Prose

The Cabinet for Sentimental Trivial Literature

Godina izdanja: 2018.

Shortlisted for the Predrag Matvejević Award 2021, longlisted for the Fric Award 2019

Sanja Lovrenčić's books draw into her net a reader who is ready for adventure, for whom reading is not merely following a linear plot and a pastime, but recognition and acceptance of a game that, when joined, becomes infinitely meaningful, subtle and even fun. Her new novel, entitled Cabinet for Sentimental Trivial Literature, in which is its set, but which is also an indicative determinant of what will be told, is certainly one of the "more readable" of her novels, i.e. one in which there are no traps for readers, unless they themselves want to fall into them. Also, as is often the case with this author, its structure is built somewhat conceptually, by changing the epistolary form, which makes up the main flow of narration, with inserted stories that form a rounded and meaningful whole it. There has been a crisis in the Cabinet, which is a kind of small, private and non-profit museum that houses the legacy of "sentimental and trivial literature". The curator, who writes letters to the late founder Rosa, realizes that not only does the Cabinet need a "cash injection", but also a new guardian to replace him. Since this is not just an ordinary job but also has a specific emotional and, of course, sentimental value, neither is easy to perform, and a job advertisement that includes one of the key sentences of the novel: "Your story is more important to us than your qualifications", will further complicate matters. (...) Ten candidates apply to the ad that had inadvertently implied that candidates should also be writers, and they bring with them stories about their professional and private lives, sometimes completely bizarre, but also stories that make up an integral part of the novel. While the curator, who is becoming more and more desperate and sceptical, fills letters to Rosa with fragments from his own and the Cabinet's everyday life, as well as those concerning the past, origin and meaning of her and his museum, an unusual and "soft" legacy that seems to have been run-over by a time of different imperatives  and priorities, the candidates succeed one another before him, with their experiences, but above all with the stories they enclose, enabling the novel to emerge from the closed space of the Cabinet into the outside, towards modernity and its peculiarities and problems. This "opening" - placed in stories within the story - subtly positions the novel towards recent reality, because it indirectly deals with the themes of art and artistic activism, social responsibility, commercialization and the entry of capital into unprofitable spheres of human activity, feminism. science and technology, but also love, which is one of the shared motives and concerns both interpersonal relationships and the preservation of some past values. (Jagna Pogačnik)

hanging sheep-stealers, a novel

Godina izdanja: 2015.

At an indefinite moment (post-apocalyptical?) in the future, the seeker Leta is reviewing her collection: her favourite is a smooth, white piece of wood at the bottom of the chest: there was barely room for it inside, she can hardly pull it out. On it are three words written in bright, colourful letters, each letter smoothly rounded; as a whole they are even more impressive compared to the chipped edges of the wooden board. That board had obviously been torn off from something, but every word on it is an indisputable whole: HANGING - SHEEP - STEALERS. Leta will try finding a context to give this fragment a coherent meaning, but every word on her board will still be an indisputable whole, a kind of verbal artefact. The same principle holds in the entire texture of the book: a series of statements by different narrators, fragments of different types of texts - advertising, autobiographical, legal-political - through their inter-relations they constantly point to the possibility of creating a coherent "world of works" that would unambiguously determine their meaning, but at the same time they function as indisputable wholes, self-sufficient and self-contained, and make the process of establishing a single context impossible. (...) From the level of an individual word to the level of the entire text, this book constantly evokes possibilities of classification and integration, but it also systematically challenges them. The only possible solution to this situation is, to read it. (Adrian Pelc, ed.) This novel, all made up of fragments - which even make one wonder whether it is really a novel or a collection of stories with some distant common denominator - firmly stands with at least one foot in a reality that is not only and exclusively parallel. True, the plot is set in the future, one preceded by a major and very apocalyptic event, nowhere mentioned and nowhere specified, but constantly silently present as a reason, a foreword on whose invisible canvas are written the fragments that build the novel. (...) A catalogue of themes that can be made out in the fragments, in which different characters (who occasionally “move” from fragment to fragment, from episode to episode) make confessions in a very unusual way, although they are completely prevented from reaching the recipient of the message they send, is well known and very indicative. In these seemingly unrelated fragments, we recognize elements of ecological catastrophe, manipulation of scientific experiments, totalitarian societies, and the consequences of aggressive advertising. But even in the world that emerged after the apocalypse, destruction, change, whatever it really was, it is impossible to delete the slightest hints of love relationships, rebellion, dealing with old age and death, traces of memories and certain moral issues. (Jagna Pogačnik)  

