Black Rock White City

by A.S. Patric

Black Rock White City is a novel about the damages of war, the limits of choice, and the hope of love.

During a hot Melbourne summer Jovan’s cleaning work at a bayside hospital is disrupted by acts of graffiti and violence becoming increasingly malevolent. For Jovan the mysterious words that must be cleaned away dislodge the poetry of the past. He and his wife Suzana were forced to flee Sarajevo and the death of their children.

Intensely human, yet majestic in its moral vision, Black Rock White City is an essential story of Australia’s suburbs now, of displacement and immediate threat, and the unexpected responses of two refugees as they try to reclaim their dreams. It is a breathtaking roar of energy that explores the immigrant experience with ferocity, beauty and humour.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Book Club, Contemporary, War, Literary Fiction, Literature

246 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

A. S. Patric is an award winning writer and author of Black Rock White City, listed as one of the best novels of 2015 by The Australian and The Australian Book Review. It has been highly commended by the judges of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2016. He is also the author of Las Vegas for Vegans, a story collection shortlisted in the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards. His debut book is The Rattler & other stories, shortlisted for the Lord Mayor’s Award. He is also the author of Bruno Kramzer, a novella shortlisted for the Viva La Novella Prize. He is the winner of the Ned Kelly Award and the Booranga Prize. His stories have featured in The Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, Island, Quadrant, in over 20 other literary journals, and in Best Australian Stories 2010 and 2012. He is publishing Atlantic Black late 2016, The Australian and The Readings Monthly calling it one of the most anticipated novels of the year.

Reviews

[Paltia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A husband and wife flee Sarajevo to find hope in Melbourne. They are traumatized by war. Once in their new country they remain locked in, limited and trapped. The story follows their thoughts about this new life as contrasted to their memories. Separately, they take their knowledge and use their instincts in an effort to find a way forward. This can be hazardous but always a preferable option to what they left behind. They place limits on themselves while coming to realise it’s perhaps more unwise to allow others to place their free choice, self expression and destiny under the lock and key of others. They exist, both needing to wait, until the moment presents itself to remember who they are and what they mean to each other. To wait is a skill. To hesitate is a mistake. To know when to act - that is their lifetime’s work.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pain of Words

That's "Patric" with an accent over the c, pronounced something like "Patrich." I assume that the author, like the characters in his debut novel, winner of Australia's Miles Franklin Award, is an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, or at least the son of one. The title links "Black Rock," an area of Melbourne, to "White City," which is apparently the literal translation of Belgrade. Patric's protagonist, Jovan Brakochevich, works as a janitor in a Melbourne hospital; his wife Suzana cleans for a private family. Both have come down in the world; both were literature professors at the university; Suzana was writing a novel, and Jovan was a poet. He has not written anything since coming to Australia; he hasn't even bothered to learn more than basic English which he speaks with an almost impenetrable accident. But words, the germs of poetry, keep returning to Jovan in his thoughts:

He leans over the top of his first Australian car, feeling the heat of the roof radiating through his palms, and drifts into poetry.

The air that breathes me, the air that moves my life, that evaporates my soul, the air that kisses me and kisses me, the air breathing in the bliss of my longest exhalation …

He doesn't own this tranquility. Moments like these are rare gifts that come his way accidentally, wrapped and intended for others. He can hold them, briefly as he does now, pausing beside his rust-spotted white Ford panel van. Soon he'll have to surrender them.

But words come back to haunt Jovan in the most sinister ways. His hospital has been plagued by a spate of graffiti that Jovan must clean up, ranging from a simple slogan, "The Trojan Flea," painted on a wall, to more complex messages ("I am so full of your death I can now only breathe your rot") etched into glass or carved into the flesh of a cadaver. There is intelligence at work here, certainly, and skill, and persistence. Suppositions as to the identity of "Dr. Graffito" range from a doctor at the hospital to Jovan himself—even though, as the one to clean them up, he feels personally targeted by them. But as the series goes on, it becomes more than an irritating prank; one person commits suicide, another is gruesomely murdered. Graffiti as a deadly weapon.

The loss of words, the pain of words: the two are connected through what happened to Jovan and Suzana in Sarajevo before they fled. We will learn about it in the middle section of the book, which is extremely painful and tells of unimaginable loss and suffering. It has left Jovan and Suzana with a clerly dysfunctional marriage, though there is enough need there, and just enough love, to hold the shreds of it together. I did find the thread of the story beginning to fray a bit; this has not quite got the relentless intensity of Charlotte' Wood's The Natural Way of Things which it narrowly beat out for the prize. But, as the committee stated, it offers a "powerful and raw" account of the migrant experience in Australia. And it does offer at least a glimmer of hope at the end, where words-as-life come head to head with words-as-death, and Patric pulls the various threads together into a finale that, though rather abrupt, is nonetheless satisfying.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy book to read. It is both distressing, and elliptical. It brushes past moments of trauma and you expect the big reveal, and then it turns away and heads in another direction. There are moments of lyrical beauty, there is horror, there are awkward, angry, shattered, just-trying-to-live characters. Nothing is simple. Nothing is heartwarming. Your effort will be repaid.

