Darko Cvijetić, It's too much for me. Eight girls
WRITTEN BY: Hana Vranac
There is hope for this world, echoes the novel, but not for penitents. Their nightmare does not disappear completely, even when they meet God. Darko Cvijetić understands that.
If graffiti on walls is an expression of repressed social energy, then facades speak best about a society. Here we see the figures of war criminals on the walls. Next to the name is written hero . On the facade next to the schoolyard, the figure of death embraces a man. Next to it is the name of the football club. In the media, the news: juvenile K., the youngest mass murderer . We then wonder if these phenomena are the eccentricity of a specific society steeped in disease or did the entire world sprout from the germ of ontological evil? Is Eve's apple to blame for everything? If the purpose of literature, as the theory claims, is to thematize the general through the individual, then Darko Cvijetić has dissected the questions that centuries-old ethics have burdened with in the novel Too Much for Me. Eight Girls . It is the last part of a novel trilogy about, as the author himself says – evil, the first two parts of which are Schindler's Elevator and What Do You Sleep on the Floor .
Filip Latinović, a war criminal and former member of the Army of Republika Srpska, after serving a two-decade sentence, returns to the community that sees him as a hero. He tries to convince them that he is not. And although there is a clear allusion to Miroslav Krleža's novel, Cvijetić's Latinović identifies himself with Rodion Raskolnikov, the murderer from Crime and Punishment . After an encounter with God and the Hague Tribunal, a deeply repentant Latinović realizes that he did not kill and rape because of his ethnicity, but because of freedom.
There is hope for this world, echoes the novel, but not for penitents. Their nightmare does not disappear completely, even when they meet God. Darko Cvijetić understands that. Former camp guard of the Republika Srpska army. Latinović's schoolmate, who writes this book from fragments of Filip's prison notes, intertextual fragments of Krleža, Dostojevski, Ec, Arendt, Nietzsche, his own self-reflexive interferences, to an imaginary text that conclusively confirms that this novel surpasses the literary game that, with the duality of these (anti)heroes, makes us wonder if Cvijetić is actually Latinović himself. Because it doesn't even matter. Roman notes: It doesn't matter who you are. The one who reads will determine whether you are Philip (because we are all Philip) or a hero (because the hero has no mural but a noose) . This Borgesian procedure is not a pastiche, but an act necessary in itself in the flood of narratives about selective truths, and the Western Balkans is a library of such. One does not exist, even when determined by International Courts. Truthfulness, it says in the book, should not be sought in the novel, but in what it triggered in us .
Part of those fragments is also the post-criminal record of the character who comes to the forefront of the novel. It is Latinović's grandson, twelve-year-old Senad, nicknamed Kost, who killed eight girls and a school guard with a firearm. But as Cvijetić does not allow his characters to have only one dimension, he prevents the hasty conclusion that the minor Kost killed because his grandfather was also a murderer. That evil is transmitted transgenerationally can be read from the novel. In the sense in which we reduce the phenomenon of evil to revenge, which comes from oppression through honor, fighting energy and the desire for confirmation. Under the idea of moral memory, local peoples claim that only theirs is right, so the figure of the victim is internalized in the entire collective. If we go back a little further into the past, it also confirms that this collective, sharers of the same fate of slavery, was left with humiliation. So, from centuries of transgenerational trauma, we are furious with the whole world. However, the novel resists definitive interpretation. In the end, Kost is also a hero. A company with a Moroccan address sells T-shirts with his image on them. It is suggested that the perversion of values is not just a problem in our society, perhaps Apple is really to blame for everything.
Borgesian, and now we can say Cvijetić's , relativization in the novel is not intended to deconstruct reality outside of it, but to point out that evil does not flow vertically. It meanders through various human phenomena. The novel shows that none of its murderers had pure blood. That the family is a hybrid of nationality and religion. In this way, Cvijetić loyally refuses to point the finger and say: only some of them killed. Let everyone clean up in front of their own yard, echoing that poetics. And Cvijetić cleans in the name of everyone. That is why the only "failure" of this book can be if it reaches only the hands of those cured of nationalism - Cvijetić's like-minded people.