Vladimir Jakopanec

Requiem for Bella Nemeth (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Requiem for Bella Nemeth, by CroatianAustralian writer Vladimir Jakopanec, is the first of his three novels to be translated. It tells an intriguing, exciting, truly soul-scorching story.
Bella is a polymorphous transgressor if ever there was one. She operates at times as a smuggler. At other times she is an interpreter for UN forces in war-ravaged Yugoslaviaanother kind of border-crossing, to add to her breaches of sexual, relationship, political, and social norms. Acting as an interpreter (and sometimes a translator), Bella conveys the perceptions, preoccupations, and besetting anxieties of other people; but she herself remains a mystery, never confessing in the role of a narrator.
Many characters are familiar enough. We know people like the main narrator, and probably think we'd act as he does. We never learn his name or his line of work, but are at ease in his interior, behind his eyes. Here is a reflective and always helpful soul who elicits sympathy and understanding, going about his good deeds for the tortured and troubled protagonists he encounters.
We get the most clearly etched depictions of Milan otaric. Milan arrived as a child migrant in Melbourne, with his honest hard-working parents. We learn much that is true to life in the Croatian diaspora through episodes he recounts to the narratoror when the speaker's staff is handed temporarily to Milan himself, or to a reminiscing friend. Milan's encounters with women loom especially large and threatening, with Bella Nemeth as his archetypal nemesis.
Quarrelsome but quiescent, belligerent but passive, impotent victim but ferocious sexual opportunist when the mood takes her, Bella assembles many opposites in one ingeniously drawn character. Bursting across conventional boundaries and categories, she is effectively no one in particular. Or to put it another way, she is every one of us. Kind and gracious Milan is a watchmakera regulator or coordinator of social harmonybut with his own mechanism broken.
Reader, you will receive this very fine work of Vladimir Jakopanec in your own active fashion. Readers, like translators, cannot do otherwise; we are not Google's automated translation facility, and we are not neural-network reading machines. Fine reading is an act of artistic creationjust like fine writing, and just like fine translating. So I now pass Vlado's challenging and engaging novel to you as the next collaborator in the chain.
Alan Crosier (translator)

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Vladimir Jakopanec
• Erscheinungstermin: 26. Dezember 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780992271572
• Artikelnr.: 70919559

Autorenporträt

Vladimir Jakopanec (Vlado) was born in 1948 among the green hills and vineyards of western Croatia, under an oppressively authoritarian Yugoslavian communist regime. As a child of religious parents, he suffered daily bullying from teachers in primary school, traces of which can be found in his writing.
He later studied English and Croatian literature and Theology, at the University of Zagreb. For more than fifteen years he worked in Zagreb's Social Welfare Centre. Then in 1987, at the height of Yugoslavia's worst economic crisis and just before the Serbian occupation and war in Croatia, he migrated to Melbourne, Australia, with his wife Mira (a highly respected pianist and music teacher) and their son Andrew.
In Melbourne he rapidly developed his artistic skills, opening his own Artis Gilding Studio for the restoration of gilded antiques and the production of sculptures in bronze. He also continued with writing, publishing in Croatia two books of poems, a volume of short stories, and three very successful novels. His Requiem for Bella Nemeth is the first to be translated into English, but others are in progress.
As he adjusted to this new life in Australia Vladimir became a careful observer of its people and their ways of life, to find his place within the Australian mainstream. As one result of that studious scrutiny, we have very worthwhile novels and stimulating and entertaining short stories. All of these, it is hoped, will be published in English so Australian readers can enjoy them as much as his many Croatian readers do.

Vladimir Jakopanec roden je 1948. godine u selu Gornja Voca, na ivopisnim padinama Hrvatskoga zagorja. Kad mu je bilo svega cetiri godine, s roditeljima se seli u Koprivnicu gdje provodi djetinjstvo. Nakon zavrene srednje kole, studira engleski i hrvatski jezik na zagrebackom Filozofskom fakultetu te teologiju na Katolickom bogoslovnom fakultetu u Zagrebu.
Do sada je objavio dvije zbirke pjesama, romane "U zamci Nefretitis", "Heretici", "Requiem za Belu Nemeth", te zbirku pripovijedaka i novella "Omara". Vladimir Jakopanec povremeno pie i za hrvatske tiskovine u Australiji i Hrvatskoj. Bio je dugogodinji urednik i voditelj hrvatskoga programa na 3mdr radiju u Melbourneu, gdje jo uvijek suraduje s prilozima iz hrvatske povijesti, jezika i kulture, a posljednjih godina predaje hrvatski jezik na Victorian School of Languages