A Tekke on the Vrbas

Ivo Andrić was undoubtedly one of the most important writers in these languages, the only author from our former country to be honoured with a Nobel Prize for Literature. A beloved writer still subject of discussions on various matters, national and other, still a topic of extensive research and symposiums, whose novels are part of the obligatory reading lists in schools. Tekke on the Vrbas is a novel which speaks in Andrić’s voice about an important Bosnian issue, the one not addressed yet in the published volumes – the monastery in Jajce. Another story about Bosnian friars and Bosna Srebrena, about Bosnia from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th century. Divided into three parts, A Tekke on the Vrbas, The Chronicle of Jajce and Cobweb and Draught, this is a novel whose first two parts may be Andrić’s lost or never written manuscripts, while the third part is a fantastically precise study about Andrić and his work, as well as an autobiographical introduction into Josip Mlakić and his topics. In the novel A Tekke on the Vrbas, Mlakić managed to achieve the almost impossible: in Andrić’s voice he wrote an untold tale, recreating a world which is both close and distant to us, a world preserved in books and chronicles, a world created and safeguarded in details by Ivo Andrić, now equally powerfully and stylistically impeccably continued by one of the finest contemporary storytellers, Josip Mlakić.

“Josip Mlakić is an author of enviable storytelling skills, who set himself an almost impossible task: to speak in the language of a great writer, to reconstruct his imaginary world, and inside it broach a subject Andrić himself would have broached if he were with us today. And, damn it, he made it. With this novel, Mlakić set his rich and diverse work onto three tall pillars, the novels Kad magle stanu (because it is first and to him formative), Skcia u ledu (because it is thematically the most complex) and A Tekke on the Vrbas (because it is the most technically demanding).” – Nebojša Lujanović

“The past and documentary material on one side, the writer’s imagination and mastery to inspire life to this past and its protagonists. The novel A Tekke on the Vrbas is more than a novelised chronicle of the Jajce monastery. It is a novel about great events, bloody wars and cruel regimes, but even more about the friars of Bosnia and Jajce, generally about little people, their longings and dreams, failures and disappointments. Inspired by Andrić’s literature, Josip Mlakić’s new novel in terms of style, structure, literary beauty, as well as by the chosen subject matter, simply oozes Andrić.” – friar Drago Bojić

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