Fíkovník

The fig tree in the garden of a house in the Istrian village of Momjan, where Aleksandar and Jana settled after World War II, plays both a concrete and purely symbolic role in the family saga about the search for individual and national identity. Family members sit in its shade, eat its sweet fruit, and draw strength and peace from it in turbulent times. At the same time, the tree is a symbol of stability and strength that no "human" storm can uproot, as it bravely withstands the vicissitudes and upheavals of history and becomes a promise of hope.

In his sweeping narrative, Goran Vojnović constantly moves between realistic depictions of events, descriptions of people and places, and metaphorical imagery in which indomitable nature becomes a counterbalance to the fragility of a world built but also systematically destroyed by humans: "This is war. Factories have stopped, time has stopped, everything has stopped. Only Una has not stopped. Now it is clean again, as it once was. Like when we were children. Now there is no more beautiful river in the world."

The story of Jadran, his father Safet, his grandfather Aleksandar, and their wives Anja, Vesna, and Jana embodies the power of individual and unique destinies, which the author sensitively confronts with the collective fate of the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia. The theme of identity is closely linked to the theme of memory, reflected from many angles: Jadran, searching for his family's memory, understands that its loss, symbolized by the figure of his grandmother Jana, also means the loss of himself. At the same time, however, the reader senses that memory can also be treacherous and unreliable, and that it becomes a cruel prison when it stands in the way of our desire for freedom. However, this often clashes with love, because love is "beautiful but unfree, because it binds us to our loved ones." In light of these findings, the stories of Jadran and his ancestors take on further and further meanings: discovering and interpreting them is, after all, part of reading great literature.