A. S. PatrićCritiques

...Grey lives

Powerful evocation of the significant harm humans do to one another, of the grave consequences of violence & conflict and of how easy it is to forget humanity if we listen to the lies of stereotypes. Patric's novel made me remember the vast misery of the 'Yugoslav' wars. How quickly we had forgotten it. How quickly moved to other tragedies, to other dramas -Jovan & Suzana's story is one I needed to hear. It is very sad and often grim but they hold on & the book offers more than a little hope. I am still trying to make sense of Dr. Graffito. 4 & 1/2 stars.

Powerful, moving and affecting, this book's images and story will stay with me. Where social realism meets parable, the story is about the migrant experience in Australia.
Jovan and his wife Suzana are Serbian refugees living in Melbourne. They're intellectuals who are unable to use their intellects. Their two children died after eating poisoned food in a refugee camp.
Jovan works as a cleaner in a bayside hospital. He is tormented by a graffiti vandal whose defacements he has to clean.
The tort is one of the sources of tension that builds to a disturbing climax.
Black Rock White City is a glimpse into the struggle life is for new Australians.
Patric inhabits his characters who stayed with me between reads.

In his unsettling and explosive first novel, A. S. Patrić tells the story of Jovan and Suzana Brakochevich, Serbian refugees living in Melbourne, Australia. Jovan is a janitor at a hospital. Suzana performs household chores for families in a suburb called Black Rock. In Sarajevo before the war both had been educators, lecturing on literature at the university. Jovan was a published poet, Suzana a fiction writer. They also had a son and daughter. When the war came they were forced out of their teaching positions, persecuted and tortured. Fleeing the conflict, Jovan and Suzana eventually escaped to Australia, but their children did not survive, perishing under tragic circumstances in a refugee camp. Years later the parents exist in a purgatory of guilt and self-loathing and suffer from a kind of emotional paralysis. Jovan no longer writes and the two barely communicate. At the hospital, graffiti has started appearing, and Jovan is tasked with cleaning away the cryptic and eerily disturbing messages and drawings from the building’s walls and floors. Despite the increased vigilance of hospital staff, the wave of vandalism persists and evolves, the perpetrator emboldened by success. Letters are carved into the skin of a corpse; after a message appears on her eye chart an ophthalmologist commits suicide. Then a woman is gruesomely murdered. Jovan, disgusted by the public’s fascination with the unknown culprit, whom he calls Dr Graffito, starts to wonder if the messages are targeting him personally. As the weeks pass and the situation at the hospital escalates, Jovan’s ongoing affair with a sexually ravenous dentist becomes combative, he encounters a drug-addled nurse who convinces herself that Jovan is the graffiti artist, and Suzana’s memories of a university professor from her student days who treated her with astonishing cruelty become more vivid. In the final scene—a frenetic crescendo—some questions are resolved, others are not. Black Rock White City, never simple or easy, pulls the reader into the grim, haunted reality that refugees like Jovan and Suzana inhabit, a world that has been shattered by senseless brutality and violence that obliterates everything in its path. But at the end of their story we can see that a seed of hope has been planted: clearly they will never put the past behind them, but together maybe they can move toward a better future.

4.75 Stars. My introduction to A S Patric’s writing was his second published collection of short fiction Las Vegas for Vegans (2012) and I have read every title he has published since – a novella called Bruno Kramzer, his Miles Franklin award-winning debut novel Black Rock White City and second novel Atlantic Black. One always has the feeling of being in safe hands with A S Patric's writing — emotional confrontation, impact and reward guaranteed.

It is pleasing to see this latest collection The Butcherbird Stories published in quality hardback… something of a rarity these days, but its contents are deserving of such packaging. I took my time reading the eleven short fictions contained. From the shortest works of ‘H.B.’, ‘Amy in#12’ and ‘The Rothko’ at 3-5 pages to lengthier titles, 50+ page pieces ‘Among the Ruins’ and ‘The Flood’, each resonates long after reading. So much so, that it felt akin to sacrilege to dive straight into the next. I let myself ponder each a while. Read full review >>½

The heat of the Melbourne summer certainly came through.

I think I might have 'enjoyed' this even more if I was Australian.

There was genuine disappointment in our group for this first 2018 meeting. The themes and content of Black Rock White City seemed promising and everyone was keen to delve into the tough issues, namely the refugee experience of displacement and culture integration.
But not even the most persistent and stalwart of us could gleam any real value in this award winning novel. And yes, we all stuck with it in the hope that at some point a light would turn on and reveal, if not a masterpiece, at least a thoughtful and stimulating work.
Unfortunately it was unanimous that there was no real chance of ever connecting with Jovan or his situation. His character stayed one dimensional and fostered no empathy with our readers, no matter how hard they tried. And let’s be honest, you shouldn’t really have to try too hard!
There was a slight hope that his wife Suzana might salvage the wreckage, but alas no, she also fell into the category of uninspiring protagonist.
So having all the right elements in place for a good novel does not necessarily guarantee reader success. With good reviews and a literary prize, we acknowledge the skill expertise on show here, but concerning a good read, what ever the critics discovered between these pages got lost in the translation for us.½

This is an intriguing read, a book I couldn't put down. It also worried me, because every character in the story is flawed and difficult. The outbreak of crimes, the background of war atrocities, and the bleakness of suburban existence jostle with an emotive story of immigrant struggles. I think this is an important book, although it may prove too confronting for some readers. Try it. If you can manage to read through the sadnesses and the seemingly inevitable misery of the everyday, you will find it is a story which stays with you for a long time.

