Water, Spiderweb

Overview

The 1964 Sava River flood sets in motion this literary thriller and then sweeps away everything before it.

With Water, Spiderweb Nada Gašic cements her reputation as both a spellbinding author and a remarkable chronicler of the city she calls home: Zagreb, Croatia. An eccentric cast of marginalized characters, from a mentally ill man who channels the Virgin Mary to three sisters cast from a disfigured version of the Cinderella fairy tale, this novel is not so much about crimes committed but rather the questions around why these crimes are committed, on an individual level and on a societal level.

In piecing together the clues that may or may not answer these questions, Gašic makes clear that we are the ones responsible for the circumstances that yield the deaths of the innocent.

Reviews

“The climax at the end, with several exceptionally powerful scenes depicting the destruction of a person’s frantic and frail humanity, can be compared, when it comes to the amount of suffering, callousness, and humiliation of oneself and others, to the films of Lars von Trier.”—Croatian National Radio

"[P]lants the seeds of a classic police procedural before turning its focus squarely onto the financial inequality, shifting morality, and desperate alienation that arose after the initial euphoria of Croatian independence had faded. Ultimately, the novel is less concerned with the crime solving than the social criticism, and by broadening its scope, Gašić’s English-language debut finds Croatia’s economic and political environment as culpable as any individual criminal."—On the Seawall

Author Biography

After a prominent career as an editor, at the age of 57, Nada Gašic published her first novel, Mirna ulica, drvored, for which she was awarded the Slavic Prize for best debut novel, and in 2010 she published the novel Voda, Paucina (Water, Spiderweb), which was awarded the City of Zagreb Prize and the Vladimir Nazor Prize.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Dasa Drndic, Dubravka Ugresic, Ivana Bodrožic, and Robert Perišic. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer won the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, in 2006. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, she has taught at the Harvard Slavic Department and Tufts University, and spent over six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator.