Kristian Novak - The London Book Fair

Kristian Novak
Kristian Novak (1979) was born in Baden-Baden, Germany. He attended primary school in Sv. Martin naMuri and
grammar school in Čakovec. Graduating in Croatian and German Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in
2005, he earned his Ph.D. from Postgraduate Linguistics Studies in 2011. He holds a lectureship with the Department
of Croatian Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Rijeka and teaches also at the Department of German Studies in
Zagreb. Novak’s chief areas of research include historical sociolinguistics, multilingualism (Croatian–German language
and culture contacts) and national identity. In 2012 he published the extensive study Višejezičnost i kolektivni identiteti
iliraca (Multilingualism and Collective Identities of the Members of the Illyrian Movement).
Kristian Novak was standard member of Croatian karate national team from 1996 to 2009, winning a range of individual
and team awards at national and global karate championships.
Novak’s high school poems were included in the Antologija međimurske mlade lirike (Anthology of Young Poetry of
Međimurje, 2011)
His novel Obješeni was published in 2005.
His highly acclaimed second novel Črna mati zemla was published in 2013. The novel was shortlisted for the Kiklop prize
2013 and named the best fictional prose of the year by literary critic of Jutarnji list Jagna Pogačnik. Črna mati zemla is
currently being translated to Slovenian (by Đurđa Strsoglavec, scheduled for 2015 with the publisher Modrijan) and
Hungarian (by Antal Bognar).
CONTACT:
Kristian Novak
Sokolgradska 67
10 000 Zagreb
[email protected]
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Črna mati zemla (Dark Mother Earth)
Some things can never be buried deep enough.
(A commentary by editor Kruno Lokotar)
Due to unfortunate circumstances, hardly anybody heard of Kristian Novak’s first novel Obješeni (The Hanged). However,
a cultured person will soon be embarrassed to admit not having heard of Novak’s second novel Črna mati zemla (Dark
Mother Earth). This big and essential novel demonstrates all the talent and skill of an author who will become, if he
keeps on writing, one of the most significant contemporary Croatian writers. First drafted in 2009 during Novak’s
research stay in Berlin, the novel took four years to complete.
Črna mati zemla is a novel about the successful young writer Matija Dolenčec struggling to overcome his creative and
emotional crisis by unearthing his own story, repressed to oblivion and compensated with scores of invented stories.
A novel about his personal voyage from urban floodlight and alienation to rural darkness and closeness. The repressed
story of Dolenčec’s life is a traumatic tale of his childhood in a village in the mystic and mysterious northern Croatian
province of Međimurje, the death of his father, eight suicides, two demons, lost friends, big myths and local legends,
the historical break of 1991, daily lies, of guilt, cruelty, isolation and love. Sweeping, profound and poignant, the novel’s
intimate twilight scenes, skilful portraits, harrowing episodes of violence and paedophilia, sparkling wit and subtle
reflexions conjure up a rural panorama, a gallery of unforgettable portraits, a horror painting illuminated with candles
from dark woods and wreathed in mists from cold riverbanks, a flashback to history with its rattling tanks, football
craze, socialism and archetypal behaviours. And this is by far not everything: this novel is also a guide to keeping love
alive, an environmental memento and much more.
Three cover design versions for Črna mati zemla were created by Dunja Janković, one of the most prominent young
Croatian artists.
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Praise for Črna mati zemla
„…The text prompts a multitude of issues, such as the relationship of fiction and faction, the issue of death in trauma,
the destructiveness and creativity of memory, and many more. Most importantly, however, Novak’s text shows us
how we exist in the world and in the language, and also how literature and literary criticism emerge – because what
the novel is about is not as shocking as what the novel says about us. I must therefore say that this is one of the few
texts of contemporary Croatian literature that is literally fascinating, and stop at this.”
