Name: Figa
Price: 22 EUR
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9789612841782

The Fig Tree

Figa

Goran Vojnović

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2016
Number of pages:: 402
Rights sold:: Armenia (Edge), Austria (Folio Verlag), Bulgaria (ICU), Croatia (Fraktura), Egypt (Al Arabi), Hungary (Typotex), Israel (Lesa Books), Italy (Keller editore), Lithuania (kitos knygos), North Macedonia (ILI-ILI), Poland (Sedno), Romania (Casa Cărții de Știință), Serbia (Rende), Sweden (Ramus), UK (Istros Books), Ukraine (Bohdan Books)
Available reading materials:: English pdf, German pdf, Italian pdf

The Fig Tree follows the intertwining stories of Aleksandar and Jana, Vesna and Safet, and Jadran and Anja, as well as others. But mostly that of Jadran, a 30-something who tries to piece together his family history, in order to better understand his own story. Because he cannot understand why Anja has walked out of their life, he tries to understand the death, supposedly facilitated by a suspicious pill bottle, of his grandfather Aleksandar. He tries to understand the withdrawal of his grandmother Jana, the disintegration of her memories, and her retreat into oblivion and dementia. Jadran tries to understand the departure of his father Safet, his disappearance from Ljubljana in the first year of the war in the Balkans. And he tries to understand his mother Vesna, her bewildering resentment of his grandfather, her silent disappointment with his father. Vojnović is a master storyteller, and while the fateful choices made by his characters are often dictated by the historical realities of the times they live in, at its heart this is an intimate story of family, of relationships, of love, freedom and the choices we make.

Kresnik Award for best novel of the year 2017

Župančič Award 2017

Shortlisted for the Njegoš Award 2017

World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2020

Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2022

One of the most important novels to come out of the Balkans in the last decade.

Teofil Pančić, Serbian writer and literary critic
Goran Vojnović’s The Fig Tree is a gentle, quiet, emotionally powerful novel concerned with memory, families and the stories we tell each other.

Times Literary Supplement
This is a story of people who shared so much and yet who quickly drifted so far, so fatally, apart. The Fig Tree is a moving, gripping novel of family, and national, division.

The Art Desk
Vojnović filters the recent history of his homeland, the suspicion of outsiders, the racial and cultural tensions through the lens of one family’s experience (his background in film is evident in much of the novel). He explores a world where a name can be a threat or destroy a life. Memories can be destructive, as the Balkan wars proved. But they also sustain us. The Fig Tree is about identity – about what makes us, what shapes us. Vojnović often withholds crucial strands of the narrative that reveal a character’s motivations. Safet’s abrupt departure and Aleksandar’s desire to work in Cairo are initially baffling. Together with Jadran, the reader has to untangle the threads in an attempt to find the answers. When Aleksandar returns to find his wife irretrievably changed, it is truly heart breaking. Vojnović’s portrait of Jana’s memory loss, from the perspective of the husband caring for her, is one of the most moving accounts of dementia I’ve ever read. This is a remarkable portrait of a country’s fragmentation and a family’s fracture.

Book Blast
Switching points of view and time period, the narrative structure resists straightforward lines of cause and effect, though never feels disjointed. The writing has an extemporised fluency to it and the long sentences are effortless to read.

The Irish Times