TWILIGHT STATE TABOO 3
Twilight State is the third, final part of the awarded Taboo Trilogy dedicated to the brave; the people not afraid of freedom.
NIGHT TRAINING
Petlevski’s novel, Night Training, is an outstanding, subtly sophisticated prose, full of remarkable amalgams. The narrator of this novel wanders around big European cities encountering along her way a palette of typical and extraordinary, memorable and moving characters in the atmosphere of dark clubs and trendy salons. She is terminally ill, heavily medicated and deeply immersed in the world of literature and jazz. Blending dreams and real life, with a dose of fine humor and social irony, Sibila Petlevski’s novel speaks about contemporary, urban everyday life, about young, lost intellectuals, about the world that is going through changes and that offers no other possibility but to wander.
Night Training is a novel written in first person and it stands on the border of postmodern pseudo-confessional literature, romanticized travelogue, Kunstlerroman, and Hemingway style prose. As it innovatively combines fictional and non-fictional elements, Night Training could be best described using the definition critics invented for Palahniuk’s book entitled Non-Fiction which said that it offers ironically unrelenting and tragically bloody prose.
Night Training Excerpt in English & Croatian.pdf
Zdravko Zima o Nocnome treningu.pdf
MY ANTONIO DIAVOLO
My Antonio Diavolo is an expanded and revised edition of Petlevski’s 1996 novel The French Suite. My Antonio Diavolo opens a series of interesting questions on the relationship between modernity and the past, and the constant repetition of the latter. Two diaries blend: the first one is written by a contemporary Croatian woman kidnapped in Algeria in the 1990s, the other one by Robert-Houdin, a famous magician from the time of Napoleon III. By mixing fantasy and reality, Sibila Petlevski has written a memorable novel of open form characterized by constant shifting of narrative perspectives between third and first person. My Antonio Diavolo, in which Antonio Diavolo is a mechanical man whom Robert-Houdin exhibits in Algeria in order to prove that western magic is more powerful than African magic, is a startling and extremely interesting work of prose written by one of the best stylist of contemporary Croatian fiction. The author skillfully conducts six fantastic stories only to join them together in a breathtaking finale, the sixth movement of her suite.
Read from My Antonio Diavolo in Croatian
Kritika_Moj_Antonio_Diavolo_Kristali okrutnosti_Dora_Golub.pdf
THE FRENCH SUITE
A novel written in the style that combines contemporary urban fiction and magic realism; published in 1996; “composed” in four movements of different narrative tempo as in the musical form of the French Suite that was made famous by Johann Sebastian Bach.
