Romaneskni vrtovi Dževada Karahasana
Novelistic Gardens of Dževad Karahasan

Author(s): Dijana Hadžizukić
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Bosnian Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Fakultet humanističkih nauka, Univerzitet »Džemal Bijedić« u Mostaru
Keywords: Dževad Karahasan; Eastern Diwan; Šahrijar's Ring; Sara and Serafina; Night Council; What the Ashes Say; Introduction to Floating; a postmodern novel;
Summary/Abstract: The book Novelistic Gardens of Dževad Karahasan consists of texts dedicated to the author's topos such as: garden, city, the relationship between the inner and outer (the meaning of the border / door), death, the semiotics of letters and writing, while the first part of the book provides a brief description of each of the six novels. The research corpus included the novels: Eastern Diwan, Šahrijar's Ring, Sara and Serafina, Night Council, What the Ashes Say and Introduction to Floating. Each of Karahasan's novels offers different reading possibilities, but, with regard to the chronotopic determination and compositional structure, we can basically divide them into two groups: Eastern Diwan, Šahrijar's Ring and What the Ashes Say, on the one hand, and: Sara and Serafina, Night Council and An introduction to Floating, on the other hand. The first group consists of novels whose textual characteristics are predominantly postmodernist, with a metatextual framework in which an old manuscript was found in focus, and with a multitude of different chronotopes and narrators. The author links the second group of novels to the recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and their composition is much simpler than that of the previous ones. The Night Council takes place in 1991 in Foča, while the plots of the novels Introduction to Floating and Sara and Serafina are set in besieged wartime Sarajevo. Even though, these novels completely exhaust their chronotope in pre-war and post-war Sarajevo and Foča, their protagonists' search for wholeness, identity and freedom, a story about evil and crime, a story about sacrifice and betrayal, a story about the position of bastards in a single-minded political system, the meanings of borders, writing, longing, carnivalization etc., make these novels an inseparable whole with the previous ones. The play with the text, which is visible at first glance in the first group of novels, is now hidden, so it is more complex.

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