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

**3.5**

This book was tough in many ways, not least of which is how to fairly review it.
Reading it completed a goal I had set for myself of reading the five books making up the 2016 Miles-Franklin shortlist. Looking back I see I have resolutely given these books fairly ho-hum reviews which would seem to suggest that this list was not my best route into Australian fiction this year.
On the plus side I do think Black Rock White City is the correct winner as it pushed my reading boundaries and had sustained sections of writing I really enjoyed.
However ....
The narrative choices made often bedevilled me. Consisting of what I would call disjointed slice of life vignettes, interspersed with grim, half-recalled flashbacks from a life in Belgrade, and an odd storyline involving a kind of malevolent Banksie-type artist, stalking the hallways of Sandringham hospital.
It didn't really feel complete as a novel to me or rather as immersive as I would have liked and yet I admired it in parts. The characters at its core - Jovan and his wife Suzana represent a heartbreaking immigrant experience, the snippets of back story you get are compelling and I was impressed by Patric's decision to take a reader right up to a violent episode but then write

" Do not visualise the details. Do not try to imagine what husband and wife may, or may not, have thought or felt. As those images on television broadcasts could not fully penetrate the minds of Suzana and Jovan, or anyone watching anywhere else at the time, so no one will ever know anything of this experience."

Although a very different style of novel a good companion to this book maybe Aminatta Forma's The Hired Man as it also is a quiet reflection on people's lives post the Yugoslav wars of the 90s.
This section in particular reminded me of that novel

"....war is hard to disguise as anything other than the Devil himself. Turning mailmen, barbers, greengrocers, electricians and taxi drivers into dismembering demons. Burning up entire generations of men as if their souls were made of hay. The Devil was never a comic book character, with a red face and small horns protruding from his skull - he is a force as real as gravity, raging through the minds of men with the fires of Hell"

I realise how conflicted I am on this book, its terse uneven prose, sometimes unwieldy poetry, elliptical and often oddly fantastical plot and yet and yet ....

I am pleased it won.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy Shit! Bravo Australian emerging writers! First novel? How can Girl At War be so acclaimed when this book exists?

Give him all the Australian Awards and get the Americans and Europeans onto him ASAP!

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up initially because it is short listed for the Miles Franklin award and I was curious. I'm not really sure what to make of it and I don't think I really enjoyed it. Mostly it was a depressing read. I suppose it couldn't help but be that. Jovan and Suzana have fled war torn Bosnia after the death of their two children. In Australia as refugees they have menial lives, both working as cleaners, barely existing. Both had taught at the university in Sarajevo now it seemed their lives were diminished. Perhaps there is some redemption and hope here. I know there has been praise for this book and perhaps deservedly so. There were some moving and profound moments but mostly I felt that it lacked a bit of emotion but maybe this subtlety of emotion was the point. For me it just left me feeling a little flat.

[Caroline Barron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m off to Melbourne to catch up with My-Friend-Jarrod next month and what better way to ready myself than to indulge in new Melbourne fiction. And my goodness. What fiction this is. Five, oh five, oh five glorious and shining stars, Mr. Poetic-Patric.

He can’t speak to any of it because it isn’t about words anymore. It’s about another existence. Neither of them is sure about the present but this is some kind of afterlife (17).

On the surface the book is about Serbian immigrants, Jovan and Suzana and their life in Melbourne. In Serbia he was a Professor of Literature. In Melbourne he cleans the evil scrawl of Dr. Graffito off hospital walls. Beneath the story Patric investigates the relationship between a husband and wife who have experienced unfathomable trauma through their children's death. He investigates infidelity and whether, sometimes, it might be okay. All of this is couched beneath an arc that questions our xenophobia. In an interview in Good Reading (April 2015) Patric says "Literature can return us to our humanity." Many Australians (and New Zealanders) who encounter Serbian (or other) refugees or immigrants may not be able to detect or understand the suffering behind smiling eyes. Black Rock White City humanizes the Serbian War and allows us to understand the life-altering terror and displacement it forced on many.

. . . the old world can be packed into a box, and left to gather dust, and be rarely seen. More and more rarely as the years pass. The two worlds drift further and further apart. Of course, the box doesn’t disappear. It will always be exactly where it always was—in the centre of their lives. It is made of the thinnest sheets of porous material, the most fragile membrane, leaking without warning at any point (136-137).

