A Handful of Sand by Marinko Košče

 

 


A Handful of Sand by Marinko Koščec - an arresting, exceptionally well-written novel that moves through a wide emotional register: sweet, sad, erotic, intimate, cold, cruel, passionate, a novel reminiscent of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being mixing personal drama with the broader sweep of history. Only with Handful of Sand the year is 2004 and the setting is Zagreb, capital city of Croatia, with haunting memories of the 1991-1995 bloody war following Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia.

The tale features two unnamed first-person narrators - a man and a woman, both single and in their early thirties; he's a publishing company editor and she's an artist. Marinko Koščec switches back and forth eleven times between having the man tell his story and the woman tell her story, a narrative technique capturing the pathos and intensity of the pair's respective lives leading up to and following their memorable first encounter. Oh, two throbbing hearts.

2004 Zagreb might be the tale's epicenter but Marinko Koščec stretches time and place as if they were silly putty, Keeping this fluid space/time shifting in mind, I'll segue to what could be the novel's trailer. I'll also bestow names on our two unnamed narrators - Mijo and Lana.

A MAN'S MENTAL PAIN
“All I can do is stare into the same painful thoughts in the darkness: as soon as my conscious mind switches on they're there.” So reflects Mijo on the first few pages. The more we read of Mijo's current life and past life, the more we come to appreciate the depth of Mijo's anguish.

A WOMAN'S MENTAL PAIN
A successful painter of large canvases, Lana the artist trembles with fear and shame when photographers shove their cameras in her face. As for her paintings: "But my pictures - I felt as if I was now seeing them for the first time. The gallery walls bore the marks of the mourning which I had painted out on canvases day and night, for months, unaware of what I was doing. Now it screamed from the walls, showing me strung up in a hundred copies." The agony and distress of the suffering artist, anyone? With sweet, dear Lana, we're given a searing portrait of a sensitive soul battling her way through overwhelming emotional barriers.

A SOCIETY'S MENTAL PAIN
So many people in the city of Zagreb harboring unbearable suffering. Lana lives in a basement apartment in the tallest building in the area, a prime spot for someone wishing to end it all. There's been a rash of suicides and one person's smashed body propelled itself through her window and splattered many of her paintings. Ugh! In a flash of inspiration, Lana stuck a note on her front door: To whom it may concern, the northern side is also good for suicide jumping.

PROBLEMS IN HIS FAMILY
Mijo tells us about the time his mother introduced herself to his elementary teacher as his father, giving everyone yet again another reason to think she's the neighborhood loony. Mijo is an only child. Oh, yes, one child was more than enough for Mom as when she related to her son that "she'd never wanted to have children and everything could have been different if she hadn't got pregnant; and me turning out the way I did - the cross she had to bear was God's way of punishing her." And where's Mijo's dad? Gone, gone, gone. Mijo's mom told him his father was a Gypsy but the facts proved more mundane: his father simply vanished once his wife became pregnant. Now, dear reader, imagine growing up in that happy household!

PROBLEMS IN HER FAMILY
Lana's mom was a nominal Orthodox Christian and her father a Jew from Germany burdened with all those horrific memories of the concentration camps. One traumatic experience for poor Lana at age fourteen: her father eavesdropped on her phone conversation when she told a friend on the telephone that she lost her virginity. "I heard that, he growled, dashed into the room wild-eyed and laid into me with fist and feet. Mother didn't lift a finger or say a word to stop him. When the 'lesson' was over, she took my head in her lap and stroked it until I'd cried my very last tear." Lana forever after carries a sense of guilt surrounding her sexual life. Ironically, when her mother dies, Lana becomes the caretaker for his depressed, morose father.

HIS PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY
Mijo lets us know that for as long as he can remember, he's been a magnet for weirdos. One of the many weirdos we're introduced to is Zoran, a mental patient who creates fantastic drawings of labyrinths, "scenes of teeming action, dense and compact, full of interlaced movements, collisions, rifts and transformations. They were covered from edge to edge in intricate patterns, calligraphic tendrils and arabesques which intersected and merged, plunging into one another, vanishing into depths and forming bizarre figures here and there with unbelievable, enchanting colour combinations." As we read various episodes in Mijo's life, it becomes abundantly clear he possesses a keen sensitivity and attunement to all things visual, including the visual arts.

HER PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY
Lana takes lessons from an accomplished Croatian artist. "I had to listen to his meditations on the meaning of art. He considered that art sucked the life out of people instead of giving it to them, in devoting their creative urges to art, people were transformed into something like sand, which briefly came alive and created the illusion of a surrogate life - a much better life where everything was possible and reachable; but it was all made of sand. By stirring it up and wallowing in it, we came ever closer to turning to sand ourselves."

Art and life, beauty and life, love and life - catch it when you can before the sand blows away as dust in the wind. Can this serve as the moral of Marinko Koščec's tale? I urge you to pick up a copy and explore for yourself.


Croatian novelist Marinko Koščec, born 1967