After Romanian which Damir Zlatar Frey wrote in an interval of ten years (Crystal Cardinal2014; Stanzia Grande2016; Istrian Lady Macbeth2020; Mama Medea, 2022) it was neither easy nor simple to anticipate in which direction his artistic imagination would go. What Frey's readers and literary critics have in their experience is that he is a writer of eruptive fantasy, which is always tempered by insights and attitudes from reality (both implicit and subtle, as well as very explicit). Frey is not prone to stylistic and formal mannerism: he simply stays true to his mission. Somewhat simplified, that mission could be reduced to agile and active resistance to the world of lack of freedom, violence, banality, prejudice and false sensibility, resistance, therefore, to everything that narrows and renders the world and consciousness and meaning meaningless.
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Although Mama Medea recognized in previous critical reviews as the most complex novel in his oeuvre, and one could hear assessments that he would no longer be able to produce anything so strong, suggestive and exciting, Frey is Lorca code- with spread the opinion shaped by prejudices. Triptych about love and betrayal - "Deer on the Lake", "Gardener" and "Cathedral of Bloody Turtles" - is a furiously executed (both stylistically and imaginatively) story about the first, last and, paradoxically, eternal mystical-erotic-spiritual meeting of Gabriel and Federico. In the text prepared by the publisher for the first edition of the novel, the reader is offered a kind of guide for traveling through Frey's labyrinth: "On the border between dream and reality, true and possible, between the muddy streets of Zagreb's Peščenica in the mid-twentieth century, the slopes of Medvednica, the Andalusian plains, the roadlessness of Madrid and New York, and the Istrian Redlands, the lives of two heroes - the young man Gabriel, who is not understood by the environment because he is feminine - constantly intertwine and different, fragile, but fighting and persistent, and one of the greatest poets and playwrights of the twentieth century, Federico García Lorca".
Already in the first sentences, the reader's desire to get out of the role that the writer consciously assigns to him - awake, aware and active observer/participant - is almost completely removed from the reader: "This morning he took my hand while sitting on the bed next to my body. Today I would recognize that touch among thousands of others. As well as those fierce eyes under black eyebrows. Everything in me was speechless... - I told you not to tell anyone about us. People are not able to believe in innocence of our meetings! They will invent blasphemous stories from them! Then, to the already activated reader's will and imagination, the merged worlds open up - first of the boy and the young man, and then of the gray-haired writer Gabriel, thwarted and injured by the sign of otherness, wounded by a palanquin and small-town bites because they "recognized" him, and Federico's almost identical, thwarted and wounded sensibility, who, in the end, becomes a victim of the brutal retaliation of the Franco regime. Stigmatized as an anti-fascist and a homosexual, after a whole day of torture, Federico is brutally murdered. Gabriel could therefore be understood as both an angel and a writer, and Federico as a writer, martyr and (this status is assigned to him by the Writer) as a saint. In "Cathedral of Blood Turtles" Frey calls them Lighthouses in the middle of the sea.
If the first two books are chronicles, conditionally speaking, because they are interrupted by digressions (saturated with colors, sounds, music, instruments, pictures, information about mothers and relatives, former loves, Dali, Buñuel, Andalusian dog, a rare neurodegenerative disease synesthesia, spices, dreams and ghosts seen by the chosen ones), in "Cathedral of Bloody Turtles" a series of dark causalities, civilization's dark spots of humanity is revealed: different - unworthy - victim of ideologically induced like-minded crowd. It is in the "Cathedral of Bloody Turtles" that we learn the true price of a "different" Eros, essential sensibility and refusal to be killed by conventions. The price, after the virtuosically painted journeys through the voids of grayness and compromised existences, is in the absolute refusal of submission, oppression and totalitarian violence against the individual and the world. That price explained as murder by brutality, as brutal murder.
Indeed, in 1936, Federico García Lorca was shot by fascist soldiers at the age of 38, and then his body was thrown into an unmarked grave. Available sources state that the authorities at the time tried to destroy any trace or evidence of his existence. Even mentioning his name was strictly punishable. "I decided", explains Gabriel, "to convey all the facts that I picked up from Federico's stories without embellishment, no matter how raw and terrible they were. It defies my own conscience to believe that traces of crimes against artists can be hidden and erased anywhere in the world. Maybe today we would live easier and better understand everything that happens to us if we thoroughly dug up the physical and mental graves and saw with our own eyes how empty they are like Federico's. How many are like that?" eerily empty like truths that have become school curricula".
Lorca code, as a self-contained ecstatic-epistolary-dialogic paraphrase of a magical-realist story, is, therefore, a fiction that, despite dictatorships, dictatorial wills and totalitarian matrices that travel through time, breaking on the unceasing resistance of fragile and angelically pure beings ready to pay the price for resistance to crossing the border of human dignity, freedom and humanity, that fiction, therefore, remains something like "syncope in time". In literature and existence.
