Wall Street Journal o Perišićevom novom romanu (25. 11. 2022.)

“A Cat at the End of the World,” a fabulist historical fiction by Croatian writer Robert Perišić, begins in an aristocratic household in the ancient Greek colony of Syracuse. Kalia, our main character, is a slave by birth, a fact he hates to consider but which dictates his life nevertheless. That is, until his masters acquire a trendy status symbol, a cat from Egypt named Miu. The cat, that “ungovernable animal” that cares nothing for class or caste, befriends Kalia while spurning the family’s spoiled heir—an intolerable preference that leads to a confrontation, after which Kalia is forced to flee Syracuse by boat, accompanied by Miu and a village donkey named Mikro.
His destination is the island of Issa in Liburnia—or present-day Croatia—where the Greek polis has sent laborers to build a city at the northern edge of the empire. Kalia finds himself with a new life and social role, yet the same suffocating hierarchies persist: He is still a servant and he, in turn, is expected to mistreat Mikro as a beast of burden.
As it delineates the way of life in the Liburnian outpost, Mr. Perišić’s story takes on the shape of a philosophical fairy tale, an impression heightened by the alternating chapters from the point of view of a gust of wind that follows Kalia and Miu across the Adriatic. The “scatterwind” has a curiously melancholic air (as it were), because it tries to conform to the restrictive terms of human relationships. But in imagining different paradigms of friendship—those between species, or between living creatures and natural forces—this dreamlike novel tries to depict attachments that are freer than any proposed by the laws of civilization.