{"id":5974,"date":"2015-05-25T11:54:59","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T11:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5974"},"modified":"2015-06-01T11:33:09","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T11:33:09","slug":"farewell-cowboy-by-olja-savicevic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5974","title":{"rendered":"Farewell, Cowboy by Olja Savicevic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Translated by Celia Hawkesworth<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Istros Books 14 April 2015 <\/strong><\/p>\n

180pp, paperback, \u00a39.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

First published in Croatia in 2010, and extracted in Dalkey Archive\u2019s Best European Fiction 2014<\/em>, Farewell, Cowboy <\/em>opens in a ferocious heatwave.\u00a0 Red-haired Dada has decided to leave Zagreb and go home.\u00a0 It is 2009.<\/p>\n

\u2018And so I had made it.\u00a0 Yes, I\u2019d made it!\u00a0 I\u2019d returned to my home-town: nothing more than a vast rubbish dump, mud and olive groves, glorious dust, evenings on the empty terrace of the Illyria hotel, heavy metals in the air, excrement and pine-woods, cats and slippery fish scales on the greasy slipway and the sea stretched out as far as November, when the north wind gets up.\u2019<\/p>\n

Home is the Old Settlement, beside the Adriatic, where Dada\u2019s widowed mother tends the family grave.\u00a0 Home is memories of childhood games played with her brother Daniel and the local boys from across the tracks, known as the Iroquois Brothers: cowboys and Indians, naturally.\u00a0 Home is also the place where film crews come to shoot \u2018real\u2019 Westerns, because it\u2019s cheaper.\u00a0 It was her father who first loved the cowboys; when he became too ill to work at the cement factory, he got a job at the factory cinema.\u00a0 \u2018Those were brilliant years for his children,\u2019 especially for Daniel, who daydreamed about the stars.<\/p>\n

Now, home is the fevered tourist backdrop for cruise ships full of Japanese and American pensioners: \u2018casinos, the mild winds of hashish, the stench of bodies and perfume\u2026girls in high heels squeezed into white nylon and animal skins; clean-shaven lads jiggling the keys of polished cars, their hands smelling of vinyl and genitalia, money and tobacco.\u2019<\/p>\n

In this tale of goodies and baddies, Dada is on a hunt of her own, for the truth behind her brother\u2019s sensational suicide.\u00a0 What was going on with the Professor, closet paedophile and porn star?\u00a0 Who exactly was pretty Angelo, in his blue tuxedo?<\/p>\n

In this post-war landscape of \u2018dessicated orchards\u2019 and \u2018roses expiring in stone troughs\u2019, where ethnicity is \u2018everybody\u2019s business\u2019, Dada speaks with wrathful melancholy of her people\u2019s self-destructive impulses.\u00a0 Make no mistake, this is a story to give any casual tourist pause.\u00a0 There are no heroes here.<\/p>\n

Author Olja Savicevic is an award-winning poet, novelist and short-story writer, and one of Croatia\u2019s best-known authors. \u00a0In Celia Hawkesworth\u2019s fine translation, her anarchic modern voice leaps off the page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

In this post-war landscape of \u2018dessicated orchards\u2019 and \u2018roses expiring in stone troughs\u2019, where ethnicity is \u2018everybody\u2019s business\u2019, Dada speaks with wrathful melancholy of her people\u2019s self-destructive impulses. Make no mistake, this is a story to give any casual tourist pause. There are no heroes here […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5974"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5983,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5974\/revisions\/5983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}