Glasovi u vetru by Grozdana Olujić

Abstract

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^^^^^H^^^^^^^H streets, of the garbage collector who discovered his body. Wliite Faces represents a turn ing point inKhoury's work. At the beginning of the Lebanese civil war, Khoury actively participated in the fighting.He told Sonja Mejcher: "I used towrite theopposite ofwhat I was livingbut Iused toreallybelieve in the ideology of politics and ... to think that literature was something else. . . . My criticism became more explicit in al-Wujuli al-bayda . . . and I was considered to be against the revolution. ... It was then that I discovered that my work as an intellectual and as a writer is, first, important and, second, meaningless, cannot be done, if I am not critical of the situation I am living in." The criticism is open and pain ful. White Masks examines not only thedeath ofKhalil Ahmed Jaberbut also the violence swirling around him and the role individuals play in allowing atrocities to happen. But the book doesn't point fingers, or end with the discovery of who committed this ugly crime. It ends, instead, with a "provisional epi logue." Here, the narrator leads us tobelieve he will reveal the fruitsof his investigation, but then veers off into several new stones. The narra torasks: "Is the identificationof the murderer the problem? Would it help us understand themotives for the crime?" White Faces is a more straight forward work than Khoury's "won derful, dreadful" recent novels, Gate of the Sun (see WUT, January 2006, 12-16) and Y alo. It is ultimate ly not as mature and layered as theseworks, but it is a compelling, thoughtful read. M. LynxQualey Cairo, Egypt 4~a I - - yk Grozdana Olujic. Glasovi u vetru. Bel grade. Srpska knjizevna zadruga. 2010. 302 pages, isbn978-86-83967-22-3 Grozdana Olujic has been active on the Serbian literary scene for a long time. She writes novels, short stories, books for children, especially fairy tales, for which she has received many awards at home and abroad. Her best-known novels are Izlet u nebo (An excursion to the sky), Gla samza Ijubav (Ivote forlove),Ne budi zaspale pse (Let the sleeping dogs lie), and Divi je seme (Wild seed). Her books and stories have been trans lated into many languages. For her recently published novel, Glasovi u vetru (Voices in the wind), she received the prestigious NIN award forthebest novel of the year. It is a chronicle of a Serbian family in the Banat region, and of Aracki, fighting for survival in this stormy part of the Balkans. Olujic presents the fate of the entire Serbi an nation for ages. The protagonist, Danilo Aracki, is the last scion of the richest and most powerful fam ily in the town of Karanovo before World War II.With theCommunist takeover, the family lost everything, and its members perished in the war or afterward, whereas Danilo was forced to flee from one place to another, including some European countries and America. As a psychiatric doctor, Danilo was preoccupied with the phenom enon of migration. He was himself forced to emigrate after a false accu sation of raping four patients. He did not defend himself because he could not believe that anybody of sane 6 World Literature Today mind would believe it.Olujic does not accuse the Communist regime forsuchwrongs, but therearemany allusions to injustices, including the one done to Danilo. However, hav ingfoundhimself ina foreign world, he cannot accept fully thatworld because he immeasurably loves his fatherlandand cannot see himself as a traitor. In America, where as a psy chiatrist he studies the "illness of forgetting," Danilo still searches for his brother Peter,who people think had perished in the infamous con centration camp Goli otok (Deserted island). Among the Indians, he finds a boy by the name of Small Cloud, whose red hair resembles that of Danilo and Peter. How can there be a boy with red hair among Indi ans? This reawakens Danilo's hope thatPeter is still alive somewhere, perhaps inAmerica, which affirms the author's idea that theworld is open to everyone, even toSerbs, the eternalmigrants. In the end, Danilo believes thatone day he will return tohis fatherlandand rebuild therich house of theArackis. Glasovi u vetru...