We were on holiday in Croatia and had unexpectedly run out of books to read. Browsing through the very small selection of English books in the local village I was pleasantly surprised to find that, instead of all the latest bestsellers, they had a range of contemporary Croatian books in translation, so I picked this one up.
What a disappointment. Clumsily translated, with many glaring errors, typos, inconsistencies and illogicalities, it reads like a messy first draft.
The plot bears some surface similarities to the Sciascia I read recently: a murder in a small town, investigated by an interested amateur, and an author more keen to use the crime as away to reveal the inhabitants' peculiarities and secrets than as a puzzle to be solved.
Feric himself says he wanted to write a "Mediterranean Twin Peaks", and I guess he succeeded in that he matches Lynch for nightmarish surrealism, but I found the whole thing very tiresome. A parade of freaks, sadism, cheap fatalism, empty symbolism and narrative dead ends, most of the time I neither knew nor cared what was going on. Maybe this sense of dislocation was deliberate, but for me it was neither enlightening nor entertaining.