Karota returns to Zadar: Tusevljakovic four months after the NIN prize

The third printing of Darko Tusevljakovic’s Karota, which Laguna put on sale this Monday, has a new cover, no small thing for a publisher. The first printing, out in February of last year, had a typical Laguna modern cover with an abstract geometric composition. The second and third, after the January NIN prize, carry on the cover a detail from a photograph of the Zadar coast in the late afternoon, with the outline of a child’s figure looking out to sea. That shift is not just a graphic decision but a signal of what the publisher now thinks the book is: no longer a Belgrade intellectual novel but a story set in Zadar, which through that address says something about the 1990s across the entire region.

Karota is the fifth novel by Darko Tusevljakovic, who in 2023 received the Andric Prize for the short-story collection Hangar for Dreams, as well as the European Union Prize for Literature. The NIN prize was awarded to him on 19 January at a ceremony at the Kolarac Endowment by a jury chaired by Aleksandar Jerkov, with members Adrijana Marcetic, Jelena Mladenovic, Vladimir Gvozden and Mladen Veskovic, with five other novels on the shortlist, including Laura Barna’s Frau Beta (HERAedu), Vladimir Vujovic’s Conversations with the Witch (Sumatra), Milan Tripkovic’s The Immortal Follies of Mrs Kubat (Akademska knjiga) and Milos Perisic’s The Abbey of St Bartholomew (No Rules Publishing). Tusevljakovic’s win was not a surprise; critics had since autumn highlighted the novel’s complex narrative structure and its approach to the themes of trauma and responsibility, work that places it among the most serious novels about the 1990s Serbian literature has produced over the past decade.

What happens to a novel in its first four months

The Serbian NIN prize record over the past decade shows that an awarded novel in its first three months goes through two to three printings, enters the bestseller charts, gives a number of interviews to the weeklies, and after six months most often sinks back into the publisher’s catalogue, awaiting a possible festival afterlife on book fairs. Karota so far holds above that trend. The first printing, 264 pages in Laguna’s standard 13 by 20 cm paperback format, sold out in February, the second printing in March, now there is a third, and meanwhile, according to the publisher, the novel is in various stages of translation into seven European languages.

The novel is set in Zadar in the 1990s, in the days leading up to the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars. At its centre is a group of five thirteen-year-old boys who live in the same neighbourhood and spend the summer before the dark line of the storm front cuts across their horizon. Davor, the central character, returns many years later with his Belgrade girlfriend Nina to Zadar to confront the suppressed memories of his old friends and to discover uncomfortable truths about himself and others. Tusevljakovic builds a narrative that moves between the juvenile perspective from the 1990s and the adult perspective from the present, creating a double optic in which the same events are seen within different moral frames.

Tusevljakovic’s prose is formally tightly controlled, with sentences that do not unfold into long baroque constructions but stay in a dry register. That is a decision recalling the way Filip David built the narrative voice in The House of Memory and Oblivion, but Tusevljakovic goes a step further by using the technique of alternating perspectives, so that the same event seen from different angles carries different moral weights. Since no version is confirmed as objectively true, the reader is forced to construct narrative meaning independently, a kind of readerly work not often required in the contemporary Serbian novel, but when required, as in the late novels of Vidosav Stevanovic or in Igor Marojevic’s The Pekic Case, it produces exceptional results.

What in Karota is of lasting value and what is only the consequence of the current climate will be clear only in a year or two. Already it is visible that Tusevljakovic has introduced into Serbian literature a kind of Zadar 1990s geography that in post-Yugoslav prose to date had not been treated with this kind of attention. The novel works simultaneously with friendship, war and forgiveness, not as abstract categories but as concrete questions that return to one person thirty years later and demand that something be done with them. The NIN jury this time did not take a risk, but it did not choose the easier option either. Karota can be recommended to those who look in the contemporary novel for a fully realised authorial world, not to those looking for easy genre satisfactions.