[W]e can't write risk-free, calculatingly. (...) Everything that people are capable of, good and bad, black and white, grey, it's all a legitimate literary topic, including those human actions that exceed the boundaries of convention, morality, law, political correctness... and when you write about it, it sometimes seems controversial, and a part of the reader is disturbed. — Matej Vrebac spoke with writer Drago Glamuzin on the occasion of the publication of his book The Night Porter in Buybook's "Diary" edition.
You are writing the seventh title in Buybook's "Diary" series, launched by Semezdin Mehmedinović, and I assume you have certainly read some of the previously published diaries. Can you tell us more about how the collaboration came about? You yourself have extensive editorial experience with a significant number of books, but what was it like collaborating with Semezdin in the role of editor of Noćni portir ?
When Semezdin invited me to participate in Buybook's edition, at first I thought that it was not for me, I had in mind a classic diary and I wondered why anyone would be interested in how I spend my days and what I do, and it seemed to me that it would be boring to write it down. But while I was reading Kaplan's diary, which the author had sent me while it was still in manuscript, that text somehow opened up for me, I saw the space that interested me, I realized that I could base the book on my previous books, but that I would approach the topic in a different way, in a different genre, and that there is a lot of space for researching the form and crossing the boundaries of the genre, and suddenly everything became very interesting to me. In early 2022, I started typing those notes and very quickly discovered that I really enjoyed writing them. Then everything went easily. And I enjoyed until the very end the way the story unfolded and the possibilities offered to me. And I am grateful to Semezdin for inviting me and encouraging me, because without him this book would certainly not exist.
In a few places you metatextually touch on the diary genre itself and skillfully play with it, building narrative and novel threads that extend. You also write that you have previously published fragments of your diary on the radio. What was the experience like writing in the diary genre after you had already successfully established yourself in poetry and narrative prose, primarily novels? It is clear that in the diary genre, not even the author himself knows the end, unlike the author of a novel, but what else is different?
Several things were interesting to me: firstly, when it comes to my novels, I was regularly asked how much autobiographical material there was, and how they were written in the I-form, and some things coincided with my life, many were inclined to assume that everything in them was autobiographical, there were even those who thought that in the novel Tri , it was almost a diary-like tracking of the growth and decay of a love relationship. The diary, on the other hand, by definition deals with autobiographical material, so it was interesting for me to see how I would now arrange that material into some literary structure, and I very quickly decided that faithfulness to the text would be more important to me than the diary's fidelity to the truth, that is, that I would add to and rewrite that life material if the text required it, thus moving it a little towards fiction from the start. In this sense, this text is much closer to my novels than it seems at first glance, it belongs to the same world and to the same set of relationships. But the form is still different, and thus the rhythm and style, and that's exactly why his writing was a challenge for me.
Secondly, I decided that I will not follow everything that happens to me in it, but only one set of very intimate topics, that I will follow one narrative line that will stretch through the entire text, and different fragments from my day/night life will then be attached to it. So he certainly has something romantic in him.
And finally, I write about all this in the book, I comment on the creation of that diary with friends, so in a way he thinks of himself, or writes himself, which was also interesting to me. And that detail you mention was created that way. When they invited me to contribute to the radio show Suvremena hrvatska proza , I sent them the beginning of the diary, and when a listener heard it on the radio, she sent me an object that I write about that I miss and am looking for.
And that story found its place again in Night Porter .
Am I right in saying that in your lyrics you will always return to certain topics, such as adultery? In several places, you thematize jealousy and adultery, describing how the world would be a boring place if we didn't cross borders, and that part is one of the more interesting to me.
I have already said that the text is based on my novels, among other things, the topics it deals with, including adultery, but there is less of that in this book, it is more concentrated on trying to reconstruct the most intimate relationships within the family.
In a conversation with a friend, you say that you don't want to hurt anyone with this book, to which he retorts that a book "that is not at least partly social suicide" is not a book. You don't even name your loved ones at the beginning, and then we find out who Iva, Goran, Lucija are... How do you see this "social suicide"? What makes it special here compared to your past works?
This is to emphasize that we cannot write without risk, calculatingly. Literature has the privilege of being able to penetrate all layers of human life, the psyche, the subconscious... even where science or philosophy cannot. Everything that people are capable of, good and bad, black and white, gray, it's all a legitimate literary topic, and so are those human actions that exceed the boundaries of conventions, morality, law, political correctness... and when you write about it, it sometimes seems controversial, and a part of the reader is disturbed. But the task of literature is to disturb us, it is not a carefree escape from reality, but it should break that frozen sea in us (to paraphrase Kafka's famous sentence once again).
The problem with the diary is that it, as a genre, implies that everything described in it is true, not in the sense of the truth of the text, but the truth of life. And that has its consequences. At one point in the book, I refer to a few sentences from Max Frisch's Diary , which says that in terms of confessional literature, a novel in the third person has the most potential, and then a novel in the first person, while the least of our inner, hidden things can be brought into the diary. But I also tried to write The Night Porter without calculating. And as I said before, I didn't hesitate to fictionalize either, which still gave me some cover.
Some of the most beautiful diary pages for me personally are about your relationship with your daughter and son, the moments you spend together and the fatherly care you show. Have Goran and Lucija already had a chance to read the diary? What is their experience or at least what kind of reactions do you hope for?