Kristina Špiranec, booksa.hr
„…with the series of eight suicides occurring in the novel during spring 1991, the author metaphorically announces
the bloody and dark nineties to follow. Likewise, the main character’s invention and fabrication of his past also
seems to be a metaphorical image of the politically motivated twisting of historical facts and fabrication of collective
memory that we were all subjected to in the nineties…“
„Novak is a novelist with outstanding sense for suspense, skilful management of plot, impressive atmosphere buildup and convincing psychological portrayal. However, the best quality of this novel is its complexity and multilayered
structure; the writer encompasses a wide array of topics, switches discourses, genres, emotional registers, ambiences
and dialects, always remaining amusing, witty and dynamic, and – despite sinister themes and frequent criticism –
never oppressive or tiresome.“
„…‘Črna mati zemla’ is a very pleasant surprise and a truly refreshing piece of prose, and Kristian Novak a name to
remember…“
Božidar Alajbegović, Croatian Radio
„Despite its title, “Črna mati zemla” (Black Mother Earth) is not a novel painted just in black, although it abounds in
oppressive shades, dealing with loss and paedophilia, which has appeared for the second time this year as a theme
in a Croatian novel. “Črna mati zemla” also has many bright tones and is actually, as Matija writes in his letter to Dina,
mostly a story about love.”
„Backtracking Matija’s past, Kristian Novak managed to do what only few writers accomplish (…) – such
accomplishment defining the writer as bad, mediocre or exceptional: Novak created a protagonist who imprinted
himself onto the literary map of Croatia, to the domestic literary sky, and I think that we are fully justified to call him
a hero, although he is for the most part of the novel just a young child.
There are books that cause tectonic disruptions in us (…). “Črna mati zemla” is one of such books.“
Tanja Tolić, Najboljeknjige.com
„Kristian Novak (…) is not a typical writer. A scientist and university lecturer, recognised German philologist, he was
also a successful karateist. Now, with his new novel, he entered the circle of the best Croatian narrators and novelists
(…).
(…) In his account of the early years of Matija Dolenčec, Novak recorded a yet unwritten history of the beliefs, myths,
legends, hatreds and tales of Međimurje, creating an impressive gallery of characters, united in a virtual danse
macabre.
(…) Novak’s book combines elements of crime novel, horror tale and love story, as well as social satire and chronicle.
But “Črna mati zemla” is above all a deeply moving study of a child panically looking for love.”
Denis Derk, Večernji list
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“Črna mati zemla” is a book that discovers a new, different and quite narratively competent name on the domestic literary
scene. It is a novel that contains and combines different and important layers that are relevant to the contemporary
Croatian prose, although approached and elaborated from completely different starting points (…)“
„Novak’s hero Matija must ultimately come to terms with himself and his fear that all people he loves will be dead, as
well as with his unfortunate homeland, while the reader will understand that no private horror can be bigger than the
one we try to suppress to personal or collective amnesia and into the hallways of our subconscious.“
Jagna Pogačnik, Jutarnji list
What deserves praise is Novak’s virtuosity in language. (…) Entering the world of the stigmatised ones, the reader will
be able to see all the pathology of small communities at play, which Novak depicts with meticulous precision.
Another quality of the novel is the love story between the grown up Matija Dolenčec and Dina Gajski, which takes up
the first third of the narrative. Suggestively written, with many strikingly precise observations and brilliantly paced,
this (sad?!) love story serving as a trigger for the novel’s main plot is probably the best text dedicated to one of the
major literary themes – the relationship between lovers – in regional prose over the recent years. Skilfully avoiding
clichés, probing the intimate just to the borderline of good taste and kitsch, Novak managed to find several „objective
correlatives“ to express the profundity of this relationship (…)
Vladimir Arsenić, e-novine
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Excerpts from Dark Mother Earth
1.
