CROATIAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN FICTION AFTER TRANSITION: THE UNFINISHED EXHUMATION IN BODROŽIĆ AND JENNINGS
CROATIAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN FICTION AFTER TRANSITION: THE UNFINISHED EXHUMATION IN BODROŽIĆ AND JENNINGS

Summary/Abstract: My paper tries to juxtaposes Ivana Bodrožić’s The Hotel Tito (2010) and Karen Jennings’s Crooked Seeds (2024), which are both novels of post-conflict transition but written from vastly different moral perspectives. One is narrated by a Croatian girl, whose father has been murdered at Ovčara, and the other is told from the viewpoint of a white South African woman, from whose family’s garden three small corpses have been exhumed. The claim is not that these are analogous situations; no moral equivalence is suggested between a death in Croatia and an excavation in South Africa. The claim is more modest: that the two novels use the same formal resources in order to narrate their respective transitions. A confiscated house or its transformation into the Hotel Tito, state intrusions into private history, an accompanying bureaucratic discourse, and a narration that is veridical but uninterpretative are all present. In each novel, the guiding principle is an unfinished exhumation. The novels conclude just before a phrase that would allow a character to mourn, a transitional justice that does not allow room for a subject capable of mourning.

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