“[A] funny, serious, clever novel.” —The New York TimesFrom award-winning Dutch author Martin Michael Driessen comes a fearlessly funny tragedy about an improbable friendship, unstable dreams, missed opportunities, and epic coincidence.In a quiet coastal town in Yugoslavia, two men seeking more than the Communist regime can offer find their lives deceitfully entwined.Andrej is a postman in … entwined.
Andrej is a postman in complete denial of his existence. He yearns for respect and fame but commits petty crimes for reasons he doesn’t fully comprehend. Josip is an increasingly irrelevant cable car operator and unfaithfully married. Life was so much simpler when neither one knew the other’s secrets. Now that they do—discovered quite by accident—each man has resorted to blackmailing the other. As their anonymous misdeeds escalate, a farce of mutual dependency begins. So does the unlikeliest of friendships when Andrej and Josip finally meet face-to-face.
In a tale set against the impending wars, Martin Michael Driessen ingeniously explores the foibles of two painfully ordinary men boldly staking their claims on life.
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I received a free electronic copy of this historical novel from Netgalley, author Martin Michael Driessen and translator Jonathan Reeder, and Amazon Crossing, publisher. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my personal, honest opinion of this work. I am pleased to recommend this novel to friends and family. Especially family, as we thought sarcasm was our forte, but Driessen has us looking like amateurs.
Our setting is a small, Adriatic coastal town in Yugoslavia, pretty but not large enough to encourage tourists, a town without any industry and isolated by a range of mountainous hills keeping it accessible only by bus. Their main claim to fame is a pod of pink pelicans who summer in the area and a dusty greyhound track outside of town. The time is the spring of 1988. We have a full cast, but only two primary protagonists.
Andrej is young, very tall but clumsy with it, a man with big dreams but little self-respect despite his job as the bicycle-driven mail carrier of the town. It takes him about five hours of the day to sort and deliver the local mail. In his spare time, he steams open and reads the locals’ outgoing mail before resealing and stamping to send it on, discards any incoming mail to guests of the hotel if they include cash, pays close attention to his lottery tickets and cruises the beach looking for an outsider who might love him. Local ladies know him too well to love him. And he takes photographs, mostly of butterflies since that is what he has been able to sell in the past.
Josip Tudjman is a decorated war veteran, middle-aged, married to a woman who has drifted way past bi-polar and the father of Katherina, a youngster with learning problems. Because of his war service, he was assigned the position of machinist and conductor of the two-car funicular, completed in 1892 as was the church located at the top of the hill. The church was bombed in the war, so the local gravity-driven train cars that accessed the top of the nearest hill now only provided access to the site of the local monument to the fallen warriors from the community. Josip began each day walking to the car at the top of the hill to load the water ballast that would counter the weight of the bottom car and passengers should that car be required. The funicular is scheduled to run every hour, but most days it made the trip to the top with just Josip, who ate his lunch at the monument before returning to the bottom to spend the afternoon awaiting potential riders.
In the spring of ’88 Andrej opens and photographs what is obviously the reply to a lonely-hearts ad – from Josip to a lady in Zagreb. And he photographs their meeting at the local bus station, their tryst at the war memorial over the lunch hour, and noted Josifs bus ride out to Zagreb every six weeks. Though he had nothing against Josip – he barely knew him – thus began Andrej’s career as a blackmailer. And the laughs truly begin.