Damir Karakaš found himself in the final of one of the most famous Croatian awards for the novel of the year - "T portal" - with his novel Sunshade, which was recently published in Serbia, in the "Magic Book" edition. Last week, Karakas was in Belgrade and Novi Sad, where he participated in discussions about his book. The novel tells about a mythical, non-linear journey of a grandfather and grandson through the forest, and among other questions, it opens up the dilemma of time and meaning. Almost all of Karakash's works were published in our country.
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"WEATHER" Your new novel Sunshade is a story about the journey of a grandfather and grandson, ali, as it seems, and the search for the devil. Who is the devil and what are they really after?
DAMIR KARAKAS: Sunčanik was first of all built precisely as a journey, a journey towards somewhere, because the further we move away from our place, the closer we inexorably get to ourselves. However, I was more interested in a kind of raster that collects experiences from multiple angles than a linear search in the narrative whole. It was important for me to try to discover first of all some metaphysical and poetic secrets and that, at the end of the day, sometimes on their way I also enter the spheres of philosophy, because the old man in the novel is a kind of philosopher, there is no other way to answer the boy's apparently simple questions, and philosophy is only worth as much as it tells us that writing is the great reason for existence and, as Mallarmé says, that the book is the greatest value, it is the base, everything starts from it and if there is no book, there will be no world. While I was writing Sunčanik, I drank a lot of red wine and listened to Gustav Mahler. I was told by a man who understands classical music, he also has a friend who is a top conductor in Vienna, "don't do that, it's a combination that will surely destroy you", but I didn't care; obviously, what works for other people, doesn't really work for us Ličans.
What is a sunbather?? Is it more of an homage to Kish? Sandstone or Bernhard's walkers?
A sundial is a sundial, in my Brinje - where at one time, to brag, the Emperor Octavian came when he crushed the Japodes, there is a sundial from 1801 on the stone bridge, and for us children, shepherds, the sun served as a landmark in time, because no one had a watch, so we aligned ourselves with the sun. The human body can also be a sunbather, albeit unreliable, just as everything in this world is unreliable, except death. And the novel is not only a tribute to Kiš, but also to all the writers who formed me, for example Bulatović, Crnjanski, Kovač. I build my world in Sunčanik from nature and Lika, which as a topos is an important formative framework of my work and identity. The characters go through the forest and search for their meaning and their redemption, or perhaps each for their own devil. If by any chance the novel is the wisdom of uncertainty, then in Sunčanik I try to approach the world as one big puzzle, to ask questions, because when you do that, you are already making progress. For example, is the need for redemption a more important driver than the search for the devil itself. And can the symbolic arrest of the devil in this novel be read as an imaginary utopian epilogue of the quest as well as its cancellation, as if evil returns from myth to man.
There are also symbols in the book that refer to other artists. Why are they important to you??
I imagined the novel in a way that I sometimes look through a kaleidoscope, that in it the frame itself should be extremely rich and bursting with visual stimuli, and they are in the smallest details. Those visual inputs open up a series of implications and semantic codes. By consuming, for example, the recently deceased great film Bela Tarra, the focus can remain on the same for a long time and in this way allow the process of a layered, internal, perceptive interpretation, while I tried to provoke such an interpretation in this novel ostensibly, repeatedly referring to some new seemingly small thing. There are a lot of symbols and references: Battleship Potemkin, Tarkovsky, Lynch, Bulgakov, Mahler's music, Japanese jazz of the seventies. I must also mention two more things: imagination and friendship; the boy and the grandfather walk through the forest, because in the Divine Comedy all those stories about hell and heaven are chronicles of Dante's and Virgil's friendship.
The non-linear understanding of time is also interesting. What a time you are presenting us?
Time is a character in the novel, it is a being, because time inexorably builds and destroys man. We could say that time is the very essence of man, according to Plato, time is a moving image of eternity. Time has always been a great mystery to me, I've always been afraid of it, starting with those shadows on the ceiling that move as the sun moves. So I have often thought if it is actually just one line that goes to some infinity or if time, matter and spaces of movement are given in just one whole, the opposite of that linear time. The title Sunčanik itself suggests that the sun and time are important landmarks in the novel and that this is my struggle with time through literature. Grandfather literally measures reality against the sun, but this motif of the sun gradually turns into a threat, the sun becomes apocalyptic at one point, until a violent storm restores the balance, so Sunčanik can also be read as a metaphor for the border between chaos and order.
