: Marinko Ko??ec
: A Handful of Sand
: Istros Books
: 9781908236630
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 120
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
A Handful of Sand is a love story and an ode to lost opportunity. Now far from his homeland, the novel's protagonist looks back on his life, from his childhood, university days and first working experience to more intimate emotional events, making critical observations on human relationships and human existence. Interchanging with the chapters written in the narrator's voice are those narrated by a woman. As her story progresses, we realise that she is the love of his life: something that she hopes he will realise before it is too late.''Croatia&apos s foremost literary stylist, Marinko Ko??ec produces the kind of novels that combine crafted sentences and structural experiments without ever losing their storytelling drive'' TIMEOUT CROATIA This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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Exactly three weeks later they started jumping. There had only just been time for me to acclimatise and for the aggression of unfamiliar smells to stop. Time for the spirits of the former tenants to disperse–that residue of messy, broken lives; that concentrate of misery. And time for me to attain at least a fragile peace with this space, without any ambition to feel it would ever be mine.

The living room became my studio; there was a bathroom, a kitchen with a dining corner, and a tiny closet of a bedroom. And as much light as I needed, thanks to the generous windows: fortunately with bars. Call it paranoia if you like, but being alone in the basement flat, I was glad they were there. I soon learnt that dogs raised their legs at the windows, even those which were kept on a leash. I had always wanted to have a dog, or at least its bark. Like the yapping which the neighbour has to guard his flat, three or so floors up. The windows were also pissed on by beer-soaked football fans after every match, since the stadium was just one hundred metres away. They always came in groups and yowled theirDii-naa-mo orWe are the champions, Croa-a-atia! There was a cramped parking area in front of the windows, and in the middle some of the tenants heroically maintained a little island of greenery with signs likeDon’t kill the plants, God is watching you! Opposite there was a house which a religious community built for itself. They had evening gatherings several days a week, and also on weekends. You didn’t see the people arrive, you just heard the strains of a song, barely audible but borne by an ever greater chorus, and ever more imbued with His voice. When they really whooped it up, I opened the windows and fired back with industrial noise. Or with the folk singer Sigfriede Skunk, from her Satanistic phase which ended in her being put away in the loony-bin. That didn’t discourage the faithful vis-à-vis, but at least it struck a kind of balance in the sound waves. I also heard my upstairs neighbours very clearly whenever they had sex, or when they argued and started smashing the furniture. Once I tried to signal to them that my ears didn’t want anything to do with it by banging the broomstick on the ceiling. They took this as a wish to participate, as if I was flirtatiously egging them on, and replied with an identical tock-tock-tock before going on to groan even more heartily and fuck each other with a vengeance.

And then a lady threw herself off the twelfth floor. I was sitting on the windowsill with my millionth cigarette; without a thought, except perhaps for the warmth of the autumn night and the intensive quivering of the stars as I sieved the sky in vain, searching for the angel of sleep. All at once, behind my back I heard a sound like a breath of wind. I just managed to turn my head slightly, enough to glimpse an unnaturally twisted lower leg and a bare foot out of the corner of my eye. A split second later there came a thud, without an echo, as a heap of dead l