The Goldfish and Eastern Ariel

Godina izdanja: 2010.

Sanja Lovrenčić began to create the collection of short stories The Goldfish and Eastern Ariel at the suggestion of Irena Matijašević, editor of the Words and Words III programme on Croatian Radio. The texts, sometimes on the border between prose and prose poetry, are quite diverse; some focus on everyday life, concentrating on the small and secondary, others develop into real short stories. Sometimes they remain almost documentary, but often, with a touch of irony, they turn into sketches of fantastic digressions, subtexts, alternative lives. Even the title discreetly points to this duality: the goldfish comes from a short anti-fairy-tale about wishes coming or not coming true, while Eastern Ariel - a detergent that was produced in a different composition but under the same name for the Eastern and the Western markets - comes from a realistic story of family relationships. Some of the short prose texts collected in this book were written to be broadcast, which gives their style lightness and fluidity. The texts that the author did not write for radio also have a similarly simple but cultivated expression, which reflects her experience as a poet and radio playwright. A separate unit consists of several travelogues, which are similar in style and spirit to the other short stories in this book. The new book by Sanja Lovrenčić completely fits into her literary work so far, at moments dancing on the boundary between prose and poetry, more often in the magical spaces between reality and fantasy, and definitely in the gaps between short story, diary, travel writing and prose poetry. (...) The author's prose does not conform to norms and forms – it begins and ends breezily and spontaneously, and yet logically and timely. The process through which the author achieves the alienation effect is especially interesting – she inserts fantastic and fairy-tale elements into what appears to be a real situation. A variation on the subject of goldfish (titled "Goldfish, a Variation"), which is also present in the title of the entire collection, is one of the most successful results of that process and has an additional philosophical dimension, as well. Images from the author's 'ordinary', everyday, family and professional life are interwoven with the less-ordinary, complementing one another with details, motifs, and even excesses of reality (like the Ariel washing powder produced for the Eastern and the Western markets), thus becoming alienating and magical. Although the primary form is not autobiographical, a part of these records does contain bits of real life (...). Many issues have been brought up in this collection – man-woman relationship and marriage, reading and writing, land versus sea, past and present, sounds of the city. (...) Definitely the most emotional part of the book is the last one, "Notes from a Sombre Spring", functioning as a sort of diary about the author's mother's illness narrated from the perspective of the daughter - the daughter records moments of despair and fear, the hospital waiting rooms, as well as the closeness which is being recapitulated through comforting everyday objects and memories of the pas. (Jagna Pogačnik)

The Snakes of Nikonimor, II part – The Way to the Sea

Godina izdanja: 2010.

