Mladenka kostonoga

From the jury statement

“Of complex structure, Zelimir Peris’s novel ‘Mladenka kostonoga’ adopts the eighteenth-century Enlightenment convention of announcing and instructing the contents of each chapter and the poetics of the picaresque novel with the figure of the persecuted ‘witch,’ ‘seer,’ ‘healer’ Gila, a feminist icon ahead of her time, and places her at the center of a narrative universe in the historically and culturally turbulent space from Dalmatia, Lika, Istria and Herzegovina all the way to the Viennese capital. However, as a counterpoint to high art, Peris introduces a gusle-player narrator, and through him also her rejected other: folk tradition and superstition, the decasyllable and feminine gender identity that resists the patriarchal mold, the language of the street, the tavern and the threshing floor, and pre-modern oral literary forms,” states the jury in their reasoning.

“It is a novel that in the 21st century emerges as an offshoot of multiple traditions, reaching in narrative zeal and abundance to Cervantes and Rabelais, while its bucolic atmosphere inhabited by fairies draws on the pastoral. In compositional terms, one should not overlook Laurence Sterne, who already in the 18th century innovated and played with structural and graphic-visual-rhythmic elements that Mallarmé would promote at the end of the 19th century and the avant-gardes and postmodernism would further develop in the 20th. The latter’s influence is notable in Peris’s affirmation of a non-linear, hybrid, mosaic composition, as found in Calvino or his OULIPO companion Georges Perec, as well as the abundant use of documentary material,” emphasizes the Tportal jury and concludes:

“This immensely playful and only seemingly dishevelled, yet in fact carefully conceived and ambitious novel of polished sentences, which required extensive research into both facts and the dialects of the various regions through which Gila travels, we consider a unique literary work brimming with humor and irony; it revives past times to speak to us about the present, especially about women’s traumatic experience, contributing to the empowerment of women through its own textual negotiating practices and gestures of resistance.”

From the jury statement

“Mladenka kostonoga” is a novel of one epoch, the one in which we are currently living, set in a previous epoch, in the Dalmatian hinterland, Herzegovina, Lika, Krajina, the South Slavic lands in general, and in our South Slavic Vienna. The story tells of Gila, and since we are in an age that believes in witches, the story tells of the witch Gila. She is a kind of Vlach and Croatian superheroine, a rebel in a phase of emancipation, who helps people using their superstitions. Zelimir Peris was, before this novel, a lesser-known writer to the wider Croatian and South Slavic public; only very attentive and very informed readers of good and serious literature read him, but with “Mladenka kostonoga” he burst forcefully onto the main stage, thundered onto the platform as a born storyteller who skillfully and powerfully alternates narrative registers, freely crosses from one voice to another, from one time to another, from genre to genre, from gender to gender, writing as someone who is simultaneously a contemporary and a fellow countryman, a close relative of very diverse writers, ranging from Salman Rushdie to Simo Matavulj. Peris is at once a modern narrator and a gusle player. Each of the fifty-some chapters of “Mladenka kostonoga” is announced by decasyllabic couplets of the gusle player Peris, which herald events and celebrate their heroes. And the reader can never be sure how deadly serious the writer Zelimir Peris is in all this, how much he jokes at his own expense and at the expense of the epoch, but one thing is certain: this is a great, witchy, emancipatory, revolutionary novel that shields us from the fool within and from the fools around us, shields us from the evil eye, both imagined and real. Petar Kocic would have rejoiced in his grave at a book like this and a writer like this, who seems to have himself sprung from Zmijanje.”

Miljenko Jergović
29 November 2020