Forgotten things started to appear, one by one, in premonitions and dreams. At first, he thought they were coming from
the present, not the past, and belonged not to him but to someone else. It started with nightmares. Since he believed
that the quantity of happiness and unhappiness in his life had to be in balance, he considered it a down payment for
the following day with Dina. He would wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented he would stand up in bed and
stare into the darkness, nervously looking for the lamp switch and trying to focus on an actual object to make sure that
it was not a phantom. He did not understand his bad dreams even though he suspected them to have consistency, a
kind of twisted logic in a world of hidden truth. Dina would not sleep; she too would wake up because she wanted to be
part of that something he did not know how to talk about. She would clench by him in the dark, the way small animals
cling to each other in cold nights, not because they can avoid danger by being close to each other, but because they
want to be together no matter what and Matija was no longer afraid to fall asleep. From time to time he dreamed of
standing by the river looking at an unknown boy with a big bushy head standing in the water up to his waist. The boy
would just look at him for a while. Then he would open his mouth with a grimace of a man frantically yelling. No voice
came out of that mouth, just dark velvet blood streaming down his chin, over his chest and belly, into the murky river.
Sometimes, still delirious, he would murmur „Here, here they are, they found me“. Dina felt there was another side to
this man who to her seemed infinitely cheerful and who made his and her life easy. Some dark side, something one was
better off keeping quiet about. She would be reminded of it by his unexpected reactions, occasional outbursts of anger
he later unsuccessfully disguised with humour, and even more so by moments when he seemed to have withdrawn
from the world and would stare mesmerised into his own darkness.
2.
Matija looked at the drawings, and after the first numbness, by the second he became more and more overwhelmed
by horror. Those were children displays of brutal scenes of mutilation, abuse, probably death and definitely physical
suffering and pain. On one drawing one could clearly see a child kneeling or crouched in the centre, with huge black
eyes, holding one hand in his mouth out of which drops of red blood were pouring, while in the other hand he held
what looked like a bundle, also red. Matija thought it was a heart. Five or six human figures were standing around the
child their heads turned away from him. Or without eyes, it was impossible to discern. They were drawn with crayons,
mainly in black and red. The movements were brisk; the paper surface looked almost as carved so were the crayons
tightly squeezed. The circles were not full; the sky was generally covered in black and red stripes. On either of the
drawings the sun was nowhere to be seen.
(…)
– You used to leave these drawings and messages on dad’s grave when you were a kid – whispered his sister while he
looked numbly. – I would pick them up after you had left them because I was afraid of what people in the village would
think of you. I did not want them to be afraid of you, although you seemed very strange both to mom and to me after
dad passed away. Strange kid, that’s it. Well fuck, you did not look strange to me, I was afraid of you and afraid for you.
You were, what, six years old, and out of the blue you would ask me or mom whether we would have loved you had
we known you did something truly horrible. Or you would ask me quietly, so mom could not hear you, whether I would
go and dig out graves with you. A six-year old child. You were often talking to yourself. I once came into your room and
you were standing in the middle of the room staring at the darkest corner of the ceiling, saying barely understandable
words in a half strange language. I remember hearing you say some words … undal, brokesto, safuntteo… and then you
would nod and laugh. When you realised I was looking at you, you turned to the ceiling and said to this someone that
I was you sister and that „they better leave me alone“. Then even sicker things started happening. You stopped eating,
you were disgusted by everything, you were afraid of staying home alone, you were afraid of going out in the yard and
you would not tell us what you were so scared of. You would wet your bed and you once wet your pants in school too.
I woke up once in the middle of the night because I realised there was someone in my room and saw it was you. You
were standing in your pyjamas by my bed, shivering from the cold, crying and whispering „they are here, they found
me“. You would feel better for a couple of days and then all of a sudden mom would find bruises and scratches on your
back and ribs as if someone had beaten you, but you would not tell who. You would throw stones at the neighbours,
spit at by-passers, burn and hide things. And you would always swear very convincingly that you did not do it. That you
do not know who did it but that it was not you. I once saw you throw stones at the cherry tree in our backyard and
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hit it with feet and hands until you had open wounds on your skin. I asked you what the fuck was wrong with you and
finally you said you were angry because mom had thrown some wooden box in the trash and that you would rather hit
the tree because you were afraid of doing something to mom. You used to run away from home, you do not remember
that either, right? They found you by the Mura River in the middle of winter almost frozen to death. You were wearing
pyjamas and a jacket. Then another time you ran into the woods. That was when they amputated your fingers. Surely
you remember that? When you were in the hospital for two weeks and got pneumonia?
