You should write an essay about Andrić's brackets. It would be useful to support and analyze the impression that it is the most personal my universals, the most far-fetched conclusions about people and life, the truest and most original proverbial statements, Andrić placed in his prose between brackets, as if he wanted to separate them from the direct flow of concrete prose, even when at first glance they are inseparable from that concrete context. Because in concrete prose circumstances, Andrić generally completely obsessively runs away from the autobiographical, and in these enclosed conclusions read it lived experience. One such Andrićev universal statement dangerous with brackets, the one from the story Window, came to my mind after reading the book I'm Zlatan, imposing itself almost as a kind of her unwritten motto. It is worth quoting that sentence in parentheses: "(A whole century later, we are healing from that childhood!)". This parenthesis is placed in the last fragment of the story, where the boy-narrator recalls how he and his younger brother were beaten many times by his violent father. It is known that Andrić did not even remember his father, that he had no brother, and that his uncle, with whom he spent a large part of his childhood, was a gentle man with a mild temper. The first person plural of the statement in parentheses refers, however, to all people, because it train it does not indicate so much the specific childhood of the boy-narrator (and his brother), but rather what it is called intensify, as when we say, for example, that Ibrahimovic is a really good player; that taj is not there to separate Zlatan Ibrahimović from another Ibrahimović, but for stylistic reasons, as well as to childhood from Andrić's bracket.
GETO: Books I'm Zlatan (in the original Jag ar Zlatan; it was translated from Swedish by Ševko Kadrić for Sarajevo's Buybook), it is possible to approach it from several perspectives. From a publishing-industry perspective, it proved to be a bestseller on the Swedish market. From a genre perspective, it is an effective blend of biographical and autobiographical. Namely, David Lagerkranz who is noted down Zlatan's story is known by the Swedish author of some similar books about famous people (he already became famous with his debut, a book about the alpinist Goran Kropp), but also of an acclaimed novel. The book is written in the first person singular, the reader is addressed directly by Zlatan, and the way Lagerkranz wrote the story has the magic of oral storytelling. From the perspective of a football fan, it is the biography of one of the world's best football players born after 1980. From a Swedish perspective, it is the story of perhaps the most famous emigrant child of this Scandinavian kingdom. From the Yugoslav perspective, it is a story about one of us. When Zlatan Ibrahimović already became a European football star, Bosnian and Croatian sports journalists lamented with equal intensity the fact that he plays for the Swedish national team and not for BiH or Croatia, the former because of the information that his father is from Bosnia, and the latter because he is a mother from Croatia. However, nowhere in his book does Ibrahimović call himself either a Bosnian or a Croat. If he is talking about his ethnic origin, he uses an expression for which the translator has found a convenient equivalent - Jugovic. (When, for example, he talks about meeting Helena Seger, his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his children, Ibrahimović literally says: "For her, I was a typical devil Jugović, with a gold watch, an open car, loud music.") Describing his father, on the other hand, he says: "He is a classic crazy Yugoslav". While reading the chapters about Ibrahimović's childhood, the reader almost hears an Elvis song in the background In the Ghetto (or possibly Cave's version): the boy grows up in a poor suburb of Malmo, a neighborhood full of "Somalis, Turks, Jugovics, Poles, all possible immigrants", father Šefik works as a bricklayer and janitor, mother Jurka works as a cleaner. Šefik and Jurka divorced when Zlatan was not even two years old. Zlatan's guardian is first his mother, and later, when his mother's daughter from a previous marriage, his half-sister, has problems with drugs, Zlatan goes to live with his father for a while. Both father and mother, however, live in poverty. The boy steals bicycles, steals small things from department stores and plays football with his friends.
GLADIATOR: Malmö is not such a big city, it doesn't even have three hundred thousand inhabitants, yet Zlatan Ibrahimović, who spent his entire childhood in Malmö, once said this: "The first time I went to the city center was when I was seventeen years old." the origin from the margins will remain deeply engraved in Ibrahimović even later when he becomes famous and rich. He socialized most and most intensively with players from South American countries ("I felt good in the company of black guys and South Americans, I thought they were more relaxed, fun and not so envious."); brothers from third world as if they recognized each other. (This is how Zlatan talks about Robinho, let's say: "We got closer playing together in Milan. We both had a difficult upbringing, under difficult circumstances and there are a lot of similarities in our lives. Both of us were in the news because of our dribbling and I adored his technique.") When talking about the reasons why he started playing football as a child, Ibrahimović says: "In the game with the ball, winning was not the most important thing. The most important were feints and tricks, the art of playing with the ball. (...) Delight and impress society with tricks and dribbling, train and practice until you're unconscious just to show that you're the best of them all." When he started playing for Malmo Football Club as a teenager, Zlatan would often clash with other juniors due to his tendency to dribble. with children from better homes, as they say. Then he develops spite, the need to show them who he is. In one place in the book, Ibrahimović says that it is his favorite movie of all time Gladiator Ridley Scott, and that he especially likes the scene "when the emperor descends into the arena and orders the gladiators to take off their masks and one of them says: My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius...And I will have my revenge, in this life or the next". There is, of course, something generally gladiatorial in top sport today, but in this emotion of Ibrahimović's there is something else, something - for lack of a better word - janissary. Animosity towards those nice privileged rich kids remained in him. For example, he doesn't name one of the "villains" from the book at all, it's a teammate from the national team who, for him, obviously perfectly embodies that kind of false snobbish arrogance that gets on his nerves. And although he does not name him, anyone who followed football ten years ago will easily recognize Fredrik Ljunberg. And it's not, of course, that Ibrahimović doesn't have predominance, it's just predominance of a different kind. Towards the very end of the book, for example, he utters a kind of apology for stubbornness and says: "I don't trust people based on rules, you already know that." Sometimes one has to change the rules. That's how you move on. I mean: What happened to the boys in Sports Club Malmo FF, the junior team, who were always well behaved? Have books been written about them?"
