Hotel Wartburg

In the novel Hotel Wartburg, Zoran Žmirić tells the story of a seemingly ordinary family, unhappy in its own way. Through this unhappiness, to which every family has their authentic right, the writer takes us in a Wartburg car. The story is about a (then) Yugoslav family from Rijeka, consisting of mom, dad, son, daughter and - a 438 cm long Wartburg station wagon, red in colour.

The titular Wartburg of the novel is a place of subsequent reckoning with the father, a leitmotif that triggers memories of key situations of growing up and maturing in which the main character settles unsettled accounts with a parent who was often more the owner of the Wartburg than a parent. The two-stroke engine, which, due to the year of production, has long since fallen silent, will rattle again in the storyteller's memory to once and for all cross paths with everything that made its ignition sound as it should only when the father was going somewhere.

With that last engine start, Wartburg made a full circle in the narrator's perspective from difficult memories to forgiving a father who didn't know how to be, or was the only way he knew and could. Zoran Žmirić advocates for this forgiveness with economical, seemingly stingy language that hits the exact measure of the emotion it must evoke in the reader; it does so with short, almost cinematic sequences with dialogue as supporting material, scenes that abound with the necessary emotional cuts from which the right ratio of spoken and unspoken, bitterness and tenderness, memory and oblivion speaks - ruling language and story in a way that only writers know how.

WORLD RIGHTS AVAILABLE

AWARDS:

Yearly Award of the City of Rijeka