“Life is just a lottery,” thinks Katja, one of a half-dozen characters whose fortunes are entangled in Jurica Pavičić’s Mother of Sorrows. Mr. Pavičić sets this complex thriller in Split, Croatia, in 2022. Katja, a widowed cleaning lady, lives with her 26-year-old daughter, Ines, and her slightly younger son, Mario. Ines works as a receptionist at a local hotel. Her life is complicated when the affair she’s having with her boss comes to the attention of his wife, who exposes the lovers on Facebook: “They had been stripped naked and tossed to the lions of social media.” A bigger story dominates the news: the murder of a teenage girl whose ravaged body is found early one morning in a deserted factory. The victim was the daughter of a well-known doctor.
Zvone, a police inspector, examines security footage and an automobile database to create a list of citizens with access to the make and model of a car seen near the scene of the crime. Among the suspects is Mario, who remains preternaturally calm under police questioning: “It occurred to Zvone that if Mario really was the killer, his conscience must have been surgically removed.” Mother of Sorrows, translated from the Croatian by Matt Robinson, is told in short chapters from its various characters’ points of view. The story is a police procedural with benefits: an investigatory chronicle that explores issues of free will and fate (“there was something toxic and corrupting in their blood,” Ines thinks of her family) against a backdrop of consumerist glamour and moral decay.’------Wall Street Journal (Tom Nolan)
“Following on from his prize-winning debut in English, Red Water, this is the second novel by Jurica Pavičić from Bitter Lemon Press (once again admirably translated by Matt Robinson) and is, like the first, set in and around the Croatian resort town of Split, where Pavičić lives. He is famous in Croatia as a screenwriter, journalist and writer of crime novels and short stories, in which he explores the social, political, psychological and moral circumstances behind the crimes and characters he creates. In Mother of Sorrows, his focus is on the complex, at times morally questionable, motivations of the protagonists – their instinct to protect family members and their relationships. Pavičić is a master of fine detail and deploys it to great effect to paint an unappealing picture of out-of-season Split, shorn of its tourists, surrounded in its outer suburbs with the squalid post-industrial detritus left behind after the collapse of Yugoslavia. It’s amongst the dross and debris of an abandoned factory that a body is found early one morning …
The body belongs to a teenager; she is, though, no rag-tag drug addict but the daughter of a well-known local chief physician and his professor wife, and there are no clues as to what brought her to this place: ‘Her lifeless body lay on a pile of bricks, ceramic tiles and glass, oddly twisted like a broken doll … waxen and unimaginably peaceful …’Her family are, of course, devastated, and their high profile in the community means the police are immediately under pressure to identify the murderer. This pressure increases as it soon becomes clear that there are almost no leads and very little evidence to work on. Forensics expert Inspector Zvone is a careful and meticulous operator, but his senior colleague Tomaš is much more inclined to seek easy answers, and the tension between them builds as the police investigation runs into one blind alley after another. All they can determine is that the girl left the club where she and a friend were dancing and drinking; with whom, why, and how she ended up in the ruined factory is the continuing mystery in the story.
Meanwhile, the murder and its impact on the community deliver unforeseen and potentially fatal blows to other local people, amongst them Katja and her two children, Ines and Mario. Katja is a widow who cleans offices to support her family – she hates the job and desperately wants to get better employment where her daughter Ines works. Ines runs guest services in a swish tourist hotel – and, by the by, is having a clandestine affair with its owner – while her brother Mario divides his time between computer games and running the odd errand for his mother; in essence, he’s a typical teenager: a blank page. But all three of them gradually find themselves faced with facts and emotions they would rather not acknowledge.
The book is divided into sections: section one – which is nearly half the novel – introduces us in gripping detail to all the characters whilst never quite telling us how their stories fit together or where we’re heading. This guessing game builds the tension remorselessly. Section two opens with fear, dismay, the destruction of vital evidence and yet more questions than answers. The characters are trapped by their actions and assumptions, both past and present, as they grapple with the inevitable question: who murdered the girl? The police investigation is still going nowhere, and planting a stash of drugs in the hope of a breakthrough, getting a conviction for the only possible perpetrator they’ve found, just seems par for the course. But there’s a deeper issue for all of us behind their dilemmas: what will we do to protect someone we love? Are we willing to accept the consequences? Are we even aware of them?
Once again, Pavičić tells a powerful story set against the background of events and attitudes in Croatia, a country that still hasn’t faced up to its recent past. His filmic style of switching back and forth between characters and storylines makes for a brilliant, if disturbing and sometimes baffling, read, but it precisely echoes and underlines the bafflement of the police! And finally, when the killer’s identity becomes clear to the reader, another baffling, unanswered question remains – why did they do it?