At the beginning of the second part of the trilogy Tisya leaves the Sanctuary and starts a southward journey toward White City, Arne’s homeland, seeking information about him, but also putting her own devotion and perseverance to a test. Arne is in a similar situation, but in another part of the world; with the army of the king who saved his life, travelling through the deep and mysterious underground of the border mountain chain. (...) It is still the "old world" – the world riddled with magic and feudal structures – but this world is by no means a recreation of a golden age. It is a world into which we are entering in a time of crisis, and the characters we find there by no means correspond to the usual images of revolutionaries or hyper-rational correctors of systems, but mostly resemble some refugees without a stable identity – people who are struggling to survive in the chaos of war. The flute-player Tisya and architect Arne are the main characters in this saga, Tisya is the guardian of the hearth, keeper of the tradition of Nikonimor, which she attempts to preserve and use against the chaos and madness of barbarian hordes. Arne is the greatest palace-builder of the known world, a person who has all the laws of classical mechanics, statics and architectural aesthetics at his fingertips. Sanja Lovrenčić tries to confront the unsubstantial chaos, destructive and worthless uniformity of "those-who-yell-together", with the two seemingly separate, but actually related aspects of human activity – poetry and technology. But she does not do it from a pedestal; Arne and Tisya are primarily full-fledged literary characters, characters with flaws and virtues – somewhat strenuous, somewhat persistent, somewhat rational and somewhat whimsical... (Matko Vladanović)

Martin’s Strings

Godina izdanja: 2008.

LITERATURPREIS der Steiermaerkischesparkasse 2008, shortlisted for the T-Portal Prize for the best novel in 2009. published also in German (Leykam, Graz) When it comes to great changes in the life of a family, often somebody makes the decisions, and the others just agree; because they cannot do anything else, or because they think they cannot. Martin’s Strings is a story about a family emigrating from Croatia to Germany in the nineties, told through the voices of the characters in the shade: a wife and a child. The father of the family, an architect who sees no perspective in his country, decides to take them all abroad. For his eight-year-old son and unemployed wife the journey to the promised land is one of loneliness, anxiety, unexpected discoveries – and unexpected friendships. Sanja Lovrenčić very skilfully managed to choose narrative situations that served as objective correlates with the help of which she best managed to show the emotional states that her heroes go through. For example, when Martin comes across a workshop for the sale and production of instruments, it was the complete opposite of the tidy shops in the German province, but it radiated a warmth that immediately conquered. (...) In the case of Tanja, her inability to get used to the apartment in which they are accommodated is only a part of her general inability to say how essentially uncomfortable she is in her marriage to Mladen. And from scene to scene, which follow in a uniform rhythm, without apparent major conflicts, one can feel the uninterrupted smouldering of dissatisfaction, that is, a war of low intensity that Tanja is waging every day with herself and her surroundings. (...) Given the change in the consciousness of the main characters and focalizers of the novel, Martin's Strings is a kind of feminist Bildungsroman in which, with the help of 'teachers' who are themselves representatives of otherness and diversity in a given chronotope, a woman is empowered to fulfil her role. Not without compromise (teaching at school is just a kind of theatre), not without suffering (she stays alone, without the support of her partner), she manages to reach a satisfactory solution for her life, which is not ideal, but it is chosen. She chose it alone, without any imposition, without mixing advertisements and general truths, without advice picked up in magazines of this or that type, without self-help books, without mass media and the doxing that phallocentric, white, male society imposes on women and their place in it. (Vladimir Arsenić)

Skating Rink

Godina izdanja: 2005.

shortlisted for the Gjalski Award 2006 Headlights in this small-scale world throw light, in a somewhat cinematic way, on a multitude of minor and several major characters. Žac, the skates-grinder, is forever telling stories about some strange people he met at the skating rink; he is the kind of person people like to have around, always capable of starting and keeping up a conversation. His main listener, Riba, the melancholic owner of the cafe by the rink, fed up with his guests, is addicted to Žac’s fictional characters and always follows their adventures with unabated interest. Those stories are intertwined with the stories of real skaters - timid lovers, teens, an elderly lady, a radio sound-designer ... In short, all the people who came to the skating-rink imagined by Sanja Lovrenčić have some secret life; in one way or another, they are also all connected to each other, from one autumn to next spring, although not always aware of it... The skating rink is a metaphor for all those places through which we pass barely aware of them, for all those people that we meet, and never ask about their stories. The skaters are all those black-and-white faces of our reality, people we don’t really see, who may gain colour only with somebody’s interest in them. Sanja Lovrenčić breathes life into them. Each character is given a unique story, often on the brink of reality and fantasy, and the novel develops as a combination of the different fates we follow. The author herself is subtly placed in the novel as one of the women with children, and we are not aware of that until the end of the book; when it is revealed, we have another proof of how multilayered the reality is... (Barbara Slade)   

Portrait of a House

Godina izdanja: 2002.

