Rastresen život

Kovač, born in 1938 in Petrovići near Bileća in a mixed Serbo-Croatian family, a Montenegrin writer and playwright (died in 2013 in Belgrade), known for novels such as “Gubilišta” (1962) and “Vrata od utrobe” (1978), here uses the collage technique: diary entries, fragments, documents and short stories to reconstruct the life of Malvina Trifković, a fictional heroine inspired by real events.

The novel follows the tragic fate of Malvina, a lesbian and Orthodox woman in love with a Catholic woman, in the context of Serbo-Croatian hatred and ethnic conflicts in Herzegovina at the end of the 19th century. Malvina is a saint and a sinner, a mystical visionary and a mad woman, faced with the taboos of homosexuality, religious prejudice and the suffering of women in a patriarchal society. Through fragmentary forms – letters, chronicles, dreams – Kovač creates a palimpsest of the past, reminiscent of medieval records, where intimate drama intertwines with historical traumas. Quote: “Life is not reduced to memoirs, but to those discarded fragments that make us human.”

Topics: identity, sexuality, ethnic intolerance and women’s emancipation; the first Yugoslav story about lesbianism, criticism of tradition and repression. The Croatian edition emphasizes linguistic adaptation, making the text the “homeland of the language” in Zagreb. Influenced postmodern prose, praised for its depth (Jergović: “The most exciting about the suffering of women”), but criticized for its fragmentary nature.