Roman A bird flies along a sharp knife., Tanje Stupar Trifunović, shows us the old truth that the spiritual climate of a time is not so much hidden in official reports and piles of state archives as in the destinies of small, ordinary people, which someone knows how to describe.
In the background of everything is the war in Croatia in 1991-1995, and the fate of a Serbian village, one would say, in the north of Dalmatia, from which you can see the sea from afar and you can reach it on foot on dusty country roads, between pines, brambles, spruces and weeds, and return the same day, before dark.
Everything is clear
But, the author nowhere gives any official geographic, ethnic or historical designation because everything is clear in that coordinate system of time and space in which the village lives between two armies, which also have no names, as well as the village itself, and neither their country "which was at war and which changed its mind about whether it was their country or not".
The glossary is in the eyes of the child, and he sees people, nature, animals, plants, the sea in the distance, everything that he knows the names of, and he doesn't even bother with the name of the warring parties or the name of the war, because there is a whole lot of confusion even among the elders, who supposedly know what is happening. There are also some two armies, which chase each other around the village, from which ours is a kind, because the narrator's father also died in it, after four years of war and in the face of the final imminent danger to the village, "she was the first to escape from the village". But the army is also made up of concrete people, who when they enter the village and houses, in which "the smells were still trapped, the food on the table, the traces of other people who seemed to have left for a short time", enter "carefully, they were someone's..." The children are honest, they don't lie, and honesty and persuasiveness is the main virtue of the novel, which talks about people and not about the official versions of events that often seem tasteless, false and clumsy compared to real images.
Vanja
The main character and narrator is the girl Vanja, who, as she explains by herself describing the birthday cake, turns fourteen years old in the last year of the war, and she has parents, a younger brother, grandmother and grandfather, and before the war she lived in a city with a beautiful and large beach on the sea.
Her literary process is seemingly simple, narrative, but she does not describe the war, but as if she were painting twenty pictures that she sees and feels with her eyes and senses, and only at the end she puts them in a chronologically clear order.
With a brush or a pencil, he starts from the eyes and connects them with the profile of the surrounding hills in the sky and paints the same or similar, sometimes he starts from a country road where sheep are bleating and the handle of a metal bucket in his hand can be heard creaking, and sometimes he paints the sky first and emphasizes that the army is somewhere right below him, but she almost never sees it live. She doesn't even describe the village, but for family reasons she later returns to it, in fact she returns to the family house and "walking through the village is like walking back in time, the holes of the past are constantly opening and it's easy to fall into".
Milena
Among the numerous heroes of this novel, a special place is occupied by the girl Milena, three years older than Vanja, who goes to the same school and looks after sheep, a lonely orphan who only wants to belong to someone.
She lives with her grandmother, who threw her bed out of the room into the hallway when a man came to the house whom she had to call grandfather from then on, and who, fortunately, will not raise her because he is not capable of raising himself. Milena does no harm to anyone. They do harm to her, but she thinks that she is happy even then, because even for that little time "it belongs to someone". Sad. The whole story about her leaves a pain in the throat... Everyone rejects her, and she begs for company, continues running along the country road in the dust, alone, and she is beautiful and superior to everyone who ignores her, like that signature of "abbot Pafnuti with his own hand" in Dostoyevsky, before whose talented hand even a certain general Jepanchin takes his breath away.
She is beautiful, as is her mother, whom she will only meet briefly at her grandmother's funeral, and she has a warm soul, but she is not recognized in the village but condemned before the court because she is a "whore bastard". The only respect she gets is from Vanja, even though in childhood they argued about the priority in leading children's games, from Vanja who thinks about her and in the end is the only one who asks about her, even when the adults persistently divert the topic and pretend they didn't even hear who was mentioned.
And the whole village, as a being, has a problem with belonging. And the army, which protects him, and in the end is the first to leave him and only helps in directing the refugees to "another country that is not ours but will become one (...) where our new life will begin".
Strange simplicity
Everything seemed to be ignoring the truth, because it was easier that way, and blindly believing in the mentioned official reports, even if it led to a tragedy, in which only the children never believed. Vanja does not mention them anywhere.
Everything here is done masterfully, even the light, like on a good painting or film canvas that emits powerful images, rich frames, and strong feelings during the entire story.
In short, a real novel has appeared in literature, a work of art with great splendor and strange simplicity has been banned, before us who have almost forgotten what it is, in a society that skimps on truthfulness. In a world and time of twisted values and concepts, in the inflation of prizes as in a well-known satire, this novel, like its seemingly secondary heroine Milena, offers simplicity, beauty and sincere artistic expression.
Like any good work, this novel opens up new ways to answer questions about which we have so far pretended not to be able to speak, because it was easier for us.
Tanja Stupar Trifunović is the publisher of the novel A bird flies along a sharp knife., is "Laguna".
