Based in an imaginary Baltics and focusing on the opposing figures of a dictator and an intellectual, Krleza's satire explores the existential struggle in the context of human social and political behavior. The novel has in itself all the political, cultural, and other commentary Krleza could not express otherwise for fear of persecution, so reads as Krleza's own running exposition on an era seen as irretrievably corrupt and sliding into fascism.
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Editorial Reviews
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Serbo-Croation
Original Language: Serbo-Croation
From the Back Cover
Miroslav Krleza is considered one of the most important Central European authors of the twentieth century. In his career he wrote over fifty books as a poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, journalist, and travel writer. He also suffered condemnation-as a leftist and a practitioner of modernism-and saw his books burned in the late 1930s. The first two books of the trilogy The Banquet in Blitva were written in the thirties to comment on political, psychological, artistic, and ethical issues. Such commentary had already earned him the enmity of Yugoslavia's increasingly fascistic government. He would not publish the third book until 1962.
Colonel Kristian Barutanski, lord of the mythical Baltic nation of Blitva, has freed his country from foreign oppression and now governs with an iron fist. He is opposed by Niels Nielsen, a melancholy intellectual who hurls invective at the dictator and at the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of society. Barutanski himself despises the sycophants beneath him and recognizes in Nielsen a genuine foe; yet Nielsen, haunted by his own lapses of conscience, struggles to escape the role of opposition leader that is thrust upon him. In the end he flees Barutanski's regime by running to a neighboring nation-only to find his new country as corrupt and as oppressive as the one he called home.
Colonel Kristian Barutanski, lord of the mythical Baltic nation of Blitva, has freed his country from foreign oppression and now governs with an iron fist. He is opposed by Niels Nielsen, a melancholy intellectual who hurls invective at the dictator and at the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of society. Barutanski himself despises the sycophants beneath him and recognizes in Nielsen a genuine foe; yet Nielsen, haunted by his own lapses of conscience, struggles to escape the role of opposition leader that is thrust upon him. In the end he flees Barutanski's regime by running to a neighboring nation-only to find his new country as corrupt and as oppressive as the one he called home.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Things fall apart,
This review is from: The Banquet in Blitva (Literature in Translation) (Paperback)
Krleza's brilliant "Banquet in Blitva" (one of the greatest political novels of the 20th century) comes, alas, too late for English speaking reading public- hopefully. This precarious genre, modern political novel-epitomized by masterworks of Conrad, Koestler, Malraux, Silone or Vargas Llosa-seems, at least superficially, a species doomed to extinction in affluentWestern societies subtly dominated by media-imposed uniformity of values and general ethical standards: uniformity which successfully reduces the intensity of potential conflicts and has gradually de-ideologized liberal democracies- so far. As it is now: Krleza's vision of social and ideological (or, in more general terms, "human") chaos out of which all forms of totalitarianism "naturally" emerge (magnificently rendered in puppet-theatre scene), expressed in his unique baroque style is more pertinent to the protoplasmatic anarchy of Eastern Europe, much of Asia and, especially, Latin America. But- who knows ? Maybe post-9/11 sense of vulnerability of democratic institutions (and life itself) will give new and wider relevance to this novel, full of convincing characters (especially Barutanski and Nielsen) and saturated with dense atmosphere of chaotic disorder and agonising conflicts between forces of oppression (which initially "meant well", but were ineluctably warped-caught in the web of life's contraries) and freedom. "Things fall apart
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Things fall apart,
This review is from: The Banquet in Blitva (Literature in Translation) (Paperback)
Krleza's brilliant "Banquet in Blitva" (one of the greatest political novels of the 20th century) comes, alas, too late for English speaking reading public- hopefully. This precarious genre, modern political novel-epitomized by masterworks of Conrad, Koestler, Malraux, Silone or Vargas Llosa-seems, at least superficially, a species doomed to extinction in affluentWestern societies subtly dominated by media-imposed uniformity of values and general ethical standards: uniformity which successfully reduces the intensity of potential conflicts and has gradually de-ideologized liberal democracies- so far. As it is now: Krleza's vision of social and ideological (or, in more general terms, "human") chaos out of which all forms of totalitarianism "naturally" emerge (magnificently rendered in puppet-theatre scene), expressed in his unique baroque style is more pertinent to the protoplasmatic anarchy of Eastern Europe, much of Asia and, especially, Latin America. But- who knows ? Maybe post-9/11 sense of vulnerability of democratic institutions (and life itself) will give new and wider relevance to this novel, full of convincing characters (especially Barutanski and Nielsen) and saturated with dense atmosphere of chaotic disorder and agonising conflicts between forces of oppression (which initially "meant well", but were ineluctably warped-caught in the web of life's contraries) and freedom. "Things fall apart
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