Stray Satellite piše o "Brodu za Issu" u pregledu najboljih knjiga iz jugoistočne Europe objavljenih na engleskom 2022.
A boldly original novel about the ancient world, the Adriatic, the civilizational impact of the cat and a lot more besides, A Cat at the End of the World is something of a major departure for a Croatian writer previously known for his generation-defining short stories and social novels.
It also displays deliberate unorthodoxy by including characters who are animals (Miu the cat and Mikro the donkey), although they don't have speaking parts - this is not a kids' book or an Aesopian fable.
The story starts in the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily in the fourth century BC, where a fleet of ships is due to set sail for the Adriatic island of Issa (present-day Vis) in order to found a new colony. Slave boy Kalia, eager to escape a life of drudgery and abuse with his unsympathetic owners, stows away aboard one of the ships. He liberates his owners' cat, Miu - a prestige pet imported from Egypt and tormented by the family's son - and takes her with him on the boat. On arrival at the island Kalia is apprenticed to the new town's main builder, and grows to adulthood as the new town slowly takes shape.
The book's other main departure from the norm is the inclusion of an occasional narrator called Scatterwind, a breeze that follows the colonists to Vis and choses to stay there, providing bemused commentary on Kalia's epoch and the centuries that follow. Indeed it's Scatterwind who fleshes out the broader themes of the book, musing on the way in which the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean and the advance of urban civilization edged out those societies that saw spiritual value in animals and nature, and replaced them with a world that saw nature merely as a tool. The cat, the animal that will allow itself to be domesticated but never dominated, is one of the few creatures that can be close to humans and yet preserve its independence and mystique. "Cats confused people... " Scatterwind declares, "They were the first ungovernable animals that made friends with the humans. When humans stood before cats, they did not see their own purpose."
This is the key difference between Miu the cat and Kalia's other four-legged friend Mikro the donkey, who is on the island to work, not be some kind of companion animal. As Scatterwind reflects, "I think that people, because they domesticated animals that served them, thought the whole of the earth could be their servant, and even found among their own species those whom they could own."
Writing about the fourth-century BC is a tall order; we can't really know how people communicated then or reproduce the rhythms of their speech. Perišić nevertheless succeeds in creating a convincing world, with Kalia, the animal-loving runaway slave who knows the pain of being owned by another human being, anchoring the book to moral, humane (and indeed ecological) concerns. And after all, boy-meets-cat is just as good a starting point for romance as any other.
© Jonathan Bousfield