The Mother of Sorrows of the title is, we come to realise, one of the main characters, but is also Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, a Madonna with seven daggers in her heart, venerated in the local church, where the priest and the nun blatantly take the side of the rich and powerful against ordinary citizens. But the Virgin Mary ‘… knew what it was to be a mother, what a trial it was. The Devil had tested them, all of them … for a moment, the Devil had taken hold … but thanks to Our Lady, it had passed … and it was time to get on with their lives. The Mother of Sorrows has no regrets. The past is the past: nothing else matters…”---- Riveting Reviews, ELN, reviewed by Max Easterman
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Jurica Pavičič/MOTHER OF SORROWS (Bitter Lemon Press)
I was unable to review Pavicic’s CWA Dagger shortlisted and internationally prize-winning RED WATER on its initial English-language publication as my copy reached me too late to cover, but was mightily impressed reading it after the fact and the follow-up to be translated is no less moving, again examining the effect of violence, crime and war on society and often forlorn individuals in once Communist Croatia and had the power to touch intimate emotional buttons in the reader. with pinpoint accuracy and much compassion. MOTHER OF SORROWS is set in 2022 in the author’s native Split and paints a bleak but humane picture of a city still reeling from being torn asunder during the lengthy course of the Civil War through three characters: Katja, a mother whose life was shattered by a previous catastrophe and now partly seduced by the mirage of religion and works as a cleaner to support her family; her daughter Ines who is employed as a receptionist at a tourist hotel and son Mario whose opaque personality sees him come under strong suspicion following the murder of 17-year old Viktorija Reba, the daughter of a local doctor, inside an empty factory building. Enter Inspector Zvone, a cop with troubles of his own but dedicated to the job even when it means ignoring his superiors and treating apparent evidence in a cavalier fashion. All the characters are a reflection of the tumult of a society in turmoil, torn between memories of war and a future dominated by the all-embracing development of tourism. A gritty portrait of a family in turmoil, just like the landscape, historical and metaphorical, that surrounds them and the terrible crime that triggers their despair. The translation by Matt Robinson flows effortlessly.” ----CrimeTime
"We are in Croatia, 2022: a war-damaged country re-inventing itself as a tourist destination. In the city of Split the attractions are the magnificent Roman ruins which, in the event, have no more to do with this story than has murder. Mother of Sorrows is about a community epitomised by three people surviving the consequences of a crime which, for all its horror, is no more than a catalyst.
On the face of it, they are ordinary people. Ines is a receptionist in a chic hotel. A bright and impulsive young woman, she stands in stark contrast to her young brother, Mario, a drone with no job and no interests other than watching football on TV while being indulged and cossetted by Katja, his widowed mother. The family home is a flat in a concrete tower block where Katja works as a cleaner, always at war with the landlord who is currently in the process of turning the communal laundry room into extra space for tourists. Underpaid and overworked, Katja insists that Ines persuade her manager to find her an easier job at the hotel. Which would be a cinch except that, unknown to her mother, Ines is having a covert affair with her manager. Terrified of his wife, a suspicious and vengeful lady, Ines is walking on eggs and in no position to ask favours.At this moment, a body is found by a watchman in an abandoned industrial plant outside the city. The victim is quickly identified as the teenage daughter of a local doctor. She had been raped, stabbed and strangled.
With the community reeling from the shock, the best man is set to head the investigation. Inspector Zvone is the middle-ranking policeman with whom we are all familiar in different settings: the good detective who follows his conscience, makes allowances for other people’s mistakes, deplores and learns from his own: a man of empathy and guilt. This one lives in the inevitable decrepit tower block where he cares for his cantankerous old father: a veteran of wars which have left him unmoved and unscathed, a kind of shell with nothing left but a beloved boat, a grumbling prostate and a knowledge of how to kill. The few times that father and son accord are when they go out fishing at night and Zvone becomes aware of the innate difference between them and the inability to do anything about it. But he‘s a good cop and his percipience comes into play when evidence is found at the scene of the murder and it points to Mario. However, as Zvone starts to move against Katja’s boy, a domineering colleague muscles in with a more obvious and convenient suspect. This is a different kind of man, a pit bull with a personal vendetta against a rapist who has eluded him – and justice - for far too long.
Although Mario remains Zvone’s preferred suspect he’s blind to the intimidation and illicit practices being employed to frame the serial offender. Almost a sub-plot in itself this episode is the kind of diversion encountered by any murder case when the investigators try different roads in the quest for the right one. But this long and meaty insert is more; it’s an exposé of bad policing that comes close to the knuckle in more than one small Balkan country. It’s a neat balancing act, too: good cop, corrupt cop.
