The Return of Philip Latinowicz (1932)

Soy incapaz de acabarlo y lo suelto. ( )

Forty-year-old Philip Latinowicz, a painter and art critic, finding himself dispirited and void of inspiration, returns to the home he hasn't seen in 23 years. His memories of his past there are troubled. His mother, always cold and distant, refused to tell Philip who his father was. Yet when he returned home after a night of carousing, she condemned his immorality and refused to open the door to him, sending him out into the world alone while still a teenager.

The village of Kostanjevec to which he returns is in eastern Croatia. It is in a state of decay following the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Philip is at times dismayed by the squalor and ignorance of the common people, as well as by the haughty irrelevance of aristocrats living on memories of lost grandeur. At other times he is invigorated by the simple pleasures of rural life and the beauties of nature.

Ultimately Philip's solitary reverie is replaced by a tempestuous daily relationship with a circle of troubled people like himself, at the center of which is Xenia, a femme fatale who seems to keep around her the shattered remnants of the men she has ruined like the drained carcasses of flies in a spider's web.

"Xenia, who was then by everybody called Babocka, was in her twenty-seventh year. She had the sleek long head of a Borzoi on a fragile, slender body. Fair-haired with deep shining eyes, she used her delicate, sharply-cut lips shrewdly and sensitively: from those pale, moist lips of hers flagrant and poisonous lies flowed like sheer poetry. Her body, a vessel of deep and obscure passions, was hermaphrodite, yet appeared the pure body of a girl on the threshold of her first spring. She blossomed like a cankered flower; her perfumes of wet, decaying hay, her opium-sprinkled cigarettes, and her broken contralto voice clouded in thick smoke, floated round the heads of the first and second generations of our newly established gentry like some mysterious incense."

Much of the novel consists of dialog in which one of Xenia's former lovers challenges Philip's romantic view of the world and the very nature and purpose of his art. As a novel of ideas coming out of a society in decay and disillusionment, this is not a cheerful or optimistic book. The questions it raises, however, about art, morality, and civilization in general are still relevant. ( )

This jolly romp through early-1930s Mitteleuropa starts with a mother rejecting her son, and ends in multiple suicide and murder. In between we explore the hollowness of art, politics and religion; of bourgeois, industrial and agricultural society; of nation, homeland and family, and of pretty much everything else.

The bleak tone isn't surprising, given the place and time (it's perhaps more surprising when we remember that Miroslav Krleža went on to become a major establishment figure and live to a ripe old age). And this isn't one of those bleak books where you feel entitled to give up and put it aside for "something more cheerful". There's an enormous vibrancy and humanity in the text, a vast curiosity about the world, even when it's at its most negative. You go on reading it for much the same reason that you go on reading Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Strawmen who are put into the book to stand for generalised ideas like "decayed aristocrat" or "jaded ex-revolutionary" always seem to turn themselves, almost against the author's will, into complex individuals. Romantic it isn't, but you do get the feeling that Krleža doesn't entirely share the nihilistic world-view he's projecting.

I read the book in German translation (by Klaus-Detlef Olof) on the recommendation of another LT member: I'm sure it must have been a difficult book to translate. Olof seems to have done a very good job at making his translation readable and unintrusive. Of course, I can't judge how well he has reproduced the original. In a book which is partly about the relation of the former, German-speaking, imperial power to its provinces, there must certainly have been some levels of meaning that were smoothed out in such a translation, just as there would be if you were reading a book translated into English from Urdu. ( )