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Summary
Summary
This powerful 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel tells of two refugees starting over after losing everything. Jovan and his wife have fled war-torn Sarajevo. They have lost their children, their comfortable lives as public intellectuals, and their connection to each other. Now relocated to a suburb of Melbourne, they must rebuild their lives under the painful and sometimes violent hardships of immigrant life.
Author Notes
A.S. Patric was born in Zemun, Serbia, but has lived in Australia since childhood. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne, and is a bookseller. His short stories include The Rattler and Other Stories (2011), Las Vegas for Vegans (2012), and Bruno Kramzer: A Long Story (2013). His debut novel is Black Rock White City, for which he won the 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Patric's suspenseful and harrowing debut brilliantly explores life as a refugee in Melbourne, Australia. Jovan Brakochevich works as a janitor at Sandringham Hospital while his wife, Suzana, earns money housekeeping for upper-middle class families in the suburb of Black Rock. Graffiti begins to appear around the hospital, and Jovan is ordered to clear the vandalism. David Dickens, a psychologist hired to study the graffiti in order to deduce the identity of the vandal, believes an employee in emotional crisis might be the perpetrator. The vandalism grows in severity, and so does Jovan's obsession with it. He begins to suspect the messages are meant for him. Tensions rise as the hospital's defacement leads Jovan to reflect on his past pain and his old life as a poet and educator in the former Yugoslavia, which he and Suzana fled in the chaos of the war and which has strained their relationship. These conflicts within them aggravate memories of their shared pain and manifest as damaging behavior. A sense of dread builds throughout, culminating in a shocking and unforgettable ending. Patric tackles the pressure to assimilate and the longing for one's former life. The book is littered with quotes from Milos Tsernianski and Ivo Andric', and nods to Mesa Selimovic', Danilo Kis, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky; the inclusion of these voices and narratives, along with the novel's shifting tones and points of view, help articulate the experience of many forced migrants. This is a heartbreaking yet hopeful work about how trauma can erase identity and drive people to reinvent themselves. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in Patric's native Australia, Black Rock White City is set in the late 1990s and focuses on Jovan and Suzana, a Serbian couple who fled the Yugoslav wars. Literature professors in their homeland, they work as cleaners and caregivers in Australia. Patric portrays this displaced pair as they try to adjust to immigrant life and piece their marriage back together. Jovan's having to cope with the bizarre graffiti appearing around the hospital where he works adds a gothic quality to the plot. As do the frequent flashbacks to the horrors Jovan and Suzana experienced during the wars in Yugoslavia, a history which looms larger and larger over the course of the novel. Jovan and Suzana constantly feel estranged, not just from people they have lost but also from professional prestige and from their native language and cuisine. For fans of A. M. Homes and Andre Dubus III, or people interested in the Yugoslav Wars, Patric's debut is an unsettling, wonderfully stylized work that paints a fascinating portrait of immigrant life.--Moran, Alexander Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Jovan Brakochevich and his wife, Suzana, have moved from war-battered Sarajevo to Melbourne, Australia, their psyches disfigured by unspeakable losses, as well as torture, rape and attempted suicide. Formerly writers and professors, they now sustain their devastated marriage by cleaning up the messes of others: She scrubs houses, he scours patients' spillage in a hospital. Having inured himself to the fouler demands of his job, Jovan must now contend with a more depraved, bleach-resistant form of refuse as a rogue insider splatters his workplace with sinister graffiti. At its gloomy heart an anatomy of trauma and displacement, Patric's novel sports the tough exoskeleton of a detective thriller. Who is the hooligan terrorizing the hospital with malignant messages, spray-painting them on walls, blow-torching them into crockery and even carving them into corpses with a scalpel? The author trots out secondary characters and walk-ons who, along with the benumbed Jovan, play like a Chandleresque lineup of suspects: nurses, psychologists, fellow janitors, the married dentist Jovan is canoodling with. But Patric is primarily interested in the quotidian sufferings of refugees, wounded people living among foreigners who speak to them as though their "slow, thick words are a result of brain damage." All this makes for arduous reading, less for the queasy remembrances of war than for the author's strategy of disorientation, in which he impedes coherence with invisible time transitions and fuzzily sketched events that come into delayed focus, like reluctant Polaroids.
