The Feminist Book Club 6

14.03.2024

Želimir Periš: Mladenka kostonoga, 2020.

14. 3. 2024. 

In March, the Feminist Book Club returns to contemporary Croatian literature. For this meeting, we have chosen the novel Mladenka kostonoga by Želimir Periš and examined how stories about witches – in this case cleverly combined with the epic about the witch Gila – become the setting for a strong and lucid critique of patriarchy.

Želimir Periš (1975, Zadar) is one of the most prolific Croatian authors. He has been awarded numerous prizes, and the novel Mladenka kostonoga received the tportal award for Novel of the Year in 2021. From the explanation of this award, we get a brief description of the novel: “In a complex structure, Želimir Periš's novel Mladenka kostonoga adopts the convention of the 18th-century Enlightenment, and anticipates the content of each individual chapter, as well as the poetics of the picaresque novel with the figure of the persecuted 'witch', 'healer' Gila, a feminist icon before her time, and places her at the center of the narrative universe in a historically and culturally turbulent area from Dalmatia, Lika, Istria and Herzegovina to the capital Vienna. As a counterpoint to high art, however, Periš introduces the fiddler-narrator and with him the cultural Other: folklore tradition and superstition, the decasyllable verse and the female gender identity that breaks out of the patriarchal mold, the language of the street, the tavern and the threshing floor, as well as pre-modern oral literary forms.” (The whole description in Croatian is available at: https://www.tportal.hr/kultura/clanak/video-zelimir-peris-dobitnik-je-knjizevne-nagrade-tportala-za-najbolji-hrvatski-roman-foto-20210602.) 

We have dedicated the discussion of Periš's novel to the genre play, which makes this novel unique in contemporary literary production, as the novelistic narrative is interwoven here with elements of epic and fairy tale and even drama. Of the many themes opened up by the novel, we were particularly interested in the social problems articulated in this genre collage: the position of women in a patriarchal culture, notions of identity, the link between government and crime, the link between history and truth, i.e. literature and history, and the strategies with which the novel plays with the mechanisms of its own reading.

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