My son read in parallel with the creation, I sent him the texts as I wrote them and then commented on them with him. He is therefore not only a character in the text, but also one of the first readers with whom I discussed all the places that troubled me while I was writing them. My daughter read certain parts and gave me permission to publish some of her photos and drawings in the book. And she didn't complain about anything. They have a lot of space in the book, and I was always afraid of slipping into pathos, because it's hard to write about unconditional love without being pathetic.
An important element of The Night Porter is the photographs that are placed between the covers. How do you view the role of these photographs in the diary, how do they correspond to the textual part of the diary?
I tried to ensure that these photos are not mere illustrations of the text, and that they do not limit the reader's imagination, but that they somehow complement and communicate with the text. In that sense, it seems to me that they give the text an extra dimension and I'm very pleased with how it turned out.
Is The Night Porter also a kind of chronicle of literary life? You write on the occasion of the death of Igor Mandić, you give us an insight into the selection of the novel of the year and the editing of Singer's translations, but there we also meet the festivals Imperativ and Vrisak, as well as Ivica Prtenjača, Zoran Ferić, Tomislav Brlek...
It was not my intention to write a chronicle of literary life, but such events and characters appear inside only as much as they are related to what happens to me, when it has some affective influence on me and my condition, when they determine the rhythm of my life.
A lot of things have found their place in the diary, but an important layer is made up of essay-style critical passages about the literature you read. Singer seems to be the most present, but there is also room for Paul Bowles, Srđan Gavrilović, Ivo Andrić and Mirko Kovač. Do you think that The Night Porter is perhaps a kind of reading diary? Do you have a habit of keeping a reading diary at all, have you ever done so before?
And for Elisabeth Strout, Albert Moravia, Hugo Pratt... I've never kept a reading journal, but reading is one of the most important parts of my life, in every way. Among other things, it is the activity that I spend most of my time on, every day, and it was only logical that something about that reading life should be included in the book. But very quickly I decided that I would not try to write objectively, or critically, about those books, but only about the way the books I read affect me, the way they relate to me. So, I went from those books to myself, using what I read in them to clarify or express similar things, emotions, actions that were happening to me or were bothering me. Those in the book function as a kind of background that reflects my world that I write about.
The nocturnal nature of the book is clear from the title itself, which is also confirmed by the fact that its working title was The Night Book . The diary was created during “night vigils”, you admit at one point that this is very important to you because you work and write at night. Do you find it difficult to explain to daytime people the charms of the job of a night porter? Wasn’t that perhaps one of the intentions of the diary?
It's just the way it is, since college I've been reading, working, writing almost exclusively at night, from midnight until morning. So I wrote these notes from The Night Porter before morning, after I had finished all my other work. And somehow it was necessary to reflect that night atmosphere in those texts, to color them. As well as the text dealing with that nocturnal part of my life. Jagna Pogačnik concluded her criticism by quoting the title of Vlatko Stefanovski's poem "I save the night from the awake", but one could also say the opposite of this text, that it saves the night for the awake. And both are true in some sense.
I would like you to say something more about isolation, whether it is the kind of insulation made of knauf and glass wool that is mentioned in the diary or the other kind that gained importance with the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, which was still going on when the diary was written in 2022. It seems that both are equally important, but did solitude previously have the same importance for you or has the world really changed in the last few years in the understanding of the space of solitude?
My life did not change because of the pandemic, that is, after it passed, everything quickly returned to the old tracks. But solitude, the time when you are alone, with a text, your own or someone else's, has always been important to me. And that's exactly why I started working at night thirty or so years ago. That was the time when there were no distractions, when no one called, when you didn't have to go anywhere, when everyone else was asleep, time for me. And so it has remained until today. Although now I have a lot of friends who know that I'm up all night, so they know how to call at three in the morning.
The first review of The Night Porter has already been published in Best Book, and it is signed by the established critic Jagna Pogačnik. The critic dissected the text very well in a laudatory tone, noting that Iva is actually “the real trigger for writing” and “the main gun of this prose.” Do you agree?
As I said before, the text is written in the form of a diary, but it builds a story, follows a narrative line. The first two novels ended with the breakup of the main character's marriage, and then with those relationships that caused the marriage to break up. In this book, the narrator tries to live with someone again, but due to previous experiences, he is full of doubts, cautious or at least much less enthusiastic when it comes to sharing his life with someone close to him. In this sense, if Semezdin is an external driver of this book, the character of Iva is the internal one without whom the book would not exist, that is, it would not be this book. Day by day, the narrator records what that attempt looks like, and he himself constantly wonders how the story will end.
Each book from the "Dnevnik" edition has a very interesting look and a recognizable stamp. How do you like the design and appearance of the book?
The entire edition has been carefully considered, including the design and appearance of the book. They are certainly above the standards currently prevailing in our publishing world. And the fact that the book looks nice is not unimportant when reading it.
The night porter ends with the lyrics of the song "The Fly". It seems as if the poet still has the final word in you?
When I wrote this text, I felt like I was writing something between prose and poetry. Each of its fragments is a rounded micro-whole, and it reminded me of putting together a collection of poems. Also, in the book I write a lot about my poetry books, so that poetic and prose impulse are intertwined all the time in both content and form. The song "The Fly" somehow imposed itself, because it seemed to predict what happened at the end. But I've done it before. I concluded the novel Three with thirty poems that are not a mere addition, an illustration of what is described in the prose part, but an equal narrative part of the text, only in them the narrative line of the novel ends.
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