Bookseller Publisher Review
"Short-story writer A S Patri''s first full-length offering is a slow-burning tale about a couple worn out by war but trying desperately to carve out a brighter future for themselves. At the heart of Patri''s novel is Jovan, a refugee from Sarajevo working shifts cleaning the wards of a suburban Melbourne hospital to provide for his beloved wife. Jovan's new life is far from idyllic and the ignorance and racism he encounters in Australia are compounded by hidden tragedies and anguish from his past, which begin to surface when sinister and anonymous acts of graffiti crop up on the hospital walls. As well as being an excellent novel about racial prejudices, Black Rock White City explores the interaction between language and perception. For example, Jovan's stilted English dialogue is juxtaposed with the lines of poetry he recites internally-the 'tracks he can run his mind along', which offer a connection to pleasures and pains of his former life in Sarajevo. Told with haunting simplicity, the eminently readable Black Rock White City joins Nam Le's The Boat and Maxine Beneba Clarke's Foreign Soil as a welcome addition to the canon of accessible stories from Australian authors about the immigrant experience. Jennifer Peterson-Ward is a communications professional and professional writing academic "
Kirkus Review
Devastated by the country's civil war, a Serbian couple is haunted by evil.In his debut novel, Patric (Las Vegas for Vegans, 2012, etc.), who immigrated to Australia from Serbia as a child, offers the dark, surreal tale of Jovan and Suzana, immigrants in Melbourne beset by memories of their past. Forced out of their homes, fired from their jobs as university professors, tormented and tortured, they ended up with their two children in a refugee camp. On the first day, all except Suzana ate a dinner that turned out to be poisoned: the children, ages 4 and 6, died; Jovan writhed in pain for two weeks but survived. The children's deaths were an unspeakable loss "of God and the skies, it is the loss," Jovan reflects, "of the past and the future." Overwhelmed by grief, the couple "found a way to live without response," which makes them, as fictional characters, unusually passive. In their adopted country, Jovan takes a job as a hospital janitor; he cleans the bloody remains of medical procedures and miscarriages and also the weird graffiti that appears with maddening frequency on all surfaces: "Dog eat dog eat dog," "Winner rapes all," "Masters of Destiny/Victims of Fate," "Ethical Cleansing." Jovan calls the mysterious writer Dr Graffito and comes to feel that he, personally, is being targeted, even when words are slashed into a woman's corpse; even after an ophthalmologist commits suicide when messages appear on her eye chart; even after a woman is murdered. Echoes of the television series The Bridge come to mind, but Dr Graffito, malevolent as he is, does not seem to be politically motivated. Instead, he appears to represent sheer, demonic evil. Patric's poetic language is highlighted by occasional passages from Jovan's poetry, though these slow down the novel's deliberate pace. The surreal, dreamlike atmosphere is intensified by Jovan's unbelievable affair with a sexually voracious dentist, his confrontation with a drug-addicted nurse who accuses him of being Dr Graffito, and Suzana's stark memories of a sadistic professor. A grim, unsettling tale of wounded characters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Halfway through this arresting debut, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australian author Patric' says that, compared with lived horror, television broadcasts of atrocities such as those in 1990s Bosnia "are only ever images." But his images will remain indelibly and affectingly in readers' minds. Jovan, a Bosnian refugee working as a janitor in a Melbourne hospital, is forced to wash away increasingly disturbing graffiti that finally seems directed at him; he's obliterating and cleansing terms like obliteration and ethnic cleansing. He and his wife, Suzana, lost everything during the war-home, university jobs, and their two children-and they are no longer intimate. They face prejudice in their adopted homeland not just as refugees but as Serbs, blamed for the Balkan violence. Yet as Jovan helplessly muses, "Bosnia was some kind of horror show where monsters killed other monsters" for reasons that were never clear, and both he and Suzana bear mental and physical scars that Patric' bares to us. As they struggle to reconnect, Jovan contends with the devil he sees incarnate in humans and finally, violently, faces down the perpetrator himself. We learn little about the so-called Dr. Graffito, but his identity is less important than the journey we undertake with Jovan and Suzana. VERDICT A highly recommended study of human loss and endurance.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.