Matija was staring at her.
– You just blocked it out, that’s all. And we were scared shitless for you. It already looked as if social services would take
you away because people started talking. Then you were a little bit better, for a couple of years. And then … when the
suicides started, one after the other, do you remember that? Fuck … you were always close to someone who would
then commit suicide. You go now and explain to people in the village that it was just a coincidence.
3.
I asked Zvonko, who was still standing as a shadow, leaning against the locker room, if we could go to his place, watch
television, cowboys and Indians, watch empty beer cans, anything, just to keep me from thinking about Franco. He
was kind of nervous and weak, he did not say a word on the way home and at home he drank glass after glass of water,
constantly getting out of the armchair and coming back. I took off my sneakers and curled up on the sofa. It seems that
at some point I dozed off, although it was still day, because I was completely calmed down and had a blank image in
front of my eyes which in my reality was not often the case. The blank image was disrupted by a loud clump from the
room next door; this was the sound evoking a huge fleshy bug, an insect the size of a horse banging against the wall
of the room lamp. I sat up on the sofa. As if something inside of me had already clearly seen the scene I was yet to
witness. The fear of what I would see was lesser than the fear of remaining forever petrified on that sofa so I got up
on my feet and went into the hallway. Zvonko was hanging from a rope tied to the attic staircase. At first I did not see
the rope as it was dark in the house, the rope was thin and it looked as if Zvonko was hovering. As if he still had the
strength to pretend he was composed and decent, he silently flexed and jerked his hands on the noose. It somehow
seemed he had changed his mind when he saw me. As if he realised that the only thing that would outlive him was
the scene of his helplessness recorded in me. I ran to him trying to lift him by the legs. He was heavy and wildly waving
his legs. I managed to grab both his legs a few times but every time he would kick throwing me a few steps back. No
one uttered a sound, nor the two of us neither all of Zdravko’s memories that were watching this bizarre picture. “Not
again”, I thought. I was now definitely becoming a monster, even to those who defended me.
I would feel dizzy whenever I found myself in a very important situation. May be because those were the moments I
had imagined a hundred times before, creating an imaginary picture of them, and when they became reality I had to
switch in my head from a timeless construct to the present. His feet were clenching, the thumb aiming upwards and
the other fingers downwards. I saw that because on one foot he was wearing a sock and a slipper while the other one
was bare. I looked up and saw that his face was red and his tongue blue. His eyes were big. He was beautiful in some
strange way.
When I was sure it was all over, I managed to lift him up for a brief moment, but he jerked his back one last time and
kicked me back. Since I did not want to let him go, I lost footing on the ground and hang on to his leg. There was a crispy
shot somewhere above me and it seemed to me that I had felt it also under my hands. It reminded me of grandma
tearing and nibbling on a boiled chicken leg from the soup. His body was now completely still and I knew he was gone.
My head was leaning against his groin and I felt moisture on my face. He took a leak, I thought. I moved a few steps back
and sat in the corner never taking my eyes off him. He was swaying back and forth and flinched one more time although
his face was already dead and still. He did not stick his tongue out and his eyes were not bulbous, at least not more than
usually. He was completely serene and I was imagining that he could now see all those from the village who had left us
these days and that he may even see my father. They were now all together and could laugh at what had happened.
I do not know how much time passed before they found me, I just saw that it was already dusk. I was lucky because no
one ever came to Zvonko’s house. That day precisely Pišta came to his house to borrow an extension cord for the light
above the kettle. He came in and right at the door saw me sitting, my back against the wall and staring at the body with
a petrified smile.
Translation by: Aida Njunjić and Sanja Novak
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