As I writer I am interested in the points of view (several) and the section of story Patric has chosen to tell. He could have written a rip-roaring present-action book encompassing the Serbian war and the unbearable deaths of Ana and Dejan. But he didn’t. He chose to begin in media res, in Jovan and Suzana’s make-do Melbourne life. This is not a story about the Serbian war. This is a story about real life in the Melbourne suburbs.

The character of Suzana is pure genius. She has more layers than an onion. Patric uses a soft touch, gradually revealing the woman she is now, the woman she was in Serbia and the (surprising) woman she was before Jovan. Patric renders her ‘love’ (you’ll see what I mean) for Jovan using a tender starkness that reflects a lamp back to each of us and asks: who were you before now? Is that person still inside you? Can you ever change, completely? There was only one place in the book I was shunted out of the story—Jovan gets a bit preachy when talking with Suzana about Graffito on pages 240-241; minor criticism that doesn’t alter my five-star opinion.

Written across the chalkboard-black streets is the mathematics of chaos. Everyone going off in a million directions, scrawling their intentions in Morse code flashes and dashes, behind glass hissing at each other in the lost languages of silence, sometimes colliding and crashing into each other, mostly passing untouched across the unalterable long black mark of destiny road through an anonymous fate (68—italics Patric’s own)

Patric’s imagery is stunningly memorable: Suzana’s Janissary dying the forest; the television discarded on the lawn; Ms. Richards waiting for the train; Suzana in the swimming pool. Oh, bliss. These I will keep.
For the briefest of moments she knows what it is to come apart in millions of different directions, none of them a release or relief (54).

As for the ending—how can anyone decry the ending? It is magnificent. I want to type it out in full and give you a slice of my chest so you can see how my breath gasped at its beauty. But that wouldn’t be good manners. You’ll have to read it yourself.

PS: ‘White City’ is the literal translation of Belgrade (19) and ‘Black Rock’ is a seaside suburb of Melbourne.

You can buy the book here:

Readings Books, Melbourne http://www.readings.com.au/products/1...
Amazon Kindle Edition http://www.amazon.com/Black-Rock-Whit...
New Zealand readers: I can't seem to find it at the independents, but have put a request in to Unity Books and Dear Reader (Grey Lynn, Auckland) to stock it.

This review also appears on my blog www.lovewordsmusic.com

[Julianne Negri · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest I’m still recovering from finishing this book. It sucked me in and churned me up then spat me out. I felt I had to scrape myself off the floor and piece myself together again. It really is an extraordinary novel by an extremely talented writer.

Patric uses images and characters like intricate building blocks to build a monument to human experience and then uses words like a wrecking ball. He constructs and devastates in equal measure. Blisters you then heals you then scrapes off the scab.

Patric gathers various elements together - the extraordinary cinematic works of graffiti by the mysterious Dr Graffito, the suburban setting, persistent surfacing of poetry, and the cast of characters that include a foolish psychologist Dickens, a broken wife Suzana, a monster-like dog and a ruthless femme fatale lover Tammie - and then layers them like transparent x-ray films, merging to create a kind of 3 D optical illusion, shimmering and bold and jumping out at you.

Emotional hyperbole is absent here. Patric eschews pulling your heart strings with the past – instead he punches you in the face Jovan and Suzana’s flailing marriage, their menial existence in Melbourne after escaping the trauma of the Bosnian war. A mop and bucket of dirty water wielded by Jovan in his job as cleaner in the hospital can be used by Patric to convey the nihilistic post traumatic mindset of protagonist more powerfully than any long winded description of war.

Patric uses the power of present tense writing which untethers the reader and allows you to experience the story, moment by moment. This gives a noir-like flavour to the strange mystery but also allows the weight of the past to be like a shadow cast behind Jovan and Suzanna and as we progress thought the narrative, the shadow gets longer and longer.

Reflected through Dr Graffito’s elaborate art-installation-like vandalism at the hospital is all the heartache, poetry and grief that Jovan wears like his work overalls. Patric employs, words, events, setting and characters to form a prism reflecting the inner life of Jovan and Suzanna without the need for any clumsy exposition or sentimentality. The result is an intense intimacy with these characters. Suburbia becomes surreal, nihilist, hopeful, macabre frightening and beautiful. The novel hinges on the poignant brilliance of the idea that the obliteration of the graffiti by Jovan in his menial work somehow squeezes the poetry from his past life to erupt in his mind like pus from a pimple. The erasing of one poem revealing another.

For me, overall, this book was a love story; about difficult long term love that shares unimaginable heartbreak and grief but carries on. A resilience that can be by turns perverse and admirable. It’s about how language and words in many contexts can affect our lives in the most vital of ways. About repression of grief and desire that simmers under the surface of seemingly everyday lives. About what happens when lives are built up, destroyed and try to rebuild themselves again. Which is what A.S. Patric does to us, the reader, within each paragraph, just to show you the truth, so you can experience it too; being built up and destroyed by words.

[Jillwilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a new Australian novel about a Serbian couple who have migrated after the Bosnian war. Jovan, former poet and academic now works as a cleaner at Sandringham hospital. Suzanah works as a carer. They are deeply damaged and dysfunctional as a result of the events of the war. The novel explores the extent to which people can ‘recover’ from tragedy and what happens to relationships in the process. This focus plays out against a storyline where an anonymous ”graffiti artist” is playing havoc within the hospital where Jovan works. He repeatedly has to clean up after the person has defaced something (this includes vandalism as refined as etching small letters into the lens of the opthalmologist’s equipment). It’s an interesting narrative choice for the novelist to make. It reminded me of the increasingly ridiculous serial-killer novels that appear on the market – with increasingly bizarre modes of murder. I think that what it is meant to do is provide perspective – the actual real-life and recent events in Bosnia are the real horror story – (there may be a complete obscenity in our preference for the former).

Through the novel we feel what it is like to be an immigrant. Jovan, the refined poet speaks imperfect English and prefers to be misunderstood rather than trying to alter how people see him. He chooses to drive a wreck of a car. People call him ‘Joe’ – Jovan is apparently too hard to remember and pronounce. He indulges in a nihilistic affair; he is a man who is deeply depressed. He and Suzannah live in Frankston; the bleariness of the suburbs is the backdrop for the story. I took a while to warm to the book but I think it’s very good. I think this comment sums it up: “Something I love about this novel is its lack of stylistic cynicism – its willingness to probe its character’s experiences, minds and hearts without the protective padding of irony.” (http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.co...)

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Strange how little his body shows the evidence of his life.’

Jovan and Suzana have escaped the horrors of Sarajevo by seeking refuge in Australia. For them, life in Melbourne is nothing like their old lives in pre-war Sarajevo: once academics, they are now both cleaners. Jovan cleans at a bayside hospital in Melbourne and Suzana cleans houses. The death of their two children in Sarajevo causes them both, in different ways, great pain.

During a hot Melbourne summer, Jovan finds his cleaning work disrupted by acts of graffiti in various places around the hospital. The cryptic and disturbing graffiti has an impact on Jovan, it reminds him of aspects of the past that he is trying to come to terms with. He cleans up, time after time, knowing that the graffitist (nicknamed Dr Graffito) is probably aware that Jovan is the cleaner. In the meantime, life moves along. Jovan keeps thinking he must replace the brake pads in his panel van before the brakes fail, and he feels considerable pain from toothache. Suzana cleans for people who seem to appreciate her services, but she knows there should be more to life. Jovan and Suzana are largely invisible to those around them, and many of their interactions (both with each other and with others) touch only on aspects of them as people. Their lives are not satisfying, and they long to recover what was important to them in the past.

‘The two worlds appear far apart. Sarajevo is across the seas, and as time goes by, the separating waters seem ever broader to Jovan and Suzana, yet the box, which they cannot open, and cannot close contains their Sarajevo lives.’

How can you make a new life in another country when your old life carries such pain? Is it possible to reclaim what is good and find peace from what is painful? Gradually we learn more about Jovan and Susana, about their lives and aspirations in Sarajevo, about their dreams for starting again in Australia. We see the scars of the past, and how they are (inadvertently or otherwise) rubbed raw by the unthinking actions of those around them. As if, somehow, the fact of being given refuge should nullify or neutralize the past.

‘A world of diminished men labouring without end, for no good reason, and a woman’s job thrown in there after them, somehow, however she might fit the shoes provided, broken crystal slipper or otherwise.’

I found this novel profoundly moving, as well as a reminder that human experiences are complex and layered. It reminded me as well as some uncomfortable aspects of Australia: assumptions about refugees and not taking the time to learn how to pronounce names. All part of a subconscious, or sometimes unconscious, process of differentiation. Jovan and Suzana are two people profoundly affected by war, but not (yet) destroyed by their experiences.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Lesley Moseley · Rating 4 out of 5]

WORTHY WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD

I am such a fussy reader, that 4 stars is very high praise for me. Stunning, is the word that seems to describe the experience of reading such a 'real' portrait of several damaged but resilient, souls.

[Helen King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most powerful books I've read. It's set in a framework which is somewhat exaggerated (at least I hope so) regarding horrific events in a suburban hospital in Melbourne. Although this part is a little over the top, it provides a structure for the more interesting, and wrenching, aspects of the book. The story of a couple who come to Australia escaping from Sarajevo, including their back story which is slowly revealed, and the unsettling aspects of trying to make a new life here, wearing the physical and emotional scars of their past, and continuing to receive more along the way. The secondary characters shine a light on inbuilt prejudice, fear of other, challenges that other people have and how they are inevitably contrasted to Jovan and Suzana's situation. It's a book which will sit with me for a long time.