Meanwhile, long before Zvone was aware of Mario’s existence, or as anything more than a faceless hoodlum on a street corner, Ines and Katje knew. They had no doubts (although Katje had excuses); they took the guilt for granted and set out – separately - to shield the killer at whatever cost to themselves. They were surrounded by crooks. They countered with guile, buoyed up by integrity. How the situation was resolved, if it was, the part Zvone played in the resolution (and for some readers it could never be properly resolved) these are questions demanding answers that even as the wispiest of hints would be spoilers.
Here is a craftsman at work, and although the basic theme is one of infallible love and compassion, love has a hard fight against evil. And Pavicic’s villains are superlative. He allows his sympathetic characters to reveal themselves over time, but his miscreants, from the first abusive landlord through cops and priests to faithless lovers, all are drawn with a few strokes of the pen, and it’s one that’s been dipped in vitriol.
More than an intriguing read Mother of Sorrows is a masterpiece in construction and style, and well served by its translator, Matt Robinson.-----ShotsMag
“What would you sacrifice to protect someone you love from being exposed for committing a heinous act?
This test of loyalty is not just the grist of novels. Think about it before you read any further. Do you think you’re capable of turning in your child, brother, parent or spouse to law enforcement should you know or strongly suspect they are guilty of homicide?
One of Europe’s finest novelists, Croatian writer Jurica Pavičić, has spent nine novels and two short-story collections exploring insights into social analysis and ethical dilemmas. He has won several Croatian literary awards for the best novel in successive years, and his first book translated into English, “Red Water,” was reviewed in “Murder Ink” when it was released in the United States last December. Now we have a second stunning Pavičić novel released in the United States two weeks ago by the avant-garde Bitter Lemon Press of London – “Mother of Sorrows” translated breathtakingly by Matt Robinson, who also translated “Red Water.” And as with “Red Water,’’ we’re not to be entertained with a romp through heists, police dysfunction or courtroom doublespeak. We’re down to the heart of the matter, down to testing love vs justice, right vs wrong.
“Mother of Sorrows” is about Mario, the youngest of two children of Katja and Tomo, and Mario’s sister Ines, twice her brother’s age. We meet the Runjićs family of four on a crowded hot July beach excursion, a day away from their stifling apartment, Katja’s demeaning janitorial job, Ines’ tedium behind a hotel desk and Tomo’s truck-driving labor. Mario is 5 years old on this outing, and with the beach shoulder-to-foot overpeopled, he disappears after the fried chicken, watermelon and heat make everyone sleepy.
The search is on once the snooze is off. Amongst the swarm of beachgoers and the looming terror of a placid ocean, panic ensues.“Her parents scattered again. Ines was left alone. Two minutes, maybe five. She couldn’t tell. She was a child. To her it seemed like an eternity played out in deathly silence. There wasn’t a sound: no shouts of people playing in the water; no music from the beach bar; no calling from her father. Ines watched her mother wandering around in circles, upset, not knowing where or how to look. She watched her father staggering through the shallow water, simultaneously searching for his son and desperately hoping not to find his drowned body.
“Finally, Ines joined in, darting around without plan or purpose. She didn’t remember calling out for Mario. If she did, the words came out in a quiet, terrified mumble. “Then she saw him … at the very edge of the beach, where the layers of sand were deeper and the sea deposited seaweed and trash … muttering to himself, head bowed, engrossed, prodding the sand scrupulously with an ice cream stick. A miniature world lay before him, ramparts made from seaweed; and a moat of wet silt. Mario was completely absorbed in a Neverland shaped from grainy sand.”
This disquieting scene is at the beginning of the book and illustrates Pavičić’s style. And unrealized at this point, we may have stumbled into Mario’s beginning detachment from cognitive reality. I don’t reckon it’s a spoiler to venture into the story further. The fundamental plot concerns the disquietude of both mother and daughter, Katja and Ines. Each suspects the other of hiding evidence in the gruesome murder of a young, popular high school girl found in an abandoned factory, alongside the bloody top of a tracksuit, the bottom of which may belong to Mario and is found missing from his dresser drawer.
You should know, too, that an old man living in alongside the factory where young Viktorija Zeba’s body was discovered had seen a white car in the otherwise empty lot on the night of the murder. A white Renault, same as Mario drives on special occasions. The hysterical overreaction to create an alibi for Mario is conditioned upon a convicted rapist having recently served his sentence and moving to their snug little town of Split. What would you do to insulate a loved one from suspicion or indictment for murder? You don’t know the answer, and Pavičić will keep you up late before you discover if you’d pay the devil.---MurderInk, Durango Telegraph