When I read his earlier works Las Vegas for Vegans and Bruno Kramzer, it was clear to me that A S Patric would go on to create literature that would be remembered by many. His writing style is uncompromising and thought-provoking. His debut in long form fiction Black Rock White City was stunning. Now with the publication of Atlantic Black he has given new meaning to 'haunting'. This is a novel to be read in, if not one, as few sittings as possible. Embarking on its reading is like being sucked into a vortex — there’s no going back, only through. Read full review >>½

Atlantic Black is a book which repays patience. Don’t start reading it expecting to understand everything that’s going on, it will take its own time for all the pieces to fall into place.
The central premise is this: what happens if a precocious and superficially worldly teenage girl is suddenly all alone with no one to protect or guide her in a disinterested and irresponsible society? Patric’s microcosm of society is aboard an ocean liner and Katerina is travelling with her mother from Mexico to Europe, when amid the revelry of New Year’s Eve her mother is taken ill and Katerina is free to test out her independence, free from all constraints.
This territory of adolescent risk-taking has already been mined, memorably in Kirsten Krauth’s just_a_girl, (see my review) where Krauth’s character in her adolescent hubris uses internet technology to encounter the kind of monsters all parents fear. But Patric has abandoned the interconnected 21st century to show us this adolescent quest for independence at its most elemental. RMS Aquitania is not a contemporary cruise ship … instead it is an ocean liner suspended wholly in the isolation of the Atlantic Ocean in winter. The year is the fateful 1939 and the only form of communication is the telegraph, open to passengers only during business hours. This is not a scenario where Katerina can text or phone her friends and family or chat to them on Facebook, and she has to negotiate her way round a ship full of complete strangers. Knowing as we do the peril that can befall grown women on cruise ships, this scenario has all the ingredients for disaster, and Katerina has only her own resources and judgement to fall back on…
The strangers she confronts come from all stations of life, including the wealthy leisured class to which Katerina belongs, working people including the staff, and all sorts in between. Not all of them are benign.
So, we see Katerina oscillate between concern for her erratic mother and her delight in her independence. Although worried about her mother’s mental health, Katerina relishes her freedom and tests the boundaries by acting like an adult. There are symbolic changes: she goes about wearing high heels and her mother’s elegant dresses and fur coats; and she signs for meals in the dining room although she doesn’t know how to order because her mother has always done it for her. But there are also behavioural and attitudinal changes: She demands service from staff who are used to treating her as a child under the care of her mother, and she behaves aggressively towards them when they hesitate to do what she wants. More crucially, she puts herself at risk by going about alone when there are, as always, men who will prey on women who are alone and vulnerable.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/08/atlantic-black-by-a-s-patric/

Stunning in its complexity and powerful use of symbolism, in Black Rock White City Patric hones in on resilience and beauty amidst bleakness. His exploration of the nuance of language and its usage, in celebration of beauty and capacity to both connect and marginalise is haunting. Read our full review of Black Rock White City >>

Interesting novel, unravelled a bit in the third quarter but hauled itself back on track for a satisfying finale. I am surprised this book won the Miles Franklin last year, given the books it was up against but it certainly deserved a spot on the shortlist.

Patric offers us some very astute observations of human nature, mainly via main character Jovan, occasionally from his wife Susana. The way the characters are drawn, the author manages to deliver such complexity and depth to each of his main protagonists without dwelling in pity for them. Difficult, given some of the horrific incidents that occur.

He is very descriptive - in some cases too much so, but some of these small passages are among the best.

This was my online book group's read for the month and I think it is a deserved winner of the Miles Franklin Book Award.
We follow the day to day lives of Jovan and Suzana Brakochevich, he as a janitor in Melbourne Hospital and she as a cleaner of peoples homes.
Their relationship is fractured by the traumas they experienced in their homeland, Bosnia. Gradually the reader learns what they experienced and develops a compassion for the adjustments they face in continuing to build a life together. Jovan's is finding his job stressful as an unknown graffiti artist lets loose on the hospital and his writings and drawings become more macabre. The book reaches a climax in the final pages.½

This first novel and winner of the Miles Franklin 2016 was a book that I could not put down. A wonderful insight into what life is really like in Australia for refugees from war-torn countries. In this case the couple have left terrible tragedy behind in Sarajevo but are haunted by this part of their lives as they struggle to adapt to their new life.
PS Read the section under description which sums up the story far better than I can.