Although the novel seems realistic, he is also phantasmagoric. It even seems that there is no border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Is Lika, soaked with corpses, piety?
Dreams are important to me. Let my novels be like Kafka's, precisely describing dreams. In the novel, I try to show that there is no significant difference between dreams and reality. Homer says that sleep is the brother of death. And I made the chapters so that they function like a kind of coordinates that can be combined in different ways, while leaving a lot of space for loading. I have to say, everything here is foreboding and ambivalent, the novel does not live up to the audience, it requires the engagement of the reader, it does not provide any relief. As for fiction itself, says Handke, isn't every expression in words, even what really happened, more or less fictitious? Less if we are content with just communicating, more if we try to express ourselves as precisely as possible.
In one place you also say "All soldiers in the war are ours., only the markings on their caps are different". This shows all the tragedy of war, but that the time for reconciliation had indeed come? Did your grandfathers make up somewhere up there?, Ustasha, with the one who died in the partisans?
Let me say right away, I don't like war, only death can be the winner in it, it's actually a kind of organized murder, and the fate of the people of Lika throughout history has been: they plow on the plow, with guns on their backs, since the lords of that time did not want Lika to develop agriculturally because they wanted to have cheap, top-class soldiers. Didn't Tito say, Ličans are the best soldiers. But that formula is still valid today, take people's culture to prevent them from understanding and thinking, instill any kind of fear in them, fuel it with a little fire and give them weapons to die for the money of moral repeaters. My novel refuses to submit to any ideology, and by writing it in such a way, I questioned the very interpretation of the system and ready-made ideas. The sunglass is permeated by the grandfather's memories of the war he went through and which defines his perception of the world. The character of the war enemy in the novel becomes a friend, and the space of humanity opens up. So when the boy asks his grandfather in one chapter if the soldiers buried in the forest are ours or theirs, he answers that they are all our soldiers, only the markings on their caps are different.
You recently, as the first writer from this area, were guests of the book fair in Prague. How were you received by Czech readers??
Yes, I was the first writer from the Balkans who was officially invited to their fair, I also had two promotions, for the diaspora and Czech readers, I don't know why they didn't invite us, they were obviously tired of our arrogant tribes, arrogance that often has no real basis. There was no one from my embassy either, I guess because the publisher has the term Balkans in the name of the library, and Croats look after sheep and dance the Viennese waltz. This is my third book that has been published in the Czech Republic so far, and I can't say that I've been accepted, maybe they don't understand me, although the writer can be famous even if he's misunderstood. But it doesn't matter, I've been translated into numerous languages, you can buy my book today in the best New York bookstore, and it wasn't an easy journey from Lika to America, especially from my small village, which Adam Mickiewicz would probably say even dogs should wear boots there. Today, my books can be bought in London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, and many other cities, and Proslava was recently included in the Study of Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, a course together with Joseph Conrad. I received many awards here in the region, as well as abroad, for example the prestigious Italian PREMIO Itas, the award of the English PEN center, with some awards comes money, so that also helps me to deal only with literature.
Do you still experience threats and embarrassment because of your views??
I went through all kinds of things, I wasn't allowed to go to my hometown for five years, so because of me, at one point, books became important only where no one reads them. I also lost my spleen, because it was pierced. The novels I have written are a kind of identity turmoil, but the most important thing for me is that my books are on the side of humanity. I was born in Lika, that certainly determined me in many things in my life, but the desire to be liked and belong was never something that attracted or interested me. I can't read Adolf Hitler's love poems. Nor will I ever support an ideology based on hatred, killing, nor will I support the Ustasha. I also have those who love me there, admittedly in the minority, but again, not everything is so black. By the way, I am neither to the left nor to the right, but above, at least a monkey on a tree, and from there I can clearly see how we live in a state of bad infinity, in a crippled society without empathy, people are filled with inner emptiness, rotten from politics, every unread book can be seen in their eyes. He scheduled the education system, so everything around us is full of ignorant people, and ignorant people know how to hate best of all. But anyway, literature is very important to me, as Flaubert says, the only way to endure this life is to enter literature as a permanent orgy. It is also the territory of freedom, and we must fight for freedom and not allow life to arrest us in any way.
