Alen Mattich

This is the first novel I have read by Alen Mattich, and I did not realize that this novel was the third book in a series. I may investigate the other titles about Marko della Torre.

As I read the first few pages, I wondered why I knew so little about the former Yugoslavia, a country name I recognized from elementary school geography lessons, but that was divided into other countries due to civil wars that occurred during my adult life.

"According to the Succession Agreement signed in Vienna on 29 June 2001, all assets of former Yugoslavia were divided between five successor states. In June 2006, Montenegro became an independent nation after the results of a May 2006 referendum, therefore rendering Serbia and Montenegro no longer existent. After Montenegro's independence, Serbia became the legal successor of Serbia and Montenegro, while Montenegro re-applied for membership in international organisations. In February 2008, the Republic of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, leading to an ongoing dispute on whether Kosovo is a legally recognized state. Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations, but 115 states, including the United States and various members of the European Union, have recognised Kosovo as a sovereign state." ~Credit to Wikipedia

At times the novel was very challenging for me to read because even with the provision of the map of the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the book, I could only sometimes follow the narrative of travel with ease as continually flipping back to the map was disruptive. So, instead of concentrating on my lack of understanding of the geography, I focused on the essence of the storyline. I became thoroughly immersed in the characters' lives and how they responded to the war within their country. This novel brought each person's resilience, courage, and the ways in which they expressed their definition of humanity to one another. At times, it was breathtaking; at times, I was cheering for their audacity, and at other times, I felt tears in my eyes.

As I read the Acknowledgements at the end of the novel, I again was transfixed that I know so little about the

"destruction and suffering by the Yukoslav's civil war of the 1990s"

as it happened during my adult life. I was questioning myself as to How could I not know? Intellectually, I know that I was paying little attention to global current events due to the circumstances of my personal life during that time. Regardless, it made me feel emotionally distraught and self-absorbed.

If a part of this novel can be called beautiful, it is in the dedication of this novel by the author to his parents who left Yugoslavia and as immigrants struggled and persevered from outright poverty to succeed in giving their children better lives and more hopeful futures. The novel's title is as expressive as the novel's subject matter. The novel captivated my heart and soul.… (plus d'informations)

Autumn, 1991. The sounds, the scents, the light and look of Croatia come through clearly in this best-by-far third installment of the Marko della Torre mystery series. “Wild thyme and lavender, pine resin and a faint fragrance of the sea” waft around della Torre as he plans a middle-of-the-night sailboat crossing from the island of Korčula to Dubrovnik in the middle of the Yugoslav blockade of that walled city on the Dalmatian coast.

Della Torre is a senior member of the newly-formed Croatian military intelligence, but with a government in disarray and the former Yugoslavia breaking into component countries at the hands of vengeful and land-grabbing combatants, no knowledge, no ‘friend’ was firm, steady, or sure. Della Torre is out of his depth much of the time in this novel, tossed about physically and emotionally by his alliances with the untrustworthy.

We follow della Torre in his rented Citroën from almost-winter in Zagreb (“a green city, pocket-sized, and close to wilderness”) to late summer in Rijeka close to Croatia’s northwestern coast and the “beautiful Venetian city” of Poreč. He drives south along the coast road hoping to find a way into Dubrovnik despite the Yugoslav blockade. He travels to Herveg Novi in Montenegro before he leaves the south for Belgrade and Vukovar, in his search for reasons why the CIA is so interested in his movements and involved in his affairs.

Mattich has the heart of a novelist (or travel writer), though his other life as Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal financial reporter may leave him little time or energy for creating characters that stand up for what is right in the war-torn Balkans. This third novel in the Marko della Torre series is a heady mix of spy thriller and war reporting along the crystalline Adriatic. The morally complex characters keep our wits sharpened: we don’t quite trust anyone but time and again these characters surprise us with their generosity, humor, grit and drive. Especially notable in this novel is Strumbić, a man who lives large in his role as policeman, prisoner, fixer, smuggler, thief, and friend to Marko della Torre.

We hear the canny Wall Street insider behind Strumbić’s words to della Torre about money and risk:

“Gringo, when you grow up using chestnut leaves to wipe your ass, the man with an indoor toilet is rich. You’re right, though, I’ve got enough. The money is neither here nor there. But I’m not a gambler. For one thing, real gambling is putting something on the line you can’t afford to lose, and the odds aren’t particularly good. Think about things that way and you realize you’re the gambler, Gringo. For me, mostly it’s an intellectual challenge. Like Dubrovnik. How many cigarettes do you stock up on? How many should you sell? Or do you wait for the price to go higher? Do you dump your holdings when people find out the armada’s coming to save them? Or do you pay some docker in Split to unload all the cigarettes and then sell into the panic when the boats arrive with only half the expected supplies? These are all hypotheticals, mind…A lot of money that comes in goes out…ultimately money matters because it gives you control.”

In his Acknowledgements, Mattich notes that his work of fiction hangs on a scaffolding of history. That history, he notes, is both well documented and well told in Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War and Laura Silber’s The Death of Yugoslavia. The sleepy river town of Vukovar was the site of an 87-day siege by the Yugoslav People’s Army that destroyed the town in the autumn of 1991. “It is estimated that the city suffered the most massive and sustained barrage fire in Europe since Stanlingrad.” That siege and its aftermath has since been labelled a massacre for the thousands of defending Croatian National Guard and civilians that were killed. Mattich loosely quotes the opening lines of Dante's Inferno and never did it seem so apt.

