The narrator from Little father he moved away from his homeland, he went to the sea to be in peace wrote, but even if he didn't want to, he took his homeland with him, at least to the extent that his partner and his sick father remained in the homeland. Strictly speaking, Almin Kaplan's literary departure from his homeland is only a maneuver that will make the return more impressive, more painful, predetermined to such an extent that the homeland, in a certain way, appears as destiny. Should we now conclude from the fact that Kaplan always stayed in his homeland in literature that he is a native writer? If the homeland is the place where the writer was born, as the writer's ancestors were born, lived and died in that place, if, therefore, the homeland is a geographical location where solid customs and established ways of communication rule, and if the writer, from book to book, writes about such and such a place, about its specificity and uniqueness, then he can be called a native writer. Except that Kaplan, despite everything, is not. His little big novel Meh (see "Time" no. 1504) is native in every detail, except for the outcome, except for the fact that it is perfectly understandable to anyone and anywhere, because Kaplan's homeland is not the goal but the environment from which he starts (because he knows it well), a particularity that is transformed into generality by literary alchemy, just as the specificity of ancient tragedies is reflected in their universality. The specificity of Kaplan's homeland is that there is no specificity.
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The storyteller, therefore, also a writer, goes to a small Adriatic town to write in peace, but instead of peace he will be greeted by unrest that, like his homeland, he brought with him. What Kaplan knows better than anyone in this language is to settle comfortably in the bends of his sentences, in an immobility that, at least at the beginning, is by no means unpleasant, and the narrator will enjoy freedom for the first few days without major restrictions: he sleeps when he feels like it, eats when he feels like it, watches movies and series, leaves the apartment when he feels like it, writes a little, goes to the library and reads a lot, maybe drinks more than would be nice, but, basically, the whole stay is shrouded in sfumato pleasantness that is interrupted only by occasional, short and tense phone conversations with his father, and routine conversations with his partner (they have been together for a long time). The world of the room and the outside world are clearly separated, but that boundary, however, is not simply physical, it is not so much the walls as what the narrator brings into those walls, or takes out from them. The narrator is not a split personality, if one would think so on the model of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel, but rather a fragmented personality that seeks (rather in vain) to consolidate itself in its fragmentedness.
The heat has chained the town and made it immobile, and the scenes are reminiscent of George de Chirico's paintings, the only thing is that there are no long and menacing Chirico shadows. The threat, barely noticeable - because everything is still pleasantly slowed down - comes from the inside, from the conversation with his father and his partner, from the ever-increasing amounts of alcohol that the narrator consumes (he begins to become unconscious from drinking), from meeting a girl who disturbs him, from deep loneliness, from the fact that he finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality, imagination and hallucinations, from concern (it seems to us excessive) for his father, so that we can find out how clinical depression is woven into all of this, but the tone of the narration does not change even when there is an argument with a partner, from which argument, as from the results of a blood test, we learn that the level of sedimentation is characteristic of long relationships - elevated. Therefore, what started as a pleasant encounter with freedom begins to irresistibly turn into a storm. And when he finds himself in the eye of the storm he himself produced, the narrator will have to return to his homeland, where he is confronted by his immobile father.
In the second part of the novel, freedom is replaced by necessity, a terrible confinement to the bed of an immobile patient. And the homeland is there. There is now a partner with whom he occasionally makes love, there is also a rather unbearable neighbor who is ready, however, to help, there is also the writer's impotence, attempts to ride a bicycle along known roads, but above all and above all, there is the almost inevitable and unstoppable unfolding of the father's story. We stop at this point and leave it to the reader to swim to the end of the story.
Kaplan's poetics of non-events, characteristic of his previous novels and story collections, and especially his marvelous diary Home people (see "Vreme", November 2, 2022), in this novel, the ill father became literally immobile. On the other hand, the linguistic dynamics that comes from an unreachable source (that's the task for literary theory and philosophy), does not decline for a single moment, literally not a single one. Whatever the hero does or doesn't do, it's simply interesting, just like with Karl Uwe Knausgaard, who cleans and polishes the book in ten pages, and the reader wants this and such polishing to continue for another twenty or forty pages. Kaplan conveys reality to us in detail and breaks it down into microparticles, his descriptions are detailed, precise and so dense that we don't even realize that they are just devilishly well-chosen sequences, framed scenes that only in that, Kaplanian way, acquire meaning, otherwise, otherwise, they would go unnoticed like everything that passes by us, untouched.
Little father is a small novel with clean lines, a clear story and unequivocal meanings, the only thing is that behind those straight lines, simplicity and unequivocalness lies an extraordinary storytelling skill, the true secret of Kaplan's writing.
