Night
(VEDRANA RUDAN)
Tonka, a fifty-something woman living in Zagreb, spends the night in bed, unable to
sleep, watching television with the sound off. In the morning she plans to
leave her husband for a younger lover, but meanwhile she engages in an extended
soliloquy ? or rather a non-stop rant.
Tonka is vulgar, rude and crude, cynical, irreverent, and utterly unwilling
to put up with pretense or hypocrisy. She is unsparing of her friends,
unsentimental about herself, contemptuous of the government, scathing about
well-meaning foreigners, and generally abrasive. She even spends some time
abusing and badgering the reader directly.
Her monologue is largely domestic in scope. She describes her friend Ela''s
attempt to save her husband Boris from conscription by sleeping with an
official, smuggling trips with her husband, relations with her mother (who as a
Party loyalist slept with a Chetnik Party official from Belgrade, giving Tonka
a parentage that is now unfashionable in Croatia), and other events among her
friends and family. But this is set against a backdrop of aggressive
nationalism, state propaganda, and ethnic cleansing during the breakup of Yugoslavia ? on
which Tonka speaks out without sophistication but also without inhibition.
This is all mixed up, comedy with tragedy, horror with farce. Within two
pages, without pausing, Tonka can segue from crocheting egg holders out of
bright yellow mohair wool to a little girl being killed and thrown into a pit
just because she''s a Serb. There''s no single story line, but the strands of
many stories run through her rant. And her self-confidence, resilience and
irrepressible vitality make upbeat a life story which might otherwise be
dismal.
Night (Uho, grlo, noz, 2002) is cleverly worked; Tonka''s
monologue always seems natural and coherent and sweeps irresistibly along. And
in Tonka''s ordinary but extraordinary character Vedrana Rudan has created a
razor-sharp tool for the dissection of Croatian society.
Resumos Relacionados
- No Comebacks
- ''''because Of My Stories''''
- Anna Karenina
- The Diamond Necklace
- Pami?tnik Pisany Mi?o?ci? (suzanne's Diary)
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