Quotes I might come back to -
He brushes his teeth, gingerly around the painful area in his jaw. Feels the fear building somewhere in the open space of his ribcage. Doesn’t have a thought or a reason attached to it. It comes and tears at his heart and lungs. He continues to brush. Spits out a little blood with his foam. Stands up and wipes his mouth with a hand towel. Can’t see it in his own face. When it fills his chest with a hundred crows, scrambling with their claws and beaks through black feathers for immediate release, even then, he can’t see it. It’s as though the past never writes itself into his features and expressions. Only that which ghosts behind the face can summon white terror specters and black dread phantoms; the dead and living writhing in the muddy grave of his mind.

Jovan is an articulate man and he wants to speak to his wife. What stops him time and again isn’t the pain, it’s a feeling that talking makes it trivial. Not that it makes it real – it makes it small. The reality is clear from when they open their eyes to when they close them, perforating even that boundary almost every night. The death of their two children isn’t the erasure of two beings. It is the loss of God and the skies, it is the loss of the past and the future, of all their small-voiced words and their hearts. The only possible response is suicide. To survive they have found a way to live without response.

Hands on the wheel. Looking at the street lights on Chapman Street that shine out for no good reason. No one around here goes out for walks. Dogs barking from every barricaded backyard. Children ensconced before their glowing screens behind the walls. Family cars left out on the street make her think of discarded bits of clothing, forgotten shows to be picked up when needed the next day for school or work. All of it done tiredly, against the will, with an obligation that works on them like a disease. People around here collapse into bed at the end of the day. They rise every morning with their cheap suburban alarms forcing them out again. … No, she knows this isn’t objective. This isn’t the life around her as much as the poisoned life within her. She’s seeing reflections.


“You want to go back to Greece?’ Jovan says, you say this sometimes. Freedom there, even if your parents run from their islands, give everything away to make it to over here. Doesn’t make much sense to me. Things get worse in Greece. Not better, since your parents leave ….
(Bill disagrees) .. . "They know how to live over there, man. We waste all our time working her. They know what Life is over there. You know what I’m saying? We have to plan to fit it in. Save up for years, and then go over there for a few weeks. Call it a holiday … what do we call the rest of this fucking life here?” … Jovan doesn’t know where he gets this idea of life. A holiday that never ends is the daydream of a spoilt child. ….
Bill says, “No Bosnia postcards, that’s for sure. Fucking Muslims, fucking up their own shit and then they come around fucking up everyone else’s. Acting as though not eating pork is gonna mean shit to God or the Devil.” Bill leaves the change room thinking he’s offered Jovan a pat on the back, as though to share a hate is to share a love. Tossing Molotov words with his eyes closed. The type of thing you lob around a football ground during a rival match. A flare and nothing more. Not something that could set the air alight – a kind of napalm that would keep burning for generations…..

Bill doesn’t know a lot about hate, and not a lot more about love. He thinks he hates a boss or a politician or someone at his local pub but he hasn’t seen hate turn into fire, free-floating and exploding through a city, and then materialising again into a blistered red monster more real than any creature children imagine in night-time terrors. Moving from city to city, and village to village, blazing across a whole country, uncontrollable and annihilating. Breathing fire around Jovan, and murdering before his eyes, raping and maiming all with a dying grin never quite dead.

The war didn’t start everywhere at the same time in Bosnia. It was part of the civil wars of Yugoslavia, yet when it petered out quickly in other parts of that federation of states, in Bosnia it grew into something far worse and protracted. It was fought from village to village, town to town, and in cities, street to street and building to building. It was resisted for long periods in some quarters of the state as it raged for gore in others … in short, it was fought by loose groupings of people organized by no grand plan, leader or movement.
Muslims vowed to Serbian neighbours that atrocities committed in another town wouldn’t be perpetrated here. Yet they were. Of course, that was also true the other way around. Serbs made promises of decency that they didn’t keep. Promises are part of a currency, and as long as there is an idea of social economy, then these notes can be traded on. A society can become bankrupt through various causes and all parts of the world have witnessed these collapses of a moral economy.

