All lives are like all rivers: they have a source, a flow and a mouth. But every life is a special life and every river is a special river, because it has its source, its course and its mouth. Novel Esada Kočan, Our River is a book about a special life and a special river. This book does not read like other books. From the first sentence, it grabs you and carries you away, you no longer read it but flow along with the storyteller's life and the waters of Our River. From page to page, from rapid to rapid, from the roar of sparkling noise to the silence of a dark whirlpool, from the anguish of a narrow canyon to a wide-spread calm flow - these literary rivers touch and flow, with you and through you, and life and water. Sometimes you run over it, sometimes you cross from one bank to the other by jumping from stone to stone, over large pebbles skillfully placed by the writer in convenient places.
Omar Grabovac, a character who assumes the role of a writer under this name, transposed the parallel of life and the river into a brilliant literary allegory in which Our River (actually, the river of the Grabovac brotherhood, since his ancestors - the three Grabovac brothers, came to its river several centuries ago coast), is a river whose fate is intertwined, and in many respects coincides with his personal fate, but also with the fate of all the people who live on this river. The story begins with a chapter titled Waking up from sleep, at a moment when the dark, threatening, unrelenting shadow of death hangs over both Our River and the storyteller's life. Our River is threatened with death by human greed; to the narrator, from that disease, so terrible that its name is not mentioned aloud or in a whisper. From that moment, until the end of this book-river, it captures us and carries its course, through its head and backwaters, downstream but also upstream, to the very source of the river, to the very beginning of our life - because "The goal of every life is to find out - the beginning! And the beginning of both the river and life is - the source itself!" (Edmund Husserl).
The intimate and suggestive intonation of the narration reveals from the very first sentences a born writer, a striking authorial personality, a man who knows what he wants to say and who knows how to say it directly and convincingly, the way he does it in his best stories Ernest Hemingway. In contrast to E. Hemingway, who bases his presentation strategy almost exclusively on ascetically short, precise descriptive sentences in which descriptions of places, people and objects seem like fragments of photographs and dialogues like snippets of shorthand, E. Kočan's narrative strategy, with the quality of immediacy and persuasiveness, it also brings us the aesthetic quality of the author's fascinatingly intense concentration. The elegance of the style, the naturalness and depth of the passages dominated by his reflexive, introspective, honest and self-critical, occasional discreet self-ironic distance, paradoxically find their worthy comparison only in the opus Thomas Bernhard - a writer who is both stylistically and thematically the literary antipode of Hemingway!
For the depth of concentration of the text, in which everything (but only what!) the author Esad Kočan sees, hears, feels while writing and what he only writes without digressions, as it were - without a break - is a perfectly suitable comment about writing Thomas Bernhard was given by his half-brother Fabian: “If it is Betoven composed The ninth symphony in a state of complete physiological deafness, Thomas Bernhard wrote in a state of complete internal deafness to everything that was happening around him during that time." This is exactly the author's inner deafness to everything that happens outside of this book, which overwhelms the reader once he is carried away by its flow. The girl Mirna, later Omar Grabovac's wife, is the only person who has access to his inner world, so much so that she imperceptibly becomes a part of that world herself, without disturbing it in the least.
"It happens suddenly, without warning. That encounter does not choose a place, time, season or year. Only, while the conversation is going on that cannot be stopped, you will hear yourself: 'I have never told anyone this before'. No wine, no songs.
It's never a big secret. We confide big secrets easily, flaunt their importance, because we have outgrown their importance. This is the second. A hidden corner of us that refused to grow up with us. Unrelieved pain that has crept into itself. She wished it didn't exist. That's why, when you say what you haven't said to anyone, easily, without hesitation, to someone whose name you're just getting used to, it's a moment of the greatest closeness that can exist between two human beings.
