Page 100 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 100
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
The novel Pastorek (2008), written by poet and novelist Jurij Hudolin
(1973) which uses the perspective of the teenage son Benjamin, portrays
his violent stepfather Loris, a country nouveau riche who literally terror-
izes him and his mother Ingrid. The plot is set in Croatian Istria in the
village of Panule, where Loris owns the restaurant in which Ingrid and
Benjamin also live. The novel depicts the early ‘wild’ capitalism emerg-
ing in Yugoslavia during the late 1980s. In his review, Harlamov (2008)
perceives it as a novel with a significant social overlap due to the criti-
cal depiction of pathological relationships among members of the new-
ly emerging social group of entrepreneurs-upstarts, nouveaux riches. On
the other hand, it is questionable to what extent Loris’s individual charac-
ter can be generalized. Harlamov also draws attention to a trait that, I be-
lieve, makes the novel somewhat schematic, namely, the fact that the oth-
100 er characters surrounding Loris, including the narrator himself, are very
passive, and sometimes even look up to him with admiration and rever-
ence for what he can procure and arrange with his semi-mafia ways. Sim-
ilarly, the young man Benjamin also looks for excuses for Loris’s infideli-
ty when he becomes an unwanted witness to it.
Hudolin’s Istrian village is described as a whole, a monolithic con-
glomerate without any features of individualization. It is narrow-mind-
edly, superficially moralistic, with a tendency to defend its internal prin-
ciples against intrusions from the outside. In the following passage, for
example, we can observe the attitude to divorce:
No one was looking down their nose at anyone because of that in Ljubljana,
but it was a crime in this village if the two who got married should break up
one day. And he could feel those reproachful glances, even though he was
not his mistake whatsoever. And Ingrid dunked him deep into this shit,
this village he could claim to be both orthodox Islamic and Christian in the
most narrow-minded sense, which it actually was (from the author’s trans-
lation manuscript, AK).
At the same time, as Matej Bogataj notices in his review, the division of
characters in the story is significantly black and white. On the one hand,
there are the mother and the son as passive victims, on the other hand,
there is the environment that Bogataj describes as a short history of vil-
vosti, da bi prišla do novega sijaja, novega duhovnega odkritja, novega kakovostnega
človeka, takorekoč rešila stari dialektični rebus ‘dobiček iz izgube’… ne vpeljala druge-
ga občevalnega jezika za ljudi, nove, tekoče pastoralne govorice… Nič. Noben pren-
ovljen, vitalni pogled na zakone kozmičnega reda, na pripetljaje časa, noben Jezusov
protiudar besu, sovraštvu, zavisti, nepotrpežljivosti.”
The novel Pastorek (2008), written by poet and novelist Jurij Hudolin
(1973) which uses the perspective of the teenage son Benjamin, portrays
his violent stepfather Loris, a country nouveau riche who literally terror-
izes him and his mother Ingrid. The plot is set in Croatian Istria in the
village of Panule, where Loris owns the restaurant in which Ingrid and
Benjamin also live. The novel depicts the early ‘wild’ capitalism emerg-
ing in Yugoslavia during the late 1980s. In his review, Harlamov (2008)
perceives it as a novel with a significant social overlap due to the criti-
cal depiction of pathological relationships among members of the new-
ly emerging social group of entrepreneurs-upstarts, nouveaux riches. On
the other hand, it is questionable to what extent Loris’s individual charac-
ter can be generalized. Harlamov also draws attention to a trait that, I be-
lieve, makes the novel somewhat schematic, namely, the fact that the oth-
100 er characters surrounding Loris, including the narrator himself, are very
passive, and sometimes even look up to him with admiration and rever-
ence for what he can procure and arrange with his semi-mafia ways. Sim-
ilarly, the young man Benjamin also looks for excuses for Loris’s infideli-
ty when he becomes an unwanted witness to it.
Hudolin’s Istrian village is described as a whole, a monolithic con-
glomerate without any features of individualization. It is narrow-mind-
edly, superficially moralistic, with a tendency to defend its internal prin-
ciples against intrusions from the outside. In the following passage, for
example, we can observe the attitude to divorce:
No one was looking down their nose at anyone because of that in Ljubljana,
but it was a crime in this village if the two who got married should break up
one day. And he could feel those reproachful glances, even though he was
not his mistake whatsoever. And Ingrid dunked him deep into this shit,
this village he could claim to be both orthodox Islamic and Christian in the
most narrow-minded sense, which it actually was (from the author’s trans-
lation manuscript, AK).
At the same time, as Matej Bogataj notices in his review, the division of
characters in the story is significantly black and white. On the one hand,
there are the mother and the son as passive victims, on the other hand,
there is the environment that Bogataj describes as a short history of vil-
vosti, da bi prišla do novega sijaja, novega duhovnega odkritja, novega kakovostnega
človeka, takorekoč rešila stari dialektični rebus ‘dobiček iz izgube’… ne vpeljala druge-
ga občevalnega jezika za ljudi, nove, tekoče pastoralne govorice… Nič. Noben pren-
ovljen, vitalni pogled na zakone kozmičnega reda, na pripetljaje časa, noben Jezusov
protiudar besu, sovraštvu, zavisti, nepotrpežljivosti.”