Suzana leans forward. Attentive. There is no confidante for Jelka other than Suzana. Back in what was once Yugoslavia both of them would have had extended circles of friends. For all occasions and all modes of companionship. Here in Australia, where everyone is locked into their suburban backyards and the biannual BBQ, Suzana and Jelka have to assume all of the kinds of friendship they still need. … Suzana knows she’s offended her only friend, yet Suzana suspects that Jelka loves being talked about in this manner. Being the subject of serious contemplation thrills her. To be cast as someone worthy of consideration, even harshly, makes her feel real. What Jelka yearns for more than anything is some kind of proof of existence no one wants to give her.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m always really pleased when an author makes the leap from producing acclaimed short stories to writing a full length novel. (I know, I know, short stories are not a lesser form, but they are often part of the pathway to publishing novels – and novels are what I like to read). A.S. Patrić is an ‘edgy’ writer, and IMO the longer form of Black Rock White City allows that edginess to flourish in a way that his shorter works have hinted at. (See my reviews of Las Vegas for Vegans, and Bruno Kramzer).

Set in the suburbs of Melbourne at the turn of the last century, Black Rock White City opens with a hospital cleaner, Jovan, tasked with the removal of graffiti that keeps mysteriously appearing throughout the hospital. This graffiti takes various forms and becomes increasingly menacing, triggering consequences that shock the reader out of the complacency that comes with living in a modern city where graffiti is part of the background of our lives.

Woven through Jovan’s semi-articulate verbal responses are his thoughts – he thinks in poetry, as he did in his former life as a professor of literature in Sarajevo. His wife Suzana, as damaged as he is by the death of their two children during the Bosnian War (1992-95), wants a more satisfying, objective picture to dwell on than the suburban wasteland that surrounds her and searches for a way to live – but they approach their new life in different ways.


She knows that Jovan used to be able to turn almost anything over to a new perspective, see something deeper, redeeming, more beautiful even if pitiful. It was what made him such a superb poet back in Yugoslavia. And it still takes her breath away, an actual gasp of air at the top of her lungs, when she thinks how crucial poetry used to be to him. How Jovan used to wake in the mornings with poetry emerging in rhapsodies. How it used to drive him, his body slumping over a bedside table and writing with eyes that couldn’t open from sleep, and with a drowsy hand, poetry that cut through all the usual bullshit poetry was, the usual mediocrity, and opened up new ways of feeling, seeing, understanding and being. And now nothing. He doesn’t write anymore and it’s as though he never did. (p. 89)

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/02/16/bl...

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really, really good book. The lone male on the Franklin Shortlist and I think, if anyone can better Charlotte Wood, Patric will be the one.
Refugees from Saravejo, academics Jovan and Suzana, are now settled in bayside Melbourne, both working as cleaners (coincidentally Jovan in the hospital where I had my tonsils out as a child). As they try to rebuild their lives their past trauma is quietly revealed as they are both dealing with new challenges. Don't want to give anything away but Patric writes in elegant, bleak, hopeful and beautiful prose, no fluff or padding and not a word is wasted or unnecessary.
Do not read this book when you are tired or wanting to relax, it deserves your full attention because it is wonderfully challenging and breathtaking.
26/7 I have just re-read my review, obviously got a bit carried away. Have now calmed and knocked off a star, still think it is a worthy rival for Charlotte Wood but the ending is a bit naff, whereas Wood's ending is a ripper.

[Zora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply impressive book about trauma, war, migration and marriage that rewards close attention. There's a layer to the plot I am not quite sure was necessary but I might change my mind as the book settles and lingers - the author clearly knows what he is doing. Some sections - especially towards the end - were so powerful and cleverly done that I had to read them a few times to properly grasp what had just happened. I hope Oz Lit rises to the occasion and throws lots of prizes at this author and book.

[Catherine Davison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't understand why this book won the Miles Franklin. I found it clumsy with sentences which needed to be read twice to find the gist, and I'm not talking about metaphorical meaning, simply syntax. It was not credible, at times it felt as though Patric was just cobbling together any and every observation he'd jotted down in his writer's notebook. Sorry, no lyricism to be found, an ugly book which I wanted to like but couldn't.

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like delving into a literary read, and this book did have moments of beautiful writing. But it was mainly self indulgent, navel gazing attempts at creative prose. A good literary book still needs a story that grabs you, and progresses forward, and has a point. It's a pity this book doesn't succeed, because the refugee story needs to be told.

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best debut novels I've read in years, BRWC is a testament not only to the Australian immigrant experience but to the very craft of storytelling.

[Lexi · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author tries a little too hard for my taste, without achieving what seemed to be his aim. I didn't find that it evoked anything in particular, nor was it very interesting.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

With that extended conflict known as the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) now over for more than a decade, we are starting to see books written about them. I’ve reviewed two on this blog to date, Aminatta Forna’s novel The hired man (2013) (my review) on the Croatian War of Independence, and Olivera Simić’s memoir Surviving peace (2014) (my review) on the Bosnian War. AS Patrić’s Miles Franklin Award winning novel, Black rock white city, (2016), which also draws from the Bosnian War, now makes three.