...I say one moment and I mean another. Eternity in disguise. Disguised as a flash of sight. There was so much that led to that meeting never happening. That's why it looks like a dance of chance. It's an illusion. Where the seas and oceans are born, the waves, since the beginning of time, have announced this moment. And you started from grief,. Each bearing in his bosom a sign of recognition. The unspoken word. In the primordial nebula, at the moment of birth of the world, in the first breath, there is the germ of everything that will arise in the infinity of time. Light and darkness, life and death. In each particle of the dispersed proto-nebula is the potential of everything contained in all cosmic particles.
In the mist of love, all the love that will ever arise is cut short. In every single love, there is a spark of all the loves that will ever happen.”
With all the paradoxically close kinship with two great but completely different writers, the literary expression of Esad Kočan, alias Omar Grabovac, also possesses the quality of deep and sincere emotionality. In his novel, this emotionality shines with that rarest and most refined light that flickers the reflection of conscience in a look, voice or gesture, only sometimes and only in some people in life; in the literary work of Hemingway and Bernhard - never. In contrast to the hard, "macho" guard of Hemingway's characters who consider showing emotions a weakness and remorse a personal humiliation; unlike the self-deprecating Bernhard, who deliberately neutralizes his strongest emotions through rational analysis, Kočan the writer is in every situation without evasion - one would say with premeditation - sensitive; he does not hide his tender concern for those who have been wronged, nor does he silence the voice of his own conscience because of the injustice he has done to others.
Unfettered honesty and dramaturgically justified stylistic enchanting inclusion in the text of the most hidden intimate feelings, expressed by the means of superior literature, set this novel apart even from the previously indicated Hemingway-Bernhard exclusive frames and place it in a category of its own!
The beginning of life and the source of the river, which Edmund Husserl promoted as a philosophical principle of the highest rank and the foundation of his phenomenology as a science, and which Esad Kočan, as a philosopher both by education and by vocation, could not go unnoticed, precisely according to the logic of phenomenological reduction, found its a place in the center of the novel and not, as is usual, at its beginning. Quite justified: No one knows himself at the very beginning, from birth, no river is a river at its source!
A man becomes a man only after a certain number of years, when he becomes aware of himself; A river becomes a river only when it collects enough water from its source. The highly cultivated style and ubiquitous but discreet erudition of Esad Kočan point the reader to the presence of methods of phenomenological reduction, subtly and unobtrusively - with just one sentence Jorge Luis Borges: "Every destiny, no matter how long and complicated it is, consists of one moment. That moment in which a man knows who he is forever." One comes to one's own beginning by reminiscence, by progressing into one's own past. The same goes when looking for the source of a river: upstream!
The moment in which the people of Grabov became aware of themselves, realized who they were, coincided with the moment in which the until then nameless river became Our River. That's why that moment, in this original but logically impeccable dramaturgy of storytelling, occurred only in the fifth chapter of the novel.
In the noise of Our River, Esad Kočan also weaved a tragic chronicle of the events of the stormy, turning-point years of the cataclysm of disintegration and war, insatiable greed and blind hatred translated into political movements, deep, apparently irreversible changes in the traditional way of life and the system of moral values, caused by by going to temporary work abroad as the first phase of permanent emigration and occasional returns of people from this area. As a critically engaged intellectual, an excellent journalist unwaveringly consistent in the defense of the highest humanistic ideals, Esad Kočan did not allow himself to have his say on this matter either, but thanks to his exceptional literary talent, he did it masterfully, without disturbing the fluid harmony for a single moment. Our Rivers neither dissonant tones of political speech, nor simplified generalizations of the language of reportage.
It's been a long time since there was a novel that stood out so much from the current literary production. It has been a long time since there has been a novel that was so needed and that would express that need so sovereignly, in the language that a friend speaks to a friend and a man to himself in moments of greatest sincerity and lucidity.
The novel Our River represents a significant event in contemporary literature, especially in the literature of the former SFR Yugoslavia. In terms of its aesthetic qualities, an authentic literary artistic masterpiece, conceptually original, thematically current, told suggestively and convincingly in the language of a born storyteller, intellectually and critically engaged, encouraging and inspiring, this work, without hesitation, can be included regionally in the very top of modern literature in the Balkans , and by its qualities it is at the top of European literature.
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