A book of lyrical prose divided in two basic groups: the first, “Portrait of a House,” depicts a secluded house with an unusual floor plan without right angles, with rich glasshouses. The whole text is imbued with a strong metaphorical and symbolic charge, and evokes the impression of loneliness in which the spirit opens up to a different view of things. The author's way of narrating enables transcending the tangible, and thus the material world dissolves into the sphere of strong emotion and metaphysical searches. The second group, "Records from the Edge of an Uncertain Land," is stylistically related to the previous one, and also represents a kind of poetic exploration of the boundaries of the real and the imaginary. Portrait of a House is a book that is all about relationships. Composed of two parts, between which a relationship is also established, it offers itself to the reader like some barely conceivable closed-open space that exists in indefinite time. In its first part, the relationship between desired and unwanted observers is primarily questioned. There are windows between the two of them, which, of course, can be seen as transparent glass walls that are only there by chance, but also as frames of an existence. Stories weave from space to space, conquering part by part of the house, moving from the glasshouse to the attic, from the outside to the inside, from light to dark. (...) Questions about the perception of space and time were masterfully elaborated in the second part of the book, entitled “Records from the Edge of the Uncertain Land”. The six stories in this section open up like dramas in which the travelling and a journey are themed in some absent time. All six stories are structured like stories from a child’s dream. They are all told with the desire to achieve what everyone thinks cannot be achieved, traveling along their own paths, using whatever means they need. These stories are by no means fairy tales, because there is no happy ending. The endings are such that we search in them by contemplating the ending or anticipating the continuation in some other form of reading. (Anita Peti Stantic)

Wien Fantastic

Godina izdanja: 1998.

The title Wien Fantastic accurately defines the framework of this collection: the stories do take place in Vienna, but the city is, as has often been the case in modern literature, a real and a fantastic place at the same time. Each of the stories is told by a different narrator, who is also its main protagonist. The author paid a lot of attention to what the Russian formalists called the technique of “skaz” – all the narrators are carefully characterized at the level of their speech. But if the language of narrators indicates their psychological (social, age, sexual ...) profiles, which connects these stories to the realistic world, everything that their stories are about richly outgrows reality. A specific life situation is just an inducement to start exploring the fantastic Vienna. And the city offers many interesting scenes that constantly encourage, but immediately and skilfully betray the reader's naive desire for their symbolic interpretation. Indeed, the fantastic dimension of this different world – which is relatively easy to reach in these stories, without dangerous metaphysical leaps – for Sanja Lovrenčić is not a dimension of symbolic thinking, resolving mysteries of our destiny, but neither it is an area of ​​threat, of domination of evil. What is important for the author is, first of all, a certain floatiness, astonishment, a change in the established and therefore cognitively unproductive course of things. (...) The astonishment in these stories is revealed in subtle shifts, in the non-aggressive intertwining of consciousness and the world. And when the fantastic order explicitly appears before a protagonist, it often happens in the form of a kind of theatricalization that helps to bridge the gap between the two levels. The city becomes a stage; fragments of some perhaps very ancient, but at the same time fragile, transient, permanently endangered play take place before the astonished eyes of the narrator - one of those plays that always make us more directly aware of darkness (perhaps glittering, perhaps intoxicating, yet darkness) that surrounds the small, lighted islets of our lives. (Hrvoje Pejaković) The story "Dancer in the Window Pane" form this collection is published in English in the anthology "The Third Shore: Women's Fiction from East Central Europe (Writings From An Unbound Europe)".