Like The hired man, Black rock white city explores the aftermath of war, but unlike Forna’s book, which is set within the war-torn country, Patrić’s book is set in Australia, and tells of refugees, Jovan and his wife Suzana. The novel starts about four years after their arrival and, although both were academics in Sarajevo, they, like so many refugees, work in their new country as cleaners and carers. It soon becomes clear that they have not recovered from their war experience. Gradually, over the course of the book, Patrić reveals the horrors of their experience. We learn that, like so many who suddenly find their country at war, they had to face that awful question, “should I stay or should I go”. As it turned out, they stayed too long, and Jovan feels he failed his wife by not going early. When we meet them, their relationship is stressed, and they seem unable to provide each other the love and emotional support they so badly need. It’s excruciating to read, because it’s so real, so believable.For my full review, please check out: https://whisperinggums.com/2017/04/29...

[Elise · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only reason I finished this was because it was a relatively short novel. What a disappointment. I’d been wanting to read it for some time as it had been so heavily lauded, and the subject matters that were behind it (Bosnian conflict, Bosnian community in Australia, etc) were some I wasn’t really familiar with and so was eager to get a perspective on it and learn more, as a lot of the aforementioned “lauding” I’d come across had noted.

In a nutshell, the husband and wife have fled Bosnia and are trying to create a new life in Australia with the reality of their past trauma ever-present.

But personally, I don’t think that’s what you’re reading. This whole booked felt forced out by the author from a desire to hang around with literary-snob types in order to go to dinner parties and win awards (I re-watched “You’ve Got Mail” recently, so I’m thinking of Tom Hank’s girlfriend / Meg Ryan’s boyfriend at that dinner party as an example of what this writing is), and so I trudged through the ridiculousness, sorely disappointed at the author’s wasted opportunity at the end of it.

Do not at all recommend. Time can be far better spent.

[Calzean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is well worth the Miles Franklin. It is impressive for its language, poetry, respect for refugees, understanding of mental health, life in the working class suburb of Frankston and for recognising a person is not defined by their job. Every character in this book is there for a reason.
Jovan and Suzana have fled war torn Bosnia after their experiences in Sarajevo including rape and the death of their two children. In Melbourne they take menial jobs as cleaners. At the hospital Jovan works at, a deranged person is placing carefully crafted graffiti that is targeted at certain people and their hidden fears. Jovan is a poet and a thinker. Suzana is more practical and is slowly coming out of her scared background. Her dialogue is blunt but brilliant.
One of my favs of the year.

[Victoria · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this book at all. It was all over the place & hard to follow. I seriously struggled through 164pgs but frankly I have many more, better constructed books to read. Not sure how it won miles franklin award but like art, books are very subjective. This one is not for me so I will happily pass it on so someone else who can make sense of it and possibly enjoy it. ☹

[Ingmar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A unique look at the migrant experience but the graffiti subplot felt superfluous. A decent read, but I'm not sure it was worthy of taking out this year's Miles Franklin Award.

[Jade · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pure trash. Don't waste your time.

[Rosalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A.S. Patric has written a book that is so much more than a refugee story; it is about the total annihilation of two people and their gradual remaking of themselves. Concurrent with their contemporary lives in Australia Patric slowly reveals the history of Jovan and Suzanna before the breakup of Yugoslavia and the obliteration of their old way of living. We get a glimpse of their despair when they are in the refugee camp and then their final disintegration as more events that are horrific take place before they are allowed to come to Australia.
The story is also a thriller as there is a mysterious graffiti artist tagging rooms and equipment at the hospital where Jovan works as a janitor. Jovan becomes more involved as he has to clean up the graffiti and because the journalist David Dickens, contacts Jovan to get more information each time there is a new graffiti. The tempo increases as the graffiti becomes more personal and hospital employees are maliciously targeted.
There is an interesting contrast between Suzanna’s and Jovan’s ability to deal with their new lives. We find out through Jovan how amazing and strong Suzanna was as a young student when he relates how she dealt with her unplanned pregnancy and her favourite university professor. This inner strength has returned to Suzanna in Australia and it enables her to tolerate the demeaning jobs choices and even her unsatisfactory friendship with Jelka, in order for her to plan and to commence a completely new life.
Jovan seems to be barely coping. We are led to this impression through Suzanna’s viewpoint and of those around him. Suzanna thinks because he doesn’t write anymore “it’s as though he never did” “he used to wake in the mornings with poetry emerging in rhapsodies” she thinks he has given up on poetry but it is still in his mind – the words keep playing in his head even if he does not write anything down. At the hospital people assume Jovan is stupid because he doesn’t (bother to) speak good English and they only see him as a janitor not the highly educated person he really is. The dentist he is seeing only wants his body for sex and is not interested in him as a person.
The journalist however, does appreciate that Jovan is a knowledgeable person. His presence in the book exposes the contrasts between Jovan’s relationships and enables another link to the storytelling for example Suzanna reads his article in the newspaper while at the supermarket.
Overall, it is a well-crafted story; it has a satisfying hopeful ending and subtly depicts the lazy and condescending behaviour of many Australians in their relationships with people from non-English speaking backgrounds.

