I am beginning to write this review of the new novel with some trepidation Slavica Perović "New Nora". We know how it goes with literary reviews - they often end up looking like a rough climb up a tree. And then, by the way, the crown suffers, leaves fall from it, and eventually it can even dry out. That's why I will say right away, before I approach the tree, and perhaps unintentionally cause damage, that the novel "Nova Nora" is a sumptuous canopy novel, whether or not I succeeded in presenting it.
Here, then, is the inevitable tree - plot of the novel... A young, modern, professionally "accomplished" woman, emancipated in every respect, is about to break up her marriage. Her husband and she are irresistibly drifting apart. She stays with the child. He tries to adapt. She does what women like her do when it comes to them: takes a job that, luckily, she enjoys, hikes, cultivates female friendships, experiments with light relationships... Will she adapt? Or will they still not adapt? Leave it to the readers to decide for themselves when they read the novel.
Familiar? How else? From life? From literature? From both, actually. We follow the title of the novel as a familiar clue, guessing literary connections. Is this New Nora related to the old Nora, the heroine? Ibsen's "Doll's House"? Hit, that's the connection. Ibsen's Nora is not Nova Nora's biological ancestor (or actually fictional-biological, that's the only way she could be). Her real ancestor's name was Eleonora, so - almost Nora. It was named after her. But, whatever name the author of the novel gave her heroine, she would have to be related to Ibsen's Nora if she were the way she is, if she were to seek happiness according to the recipe that Nora had in mind - freedom plus love plus family.
And since it is still the majority recipe for female happiness, we could go further and say that the heroine of the novel is a true representative of the female majority who has not yet found a better recipe for happiness, and who is therefore also related to old Nora. It's the same blood. Not the one from which everything except the genetic evidence for the continuity of the male line from the beginning of time to the Day of Judgment has aired out. The heroines of this novel have a lot to say about blood, but it's a different kind of blood. Let's say the one who pumps herself into every act of responsibility and love for what is close to her, including herself - I'm here, I'm not running away, I'm doing my best. Such blood spurts from this novel. She could make women relatives. They should have learned lessons about closeness. They had when and they had why.
However, the main heroine of this novel is not called just anything. Her name is Nora. And the novel is called "Nova Nora". Clear and loud. Literary kinship is confirmed and acknowledged. The main character knows about this relationship. It often returns to its literary ancestor. It could have been risky to put so many Nora-references in one novel. The novel could have "dried up" from that. It could also collapse under the weight of its intertextual construction. Anything could have happened, but it didn't: nothing was dried up or collapsed.
The new Nora, let's say, is the expected form into which the old one, Ibsen's Nora, could have continued to search for herself throughout the 20th century, outlived all the waves of feminism, the sixty-eighth, social changes in which women gained crumbs of freedom, picked up everything along the way benefits of female emancipation, made it to the third decade of the 21st century and returned home with the same question - How can I be happy?
What old Nora went looking for when she slammed the door of Torvald's home behind her seemed almost comically abstract - where were you going, woman's head, where did you think you were looking for yourself? The same question, only more sympathetic and benevolent, is asked by New Nora - "Where did Nora go in a skirt up to her heels, with a snow scarf on her back, on a snowy night, on icy roads?" It had to be a hopeless adventure - there was nothing for her beyond the doors that closed behind them. Well, that has changed - there will be something for Nova Nora outside her home, it is no longer an abstraction.
The new Nora will stay at home, with the child, and her husband will go to look for himself, wandering through the realms of politics and eco-politics in an extremely abstract and false way. Is it the patriarchal paradigm turned upside down? Of course not. She just perverted herself - men gave up the patriarchal right to keep children with their surname on their laps when they realized that it was stupid, that they were only depriving themselves of their freedom, and as soon as women became economically capable of doing so. As for the women, they rarely slammed the door behind them. Nora is not reality. She's an experiment - what would happen if Nore really left? What it would be is unimaginable. It would be a terrible explosion, everything would crumble to ashes. Nora is just a threat. Which was heard. Is it stuffy for women in the house? Okay, let them go outside for a bit then. A little in - a little out. But then the husbands will go outside, for even more freedom, and forever. As Nora's husband Max left.
But Nora wants Max to stay. That's the catch. He wants just his, just like that - a husband's love. In this novel, love is talked about a lot, it is sought in every place, it is allowed to appear in whatever form it wants, conventional and unconventional, just let it appear more, but the novel "Nova Nora" is above all staring into the void which asks to be filled with male-female monogamous love. It is true, there is little evidence of its existence, but the void is there, so it is there. Staring at her seems like a brave and honest author's decision because - it is a living truth that for many women, and not only women, monogamous hetero love is the only love umbrella under which they want to crouch.
Yes, it took the author's boldness to capture this seemingly "exhausted" female experience. Hence the anxiety mentioned at the beginning of this text. Where did Nora go? - the author of this novel is not the first to think of that question. A woman between family and public space - this female position has been thoroughly illuminated by feminists from all sides. And illuminated too much - will be said by those who would like to keep quiet about this, and that, and everything. How much longer with that? But, it's real!! - shouts this novel. That's it women`s condition, right there is the scene of their contemporary drama. Feminist politics, like all politics, can destroy literature. Or to fill it with blood, as is the case with "New Nora".
All this was about the tree of the novel "Nova Nora". And its canopy? And its leaves? Even if it would be polite to shake off every leaf, leaving nothing on the branch for the reader, I have to give it up. Too difficult a task. Let me try, however, at least briefly... I will say - just how much human experience has this novel absorbed into itself; what a multitude of burning social issues branch from its tree; how much erudition and wit is built into it; how this language enjoys itself and how easily it moves from colloquialism to discursiveness; how much of his own reality and how many characters in all three dimensions he is able to create, and how many other things that literature lives on are in that canopy.
Finally, as a point, here is a reading recommendation for those who will want to read this, the third novel by Slavica Perović, of which, I hope, there will be many. So, like this - read slowly, chapter by chapter; do not expect a shift in perspective as you will be guided from beginning to end by a narrator, which you will certainly not regret, and do not expect spectacular twists as the situation will change as probability dictates. This Rome comes in waves. Whenever a new wave comes, there will be something of the same and something new in it. The same Nora, with the same contemplation of her life, who brings new experiences and reasons for literary enjoyment from the depths every time. And all this will increase until the very end.
Bonus video:
