Novel
Cyclops
Kiklop
Ranko Marinković · 1965
Synopsis
Zagreb, from autumn 1940 to spring 1941. Melkior Tresić, a theatre critic, awaits his call-up and decides to lose weight until he is no longer fit for the army. He goes from café to café with a band of bohemians and men of letters, Maestro the drunken journalist, Ugo, Don Fernando, meets the beautiful Viviana, a palm reader, actors and girls, and his imagination fills with the Cyclops of the Odyssey, the giant who devours men.
Context
The novel appeared in Belgrade in 1965, from Prosveta. It draws on its author's life: critics have recognised in the bohemian Ugo a friend of his youth, the poet Viktor Vida, and in the journalist Maestro Tin Ujević; two older short stories are fused into it. Critics have studied its allusions and its quotations. Kosta Spaić adapted it for the Croatian National Theatre in 1976, Antun Vrdoljak made a film of it in 1982 and a television series in 1983. An English translation appeared in 2010 at Yale.
Who it is for
More than five hundred pages in its English translation, a narrative in fragments, dreams and monologues, full of allusions to Homer and Shakespeare. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
NIN Prize 1965 by unanimous vote, Ivan Goran Kovačić Prize and City of Zagreb Prize; voted best Croatian novel of all time in 2010 by forty-one jurors.
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