"Matija" is a book about a father and a son. It was written by the father, Drago Hedl, and the son, Matija, who committed suicide.
Matija was 17 when he went to America, he finished his last year of high school there, graduated in biochemistry at Iowa State, received his doctorate from Purdue University in West Lafayette, post-doctorate at the University of Chicago, spent 11 years at Yale, one of the ten best faculties in America, worked on discovering the cause of Crohn's disease, wrote scientific papers, published them in important journals, mentored doctoral students, ran a laboratory... He played the flute and the piano. He was 44 when he chose to disappear. And he intended to stay in America until he was 55, then return and found a small theater.
This is not some kind of lifecoach manual for those who suffer, or have already suffered, such a fate, Miljenko Jergović wrote in the afterword. This is something between a biography and a diary.
Drago Hedl divided it into 37 chapters, one for each day that passed from the time Matija left this world to the day when the urn with his ashes was lowered into the family tomb at the Osijek cemetery. Each chapter contains a memory from Matija's life and a diary entry.
There is not an iota of pathos and self-pity in the book. It is more about Mtia's life than death. There is only painful honesty in her. And despair, and facing oneself, an attempt to understand the son's motive for committing suicide, and countless questions to which there are no answers. It also includes the callous American bureaucracy. It includes Osijek, the war, and Croatia's post-war hopelessness.
The book is proof that time does not heal wounds.
Drago Hedl spent more than half a century in journalism. He has been engaged in literary work for a long time. For the book "Glavaš, chronicle of one destruction" he received the Jutarnji list award for the best nonfiction work in 2010.
His novel "Donjodravska obala" was awarded the Kočić Pen in 2014, and Zlatko Sviben made a theatrical production of the work and staged it in the Croatian National Theater in Osijek. Two seasons of the TV series "Silence" were filmed based on Hedl's crime trilogy "Election Silence", "Confessional Secret" and "Kiev Chicken", which were shown both on European television and on the HBO platform.
The book "Matija" was published by "Academic Book".
