The Modern Novel

Home » Serbia » Dragan Velikić » Islednik The Investigator)

Dragan Velikić : Islednik The Investigator)

This is a very much a (semi-)-autobiographical novel, though while it obviously focuses on the story of our author/ narrator, the shadow of his mother very much hangs over this novel as she has a great influence on him and on all of this story which of course goes back to before his birth.

By the time he gets round to telling the story, his mother has been dead for a while. She had passed her final years in a care home (I’d rather kill myself than live in a home,” she always said. and Cemeteries are much nicer places. The dead are closer and more alive in their finality.) The only redeeming feature for her is that there is a bridge over a river and used to be the boundary between Yugoslavia and Italy.

Mother loved stories but not made-up stories. Her son followed her in his view.I feel completely lost in the world of fantasy. Fairy tales have always made me uneasy. Any event that is without a rational explanation drives me crazy. She liked true stories, stories of things that actually happened and she remembers every incident of these stories which she will continue to repeat. Many of them she writes down and indeed one of the worst things that happened to her was when her notebooks were stolen and she never recovered them. She complained to her son when he was writing a novel, saying that he should not write fiction but should write the truth.

Our narrator jumps backwards and forwards in time and, of course, he was confronted as the other character,s with various wars. While we get glimpses of World War I and its impact on the region, a the main focus is on World War II and of course the Balkan Wars after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Serbia gambled away all the historical points it had scored in two centuries of fighting for its independence. For the first time, it was not on the right side.

He was born in Pula so a lot of the action takes place in there and as an older man he goes back to see what it is like. However, we see it before when his mother goes there shortly after World War II, on business, and find the town almost deserted. She only meets the narrator’s father later.

As mentioned, the focus is, to a great extent on the narrator’s mother. She remembers a huge amount of detail not only about the life of her family and herself but also about the story of a whole host of other people she has met, places she has visited, particularly hotels, and a whole load of other details. For her one of the worst things to happen was when her detailed notebooks of all the hotel she had visited and other details of her life was stolen from a train carriage. She keeps mentioning this issue much later.

While she is very important, there to this story is another important woman in his life and she is Lizeta. Lizeta was a neighbour in Pula who had been very helpful and friendly to the family when they first arrived. Our narrator becomes quite close to her and learns her story. She had come from Salonica, which we now call Thessaloniki, and we learn a lot about that town. In accordance with the theme of this novel we learn in particular that the town has changed dramatically since she lived there. Dragan visits the town and various places she had mentioned not only no longer seem to exist, but no one seems to have heard of them. This, of course, reinforces one of the main themes of this novel, how a whole load has been lost in the region, primarily because of war. Lizeta is one of those people who, without moving, keeps changing country. However, she does move around and again finds herself in different countries even though staying in the same place.

We know that the author left the region during the Balkan Wars and we follow him as he lives elsewhere, primarily in Budapest. We also learn many of the Serbians had to flee from Pula and their houses were essentially stolen by the refugees.

Towards the end of the book, he does go back more than once the first time for a book fair. He comments This is no longer the city where I was born. In the meantime – which means a whole lifetime – it has turned into a place of money launderers, with low brows and murky eyes, hired guns, fake donors, forgers of all kinds, those who buy building permits, birth certificates, marriage licenses, citizenship papers, diplomas and prayer breakfasts.. Lizeta and others feel the same.

Various famous and semi -Infamous people passed through Pula. Going back in time it appears that Dante was there Tito paid a visit.Dragan was not a supporter of Tito and his politics and indeed is highly critical of him. He also focusses on the semi-famous Hiterot/Hütterot family (we later learn that he wrote a novel about them. His family and Lizeta in particular were close to them. He makes much of the fact that they were brutally murdered by Tito’s thugs.

What makes this book so well worth reading apart, obviously from the fact that Velikić is a superb writer despite his mother’s criticism, is the way we read fascinating stories about a host of characters, primarily though certainly not only the author, his parents and Lizeta, but also both excellent stories about the interchanges between these families and how they cope with the ever-changing political situation in the region as well as a picture of how the region dramatically changed, with both world wars, the Balkan Wars and, for Lizeta, the aftermath of World War I which saw the Greek’s expelled from Anatolia and the Turks going back to Turkey. His mother may say that he should focus only on what actually happened. While she may have a point seeing it from the point of view of a novelist makes it that much more interesting for the reader.

Publishing history

First published in 2015 by Laguna
First English publication in 2025by Istros
Translated by Christina PribiCheviCh-Zorić