BARCELONA, REAL LIFE: The book is mostly narrated chronologically. The only exception is the first chapter, somewhat prologue, which describes Ibrahimović's conflict with the coach of Barcelona, Guardiola. The story of Barcelona continues, of course, towards the end of the book. As much as he can't stand Guardiola, Zlatan is equally, if not more, impressed with Mourinho. The fascination that Mourinho evokes in his players is a fascination with diversity. He is different from them, yet powerful, yet strong. He was never a player at the highest level, yet he knows everything about football, that's Mourinho. The conflict with Guardiola almost fits into a phrase from that Springsteen verse about father and son: Too much of the same kind. And the attitude towards Xavi and Iniesta and especially Messi is specific; they are not as close to him as Robinho or Maxwell, but it's not like he can't stand them like Ljunberg or Van der Vaart. And they are simply different. They came to Barcelona as children, at the age of eleven, twelve or thirteen, and everything in their life is football, that's how Ibrahimović thinks, without ever saying that they don't know anything about real life. At first he clashed with some players, but later they became friends. There is a good example of Siniša Mihajlović. At the moment when he introduces him into his story, at the time when he started playing for Juventus and the match against Inter awaits him, Ibrahimović has the need to say this: "Inter had (...) Siniša Mihajlović, who is a Serb. Of course, a lot was written about it, in the style that the match will be a Balkan war in miniature. It was nonsense. What was happening on the field has absolutely nothing to do with the war. Me and Mihajlovic later became friends at Inter. And I never took into account where someone came from. I'm not interested in that ethnic nonsense and frankly how could I be otherwise? In my family we are all mixed. The father is Bosnian, the mother is Croatian and my younger brother has a father who is Serbian."
GOLDEN LEGS: The leitmotifs of poverty and difficult childhood run through the book in chorus. From resistance to tobacco and alcohol, which appears as a reaction to his mother's and father's addiction, through recollections of the early nineties, when his father drank more than ever while constantly listening to the news about the suffering of Muslims in his native Bijeljina, to details such as the one about visits abroad with Malmo's juniors, when the other boys would receive an allowance of two thousand kroner from their parents, while Zlatan would bring twenty kroner, and the father would barely pay for the travel expenses themselves, and that by skipping the rent payment for the apartment where he lived at the risk of becoming homeless. Somewhere in the beginning, the episode is apparently entirely ornamental, where the boy Zlatan admires the house that he thinks is the most beautiful in Malmö. Fifteen years later, he bought it for his family, himself, Helena and two sons, even though the owners initially insisted that the house was not for sale. Zlatan left the remodeling of the house in the hands of women, except for one single detail. At the very entrance to the house, on the wallpaper in the hall, there is a photo of two feet, Ibrahimovic's feet, "the feet that paid for it all." The circumstances of a real life in a real world, a hard life in a callous world, made Zlatan Ibrahimovic the man he is. He has the hunger for victory and the charisma of a team leader, but he is more important to himself as a person than any team. He hates the very thought that someone wants to make a fool of him. It is better understood with to the mangupis, but with exemplary citizens. Hypocrisy annoys him. It fires him up and motivates him when they hate him.
NO ONE LIKE ME: Judging by this book, the peak of Ibrahimović's hedonism, in some old fashioned sense, is that he sometimes drinks beer and likes to eat pasta. When he won it with Juventus skudeto, with Trezeguet he got so drunk that he fell asleep in the bathtub afterwards, but that's just the exception that proves the rule. Bad Boy he acquired the image mainly because of his tendency to drive fast and because of his grumpiness. Apart from football, he enjoys playing PlayStation the most. Although somewhere at the beginning he admits that one of his motives for starting his football career more seriously was to try to "impress the girls", he does not try to give the impression of a womanizer. Apart from Helena, in the book he only mentions another girl named Mia, to whom he was engaged in his early youth and who is connected to one of his first media statements that resonated in Sweden. Journalists asked Ibrahimovic what he gave Mija for her engagement, and he coldly replied: "What kind of gift?" She got Zlatan." A little later she explains: "She got Zlatan...It was a true answer that just came out of the mouth, a line that came out of the mouth of a real actor. She only completed the media image of me." That self-confidence, that pride in one's own uniqueness, combined with the awareness of how repulsive it can appear to other people, is one of Zlatan's most distinctive features. One of Andrić's characters at the beginning of the mentioned story is described as "brave and enterprising, with unpredictable acts of evil and kindness". There is something in that phrase from the character of Zlatan Ibrahimović, the character of (one) Yugoslav. A player who like that dies in beauty, the player who becomes the top scorer of the Italian championship with the goal he gives with the heel, the player who decided el classico coming on as a substitute, the player who scored so many anthology goals and received so many stupid red cards, actually zipped in itself the essence of the Yugoslav football character. While Yugoslavia existed, such an ideal Yugoslav football player could not exist, just as there are no ideal gases. That's why, even when you don't like his team, it's so easy to support Ibrahimovic. Zlatan will gild all that.