The horrors of history are therefore addressed in Mattich’s fiction, lest we forget. Mattich is able to draw our attention to the beauty and terror of the place and time with a lightly-told, thought-provoking, and informative tale of spies-on-spies. I can’t recommend it more highly. Each book in this series is a real treat, but this last was his best. I didn’t want it to end.

This series is published by House of Anansi Press in Canada. This book and the others in the series will be available in the United States in paper this summer and I urge those interested in international fiction to order them early and often.… (plus d'informations)

Words are Mattich’s business…I mean in real life. He is a journalist and columnist based in London, writing for financial concerns like The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. He makes dry and convoluted financial, political, and historical matters comprehensible and interesting. He makes a second incursion into fiction with this comedic spy novel set on the Balkan Peninsula, in the region of the former Yugoslavia. His first novel, rel="nofollow" target="_top">Zagreb Cowboy, was the most fun, thought-provoking, and informative crime novel I read last year. At the moment, Mattich is not published in the United States, but I expect that is merely an oversight that will be corrected soon.

Zagreb, 1991. Marko della Torre alias the Gringo, works for a Croatian state security less than two months old. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from the Yugoslav republic in June 1991, and the new Croatian government “nationalized” former federal buildings. Marko had been a member of the regional headquarters of the Yugoslavian Department of Internal Security (UDBA) in Zagreb, Department IV, which was responsible for investigating extra-judicial killings.

“[Della Torre watched] the watchers everyone feared…No other secret police force in the world was as successful at killing people beyond its borders—not the KGB, not the Stasi, not the Securitate, not Savak, not even Mossad. The CIA didn’t even register as competition. Della Torre’s job was to find and prosecute any UDBA operations done outside the scope of Yugoslav laws. Killing done for the personal motives of people in power.”

With independence, della Torre’s office was to be absorbed into ‘military intelligence,’ in a Croatian military in its infancy. Armed forces in every state of the former Yugoslavia would like to see the UDBA, its personnel and its files, disappear.

One thread in this novel is about the assassin called the Montenegrin, and his killing of “Pilgrim,” code name for Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, whose death in February 1986 was never solved.

--from the Acknowledgements: ”Olof Palme’s assassination on that cold February night in 1986 remains one of Europe’s great unsolved crimes of the postwar era…There are numerous theories about who might have been behind the killing and why. One is that the Yugoslav government was somehow involved. This isn’t particularly far-fetched. The UDBA may not be in the popular imagination like the KGB or the Stasi, but of all the organs of state security operating from Europe’s Communist bloc, the Yugoslav secret police was perhaps the most murderous beyond its borders—even if its known targets were Yugoslav dissidents or some related or associated with them.”

Mattich brings us to Vukovar in August 1991, just months before the infamous Vukovar Massacre at a hospital in November of that year. This undoubtedly foreshadows a future novel in the series since it is only touched upon, putting our nerves on edge and placing della Torre’s wife squarely in the center of the action, while the storyline brings us down the Dalmatian coast to the walled city of Dubrovnik where the Montenegrin has a hideout. The CIA shows up and wants him neutralized.

Along the way Mattich shares the beauty of the Adriatic: “The waters of Croatia’s Adriatic are crystalline blue and turquoise to a depth of ten metres and more, so that the coral fans and black round balls of spiny sea urchins on distant bare rocks appear to be no more than an arm’s length below the surface. This clarity engenders a sense of vertigo.” His descriptions of the coastline and mountains makes one yearn to visit. And he tells us the myth of the American West thrives and the whole country grew up reciting the stories of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, the famous cowboy and Indian pair created by German novelist, Karl May:

“Everybody had heard of Winnetou. Even if they hadn’t read the books, they’d seen the films. They were famous. ‘German movies made with Yugoslavs…based on the books by Karl May. May was a German wrote a bunch of adventures about exotic places...Most of what he wrote was from a debtor’s prison. Anyway, he’s famous in Germany and Yugoslavia…[everybody here] loves cowboys and Indians, mostly because of him…He was Hitler’s favorite writer.’”

This series is just too interesting to miss. Mattich strikes just the right tone as he introduces us to a region with which we may not be familiar, reminding us of recent earth-shattering events there and inviting us to imagine what life must have been like when Yugoslavia broke into its component states: “any sense of brotherhood was riven by two alphabets, three religions, innumerable dialects, and a history of mutual loathing.”

Mattich’s characters are richly developed and ambiguously framed by their questionable behaviors, and yet we admire and respect even the hitmen for their devotion to duty and family....all except for the Americans. The CIA operatives introduced in this novel are admired for their equipment, money, and dental work, but little else. And Mattich is funny. He catches the absurd and delivers it in such a way the one begins to imagine how nice it would be to be sitting late into the night around a small wooden table with a bottle of slivovitz and a bunch of rough-looking middle-aged policemen, shooting the bull.

This book is available in a deliciously high-quality paperback edition or for download from The House of Anansi Press in Canada. I have a paper copy I can giveaway to one interested reader of my blog. Giveaway completed February 20, 2014.

A word about the eBook: for some reason, those cute little accent marks above the alphabet letters for Serbo-Croat place and people names (e.g., Poreč, Anzulović, and Strumbić) are not manifest in the eBook but are replaced by an annoying question mark instead. It takes a little getting used to, but the book is understandable even without having the proper alphabet. I don’t really understand why it is not possible to rectify this (how hard is this?) but urge the eBook publisher to rethink this for the future. This series is worth any effort or expense in getting it right.

A third book in the series, The Heart of Hell, is scheduled for publication in February 2015.
… (plus d'informations)