does not directly portray this conflict as a simple battle between Good and Evil, but through the main character Simon, a Serb of Serbian origin, a returnee from abroad, analyzes the state of spirits in a small town over which the threat of a tragic conflict looms.

The pattern of criminal prose will serve as a kind of narrative frame of the novel (a series of mysterious murders occur for which the perpetrators cannot be identified). However, the basis of the novel is actually made up of digressive parables inserted into the basic narrative line and monologue sections of the characters in which questions of importance are considered! (i) the rational principle in human life, and especially in the social organization of the community, and about the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. In this way, criminal prose acquires strong elements of philosophy and psychoanalysis, with which Karahasan demonstrates his erudition and life wisdom.

Dževad Karahasan was born in Tomislavgrad (Duvno) in 1953. He completed elementary and high school education in his hometown. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, studying comparative literature and theatrology, and received his doctorate in Zagreb, at the Faculty of Philosophy. Worked as a playwright at the National Theater in Zenica and the National Theater in Sarajevo; as an editor in the magazine "Odjek" and the magazine "Izraz", and as a professor at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, and as a lecturer at the University of Goettingen. He was a visiting professor at the universities of Salzburg and Innsbruck.