Calypso

When Martin Dedijer decides to end the world of the Dedijer family, the world whose boundaries were delineated by his father, the sailor Maksim, with his life and death, coming to a hapless ending on the bottom of the Black Sea in a shipwreck of the merchant ship Bianca Stella, he will do it unconditionally and forever hanging himself from a conifer near the town he grew up in. The strings of the rope will unravel along with the ill-fated Dedijer family story, from their forefather Tod and his sister Natalia, to father Maksim and mother Marija and to the darkest, hidden family secret. Densely and brilliantly written, uninterrupted, without dialogue, in a single chapter, minutely crafted, Calypso is a tour de force novel by Ognjen Spahić. His Martin is an emblematic post-transitional hero, he is a Telemachus tracing his father’s seed and wandering from the flat he grew up in to the abandoned mountain village with only an empty grave with Maksim’s name. On his quest, he reaches the heart of the labyrinth every time, but his thread is only one of the threads of that rope. The tragedy of the Dedijer family is classic and eternal, entangled in an indissoluble knot of past and present, the eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos. Neither Calypso the nymph nor the legendary namesake ship of oceanographer Cousteau can set them free, because the cave the Dedijer family rests in is as dark and dead as the bottom of the Black Sea.

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