The Croatian writer who was bequeathed a house with a garden by an admirer

The Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresico (1949-2023) suffered the end of Yugoslavia and went into exile to end her days in the Netherlands, after a nomadic life teaching at universities all over the world. One day, when she was already a mature woman, an admirer of her books left her a house with a garden not far from Zagreb, her city. At first, she thought about giving it up, but the inheritance tax was very low, so she accepted. She went, explored the area, put up curtains, and even shared it with Bojan, who had left his career as a judge to deactivate the many mines that still remained in the area, vestiges of the terrible Balkan War.

That could have been a home for him, who had none, but that wasn't the case. Although we don't know if what he explains in The fox It's true, that's what we read: "I set up the electric stove under the old seaweed-stuffed sofa and plugged it in. I knew the dry grass would burn sooner or later and then everything would catch fire." I'm inclined to think that this episode is "half fiction, half reality, or perhaps something more than half fiction," as he said in his beautiful book. Thanks for not reading, which as you can imagine is just the opposite, an invitation to read.

A broad outlook that broadens the spirit

The fox It arrives in Catalan after Angle Editorial published it last year. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, where the author shed light on some episodes of her life as an eternal exile in places like Berlin and Lisbon. Now we accompany him, among other places, to Naples and England, which he visits to attend literary conferences and events. And once again we have before us a hybrid artifact, a puzzle filled with stories linked to literary creation through which circulate a multitude of literary wounds that he uses to speak about identity and the emigration of intellectuals.

Thus, in Naples, he visits the city in the company of the widow of a famous poet—a kind of Maria Kodama—who admits to having earned the respect of others by assuming a secondary role: "I have obediently served the literary talent of a man, I have been at the service of a masculine mind." dream girl, and I am also his potential widow." And in England he meets Mrs. Ferris, who has written a book about the writer Levin, one of the many intellectuals besieged by Stalinism. And since Ugresic is a specialist in Russian literature, he could not miss Vladimir Nabokov, narrated through the life of Dorothy Leuthold, the student who drove him on a trip to California and who became "a footnote inserted in the great cultural text called Vladimir Nabokov."

Already in the 1950s, Isaiah Berlin wrote about writers who saw the world through a single idea (hedgehogs) and those who have a multiple vision of reality (foxes). Ugresic writes "my story about how stories are created" from a plurality of points of view, times, and spaces. How could he not do so when, "after drawing an incoherent itinerary on a kind of map of my own, I ended up taking root in another country and became a being with two biographies and three languages"? The central axis of The fox She is always herself and she makes herself loved, but the stories of others that she adds to her own display a richness that we have not been accustomed to reading for a long time and that gives us a feeling of broad-mindedness that also broadens the spirit.