[Chris Giacca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Powerfully average. Breathtakingly mediocre. A tour-de-force of okish-at-best-and-even-that's-a-stretch.

Some thoughts, in order of when I thought of them, not necessarily in order of relevance or connectivity because apparently that's how we do things in the land of Patrić.

Jovan has broken English right up to the point where he doesn't and the only critical change from a to b here is that there is a lot of time spent with Suzana and Jelka who don't seem to have broken English at a point and when we return to Jovan after this little denouement, miraculously his English has improved markedly.

The whole thing is very male-gazey and enough to make you roll your eyes at certain descriptions. Cliches abound. Yay.

We get given glimpses of a really interesting, compelling plot, only to swerve completely into the most boring side lane possible about halfway in. And then once we are returned to the actual central plot, Patrić appears to have lost interest in said plot and thus wraps it up in the most dismissive, hand-wavingest way possible, kind of leaving you wondering what the actual fuck was the point of having the plot in the first place. It's almost like the plot was there as justification for a treatise on the Yugoslavian conflicts, rather than an actual tangible thing happening to actual tangible characters.

Speaking of - motive? What motive. Who needs a motive!

Everyone is so rude to everyone else. All the time. Constantly, incessantly abrasive. Which is fine, I guess, but certainly doesn't give the characters any internal drive to interact with one another, from a reader's perspective.

Jelka is meant to be dumb and pretty, Suzana is meant to be intelligent and pretty. Every woman in the novel is described in terms of aptitude and fuckability. These two in particular? They're meant to, I think, represent a duality. A yin and yang. They discuss Tolstoy in a library and sound identical to each other 99% of the time, except when Jelka outright says 'you make me feel dumb sometimes'. Mmmm contrasty.

Consistent decision making? What consistent decision making.

Consistent perspective? What consistent perspective.

Consistent tense? What consistent tense.

And so on and so forth.

There are some pretty parts though, so it scrapes a 2/5 and that is being generous with rounding. It's a 1.5 really.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really do admire anyone writing a book, so unless it’s God-awful or offends me in some way I have trouble giving anything less than three stars. But this one is very close to getting two.

It starts off really promisingly with an interesting lead character – Jovan, a Serb refugee from Bosnia living in Melbourne who paradoxically was a poet in his own language but whose English is terrible – and an almost-fun caper involving coded graffiti in a hospital, and Jovan’s involvement in it. Alongside this flashbacks to the former Yugoslavia add interest: we rarely get told stories of the suffering inflicted on Serbs in Bosnia.

But about a third of the way through the focus completely shifts to Jovan’s wife, the self-centered and, worse, uninteresting Suzana. Up to this point I was looking forward to getting back to reading, but after the shift in focus and tone it became a chore and I couldn’t wait for it to end.

Part of the charm of the first part of the story was hearing Jovan's poetic, articulated thoughts compared with his broken, comical-ish English, but Suzana's story was told completely straight. No plotline was sufficiently explored and the writing became quickly prosaic. The author has a great knowledge of the suburbs and streets of Melbourne, Sarajevo and Belgrade, but these weren’t used to affect.

I felt I was missing metaphors or something. I’m from Melbourne and very interested in the fall of Yugoslavia so am disappointed this didn’t deliver for me. Maybe I just didn’t get it.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was terrific!
I was born in Sandringham Hospital and have worked in the Bayside area a few years now so it was lovely to read a novel set in parts of Melbourne I feel a little familiar with.
However...
My main enjoyment was settling in to experience the experience of an emigrated couple who following tragedy seem to be just missing each other in passing whilst living in same house. They misinterpret each other, their communication is out of whack, and ex literature professor now cleaner Jovan.. what an honourable man. He, like so many qualified people moving to Australia, struggle to or give up on the bureaucracy of getting their qualifications recognised, takes the manual work on offer.

If it was a film I'd be saying watch it so we can talk about it!
Instead... read it!

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bleak depiction of a Serbian migrant couple, Jovan and Suzana, broken by their experiences in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and living in a twilight of frozen grief in suburban Melbourne at the turn of the millennium. Did I mention bleak? They seem to find their way back to each other in the end, the only reason for the ‘Dr Graffito’ sub-plot and a sub-sub-plot murder, which were summarily resolved at the very end and never satisfactorily explained.