Midsummer. A young woman travels on a train from Paris to Croatia, where the family waits on Grandmother‘s Island, as every summer. She thinks of the man with whom she had a relationship for a year that never really could start: the man is a married man. A painter, who no longer paints. The dead grandfather joins her in the moving train. He also was a painter, also had stopped painting. The two absent-present men become her companions on a journey into the past and the memory, that constitutes a family narrative. The emigration of her parents shortly before the war in Croatia has triggered a myriad of movements. Break open, break off, it seems to be a family tendency, that repeats itself, that is questioned. In this field of tension of these geographical and linguistic shifts, in these spaces occupied by history, Ivna Žic tells in her debut novel of a beginning search, scanning now and then at the same time.
Awards
Nominated for the Austrian Book Prize 2019 Nominated for the Swiss Book Prize 2019 Nominated for the Bremer Literature Prize 2019Sample translation
English sample available
French sample available
Ivna Žic, born in 1986 in Zagreb, grew up in Zurich, studied Applied Theater Studies, Acting Direction and Scenic Writing in Gießen, Hamburg and Graz. Žic lives in Zurich and Vienna. Most recently published by Matthes & Seitz: Wahrscheinliche Herkünfte.
By the same author(s)
"In a flowing language, suggestive and with a great sense of rhythm. Ivna Žic succeeds in creating a strong atmosphere without making a big fuss, subtle and poetic in places. A voice to be discovered." - Anja Dürrmeier, BR
"It is amazing how Ivna Žic was able to condense the experiences of a child of the diaspora, with all its losses and all its beauty, so intensely on only 164 narrow pages. Others need 400 pages for that." - Margarete Affenzeller, Der Standard
