September 12, 2022
Perišić (No-Signal Area) draws on mythology and history in this immersive if arcane tale about the founding of a Greek settlement on the Illyrian island of Issa (the present day Croatian island of Vis). Narrative threads alternate between the omniscient moral philosophizing of Scatterwind, a genderless, 2,500-year-old wind spirit, and the maturation and travels of Kalia, an enslaved boy in fourth-century B.C.E. Syracuse. Sabas, Kalia’s master, buys an Egyptian kitten named Miu, who takes to Kalia instead of to Pigras, Sabas’s son (and Kalia’s half-brother). Pigras’s increasingly violent attempts to subordinate Miu cause Kalia to run away with the kitten. The two hide out in the stable of a donkey named Mikro, and soon the three of them leave Sicily on a Greek ship headed for Liburnia. Arriving on Vis, Kalia apprentices with Teogen, a stonecutter and urban planner; befriends Arion, a one-armed mercenary, whose tomcat mates with Miu; and marries Avita, a Liburnian born on the island. As Scatterwind charts the evolution of humanity’s domestication of animals, Kalia’s arc becomes patchy, and Scatterwind’s asides increasingly feel more breezy than profound (“since my arrival, nothing has changed on the Earth apart from humans”). A gratifying conclusion, however, remains elusive amid the copious historical detail. Classicists will find lots to love.
October 15, 2022
Lyrical novel of the ancient Mediterranean by Croatian writer Perisic. Three principal characters move Perisic's loping tale. The first is Miu, a cat, which, like all cats, "does not know the difference between a palace and a neglected yard." The second is young Kalia, a son of Sparta's sole colony, who, in another colony, finds himself enslaved. The third is a persistent wind, which explains, "I'm not an ordinary spirit, the way people imagine--a person's ghost or some such thing--but I am from a family of wind spirits, dragged from the upper parts of the atmosphere by some dramatic events." Floating back and forth among contending Carthaginians and Syracusans, the wind comments on the ways of the world even as humans, with all their vain wishes, find new ways to invite the gods' wrath. The obnoxious child of Kalia's owner tries to torture Miu, ordering Kalia to perform the most savage of acts, bellowing, "I am her master and she needs to love me. She needs to hate you!" It doesn't work on animals, animal behavior being one of the wind's chief topics. It certainly doesn't work on Kalia, who rebels, stealing away to yet another colony far up the neck of the Adriatic Sea in what is reputed to be "the end of the world," a place called Liburnia, modern Croatia. Perisic takes his time in pulling the threads of the story together, and in any event that story is less memorable than the delightful apothegms with which he adorns his prose. The wind always has the best lines--including, thousands of years after Kalia's time, while looking down at an alley cat that may well be a descendant of Miu's, a wistful reminder that she (our wind is a female) needs to find balance lest she go crazy pondering the ways of humans: "That would not be good for the climate. Everything is quite wobbly already." A graceful meditation on history and nature by an author well worth knowing.
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