Towards the end of Hotel Tito, the young hero listens to the song Like a Rolling Stone. Croatia’s war of independence is coming to an end, and we find the girl, already in high school, a long way from the girl who saw the tragedy begin in 1991, when she was only 9 years old. A time when there was no home and the home address was unknown. There was a period of aimless living in early adolescence. With a nod to Bob Dylan’s song, Ivana Bodrožić (Vukovar, 1982) continues her passion for a novel full of thin gaps and blind corners; this novel aims to find a reader willing to take on all the oddities that emerge from a girl’s gaze. She suffered a lot of persecution.
The Croatian writer has the skill to handle this tragedy to tell the story of a life shaped between genocide and oppression. But it also shows temporary happiness, love, and all that is required to move forward in the midst of hostilities, even individual suffering coexisting with the collective suffering of the entire population. Displaced. Refugees. Most of the book is there: Tito Hotel. Because from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980, everything was Tito or Josip Broz, president of the Yugoslav State of Croatia; In the words of Marc Casals, the figure of Marshal Tito continues to resurface even today, both in political discussions and in the memories of residents.
This is a novel written in an autobiographical style. Published in Croatia in 2010, Menoscuarto offers the first translation directly from Croatian into Spanish, introducing us to this plot in which personal discovery is clearly manifested in an impossible context, with accurate reflections on memories that must be shown. incomplete and messy.
Scenes where the protagonist becomes a member of the municipal library, discovers reading and the parallel world he can move into, stand out: “He reads up to three books a week. “I did this in the park, in the bathroom, on the balcony, at recess.” The days he spent in other people’s homes were like the times he spent with an Italian family. Other childhoods and strange ways of exploring friendship he found once settled in the hotel, as in this paragraph, which perfectly reveals the author’s style regarding the everyday and childish events that occur in the middle of the war: « They were my first friends. . Biljana and Ivan. Biljana’s family was separated. His father was on the beach, where he stayed with his mother, who forever protected him from everyone and everything after they both survived the prison camp. It seems to me that precisely because of this exaggerated protection she had become very thin, fragile and transparent. He seemed invisible, but at least everyone knew him. I’m glad he wanted to be my friend. Then I forgot about it. Since 1991, bureaucracy and letters demanding housing that come and go and never come: «Today, I ask you once again to help us solve our housing problem. My sister has just started secondary school and went straight to high school thanks to her outstanding previous results, but she has to live alone in a school dormitory, away from her mother. “I’m a university student, but I don’t have the conditions to study because we all live in a small room of nine square meters.” And most of all, a family: a brother and a mother who are grieving the disappearance of their father at the beginning of the war, fighting with Croatian forces. Different examples to highlight the survival of a girl who explains everything with surprise but also naturally. Who falls in love, who gets disappointed. Problems that remain current with new wars. In this novel, which is not just a novel against war, humanity overflows on every page.
Bodrožić is the author of the poetry collection First Step Into Darkness (2005) and the detective novel Rupa (2016), for which he won the Balkan Noir Award. He was deemed worthy of international awards such as the Prix Ulysse for his Croatian best-selling book Hotel Tito. Maybe today, back home in Zagreb, Like a Rolling Stone might sound different.