New novel The summer is over. Dubravka Rebić confirmed her place in a not so big space literature which is not written in the glory of the first person, but with its impersonal characteristics and orientation towards the universal is confirmed as such, worthy of what it carries: the desire for communication and understanding of the vanished world which, fortunately or not, we still carry within us. In short, Rebić is not telling us a story so that, first of all, she would overcome her internal convulsions, but so that we, reading her book, would try to look for possible variants of ourselves in the images of others.
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Already in the title of the novel, on the "warm ruins of summer, blown waves and wind", between melancholy and disappointed hope, the key to the emotional moods of the main characters is hidden. Remembering her father who left her in the shallowest part of the pool, in the uncomfortable vicinity of foreign and unfamiliar views, Željana will wish to offer us a view of her life, but also of others' lives, through fragmented forms of memory, in the form of memoir fragments (inspired by her father's attempt at an autobiography). Corroded by dementia syndrome, Željana will strongly resist the violent grip of the past and try to reconcile the feeling of (self) non-acceptance with the need to develop her own identity. Mapping the most important characters from her environment, from childhood to mature days, she will call up the ghosts of the past in a scattered biographical series.
On the trail of a simple graphic solution with which, with the help of a bold and italicized term, he will try to interest the reader's eye in easily recognizable symbols of a bygone era (magazine Arena, Vinetu, Dnevnik, "stojadin"), the writer seemed to want to install a mechanism for the process of deciphering other, first adopted, then annulled identities. As she did not get to meet her mother - she passed away after a short illness - little Željana longed for her own ja it comes first through comics about Zagor, through the adventures of Chiko, Zagor's companion, with whom the girl gets along easily, perhaps because in his noble but at the same time comical character she also finds the experience of being an abandoned baby. Chico, like her after all, was left to himself for a while. Chico's adventures are vivid enough to point to a possible path to a future that doesn't have to be as angsty as childhood. Because, in that childhood, the father called Bule, a fanatical and unsuccessful athlete, was constantly absent, only to disappear at one point, perhaps not so much by his own will as by a game of fate, a game that didn't work from the very beginning. Deeply shaken by the sports failure in which he saw his whole life, Bule traveled a long (and difficult) path from debtor, to waiter, to "patron" of wild teenagers, not hiding his pain, but never facing it. To that extent, flight was a way out, and death, perhaps, a welcome alibi for avoiding responsibility.
There is no safe city, no safe place, no "smell of mother's lap" and no safe ground under your feet. In the circle created by relativity, everything seems so close, but as soon as he reaches out to reach for what is within reach, it slips away. Dissatisfied with her physical appearance, anxious about what to say to her crush Marko - "it's the end of summer, and I can't wear shorts" - Željana's maturation leads to increasing insecurity, although, on the surface, everything seems to be fine, especially when she achieves a successful television career and becomes a mother. In her diary entries from her student days, Željana talks about herself as a stupid person, which, ten years later, will turn into a "rotten person", but she has always somehow managed to convince others that she is something more than that, that is, that she is worth it.
The author largely supports the philosophical basis of the novel with the work of Carlos Castaneda, an American writer and anthropologist, in whose sentences she also finds her spiritual base. Adopting Castaneda's position that "the inner dialogue is the main obstacle for most people and that it is the key to everything", and that the trick of accepting the world is to stop the inner conversation, Željana gathers energy to face the loss of her grandfather, who in this novel, not without reason, assumes the role of guardian angel and protector. Watching him collapse on the nursing home bed, she, like her grandfather, more than once wanted to leave everything. However, once again Castaneda does not let her give up. We should look for miracles, because "we get tired of looking at ourselves and that fatigue makes us deaf and blind to everything else". Castaneda is also referred to when arguing with her husband: "Castaneda nicely said that boasting is not only useless but also dangerous, that we don't need anyone to admire us from the outside." The problem, however, is that we cannot be approached from the inside either - we are too closed and prone to introspection.
As a kind of gentle antipode that alternately approaches and moves away from its object (Željana), Dubravka Rebić succeeds in creating the character of Olga. Without ceasing to play with the perspective of these two characters, presenting the lack of one as an advantage of the other and vice versa, the author gives us Olga's life as an eternally restless life line that is constantly in danger of being interrupted, but still manages to be preserved and remain whole. As if he had always been mature, Olga's life has a clear determination - to survive every time and to be preserved in every age. Or it just seems to us, since, seduced by the realistic cruelty of Dubravka Rebić's prose, we tend to measure the weight of life by renouncing its beauty.
