A piano usually has 88 keys, 52 white and 36 black, from which 88 tones emerge. As a rule, a pianist reads 88 notes. These 88 microprose simultaneously make up one piano and one piano concerto. Each story is one tone, but all the stories gathered together, because that's how they should be read, as a whole, do not make a novel, as someone might mistakenly think, but a precisely formed musical form. At first glance, the world of Nadija Rebronje is not mimetic, does not describe reality, does not testify in court. But just as Bach's Goldberg Variations do not describe reality, nor can they be used as evidence in a court of law, and yet nothing speaks of reality as precisely as when Glenn Gould mumbles playing the Goldberg Variations, so too 88, by Nadije Rebronje, the world and life is derived in words. The music of existence. A wonderfully, unbearably beautiful book, which this reader now considers his own. And the second, black, hole, which reads: " - from a fast train you can see how the train breaks the world around us through the windows./ - it is necessary to break the world in order to build a new one from pieces.", for the reader, is the ultimate definition of travel.
Miljenko Jergovic
Before us is an unusual book, for which casual, unengaged readers would not be able to say whether it is "easy" or "difficult" - but in any case they would read it gladly and with pleasure, because it has that appeal that draws to music and to some stories that seem to be familiar to us all... However, under that unbearable lightness , "the waves broke the text" and turned it into 88 piano keys/songs in prose, and they speak to us about the cruel tenderness "that breaks the world around us", when "you move too fast to be a body, you are just music" - but not so fast that the author fails to record the horror and beauty of the modern world, inside and outside. Nadija writes a great homage to reading - among other things, she offers us a wonderful combination of Borges and Harms ("one man wanted to die heroically on all seven continents"), but giving us a concert for text and pain in a feminine way - the best way..
Ferida Durakovic
Book 88 is built from 88 "piano keys " , fragments, which are not connected by any external, mechanical frame. The 6th key/fragment, in which the female speaking subject says that she met a pianist who was formerly a philosopher, a student of hydronautics, a candidate for a porn actor, a plantation worker, can serve as a key to understanding the construction principle. After reading the Divine Comedy , the pianist broke the piano "and left behind eighty-eight worlds in eighty-eight holes " . This indicates that Rebronja is building a world in which, quite Borgesian, a book is perceived as real as the table or piano on which that book is standing. The Borgesian procedure is also reflected in the fact that the author imagined that some short stories, novellas, or even novels had already been written, and then in her fragments she brings us a "summary" of the character, fate, or existential situation on which these "written" works are based. Since the big themes - such as death, freedom, love, tradition - which these fragments deal with, no longer guarantee the convincing integrity of a literary work, 88 reminds us that contemporary prose lives more on the tact and taste of the person who writes that prose than on big themes. That's why these fragments are "not yet " , or "not yet " , a part of some solid whole, which they metonymically represent. The high degree of independence of the fragments and the way in which Rebronja builds the rhythm of his book allow 88 to be read as poetry in prose, as a book that at the same time confirms that no verse is completely free, if a person is serious about his work.
Almir Basovic