Edgar Allan Poe is generally credited with inaugurating crime fiction nearly two centuries ago, with his 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” For more than 150 years, the genre continued to be dominated by authors writing in English, either more Americans, like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, or Brits, like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. That hegemony vanished near the end of the 20th-century when Swedish author Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels kicked off a boom in what would come to be called Scandinavian noir. For Mankell and his contemporaries, however, the parameters of their particular subgenre had been established decades earlier, by the team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose series of Martin Beck novels, published from 1965 to 1975, revolutionized crime fiction. In his introduction to the 2008 reissue of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s first novel, Roseanna (translated by Lois Roth in 1967), Mankell writes that the duo wanted their work to be “a mirror of Swedish society,” not necessarily just a “form of entertainment. […] They realized that there was a huge, unexplored territory in which crime novels could form the framework for stories containing social criticism.”
I don’t know if Croatian author Nada Gašić ever read Sjöwall and Wahlöö, but her 2010 novel Voda, paučina certainly fits into their genre conventions by using a murder investigation in Zagreb to critique Croatian society in the early 21st-century. Water, Spiderweb, as the novel is titled in Ellen Elias-Bursać’s new English-language translation, plants 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.
One inescapable factor when discussing the Balkans is the violence that redrew national boundaries in the 1990s. The Homeland War, as the fight for independence is called in Croatia, is explicitly referenced in Water, Spiderweb, but is metaphorically ubiquitous in the form of the Sava River, which connects four countries that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia — Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Serbia. The novel opens with the Sava overflowing its banks on the evening of October 25, 1964, inundating southern Zagreb’s Trešnjevka neighborhood, where the novel is set, and destroying or damaging more than 8,600 homes throughout the city. One of the 17 people killed in the flooding is Ana Firman’s husband, who is washed away at the same time that she gives birth to their daughter, Katarina.
Flash forward to 2009 and a divorced Katarina is living in her parents’ renovated home with her half-sisters, Irma and Ita. While the sisters prep for Ita’s upcoming wedding, Katarina’s 10-year old son, David, witnesses a shadowy figure dump a body onto the school grounds. The dead woman was a sex worker killed during a liaison with an unidentified governmental figure, but she was also the school’s Spanish teacher. When the cops show up to question the victim’s colleagues and students the following day, Detective Kasumić is intrigued by a passing encounter with a panicky David, but his boss, Inspector Vidošić, wants to focus attention on Irma, who was not only the dead woman’s fellow teacher and close friend, but a person of interest in a prior narcotics and solicitation investigation. After David is hit by a tram and ends up in a coma, Kasumić’s continued insistence on looking into the kid’s backstory gets him suspended. Although Vidošić pops up now and then to flirt with Katarina in David’s hospital room or to dismiss some forensics report that comes across his desk, Ita’s wedding and the subsequent All Saints’ Day celebrations push the murder investigation to the back burner for the bulk of the novel.
During this crime-solving lacuna, social commentary takes precedence, starting with glimpses at the economic desperation that drove Irma to seek supplemental income in sex work, a side hustle that may have begun as empowered and discretionary but became coerced, abusive, and tied to drug addiction. The uncertainty of Croatia’s nascent capitalism crops up throughout the novel via references to “the shitshow with the recession,” people not getting paid on time, and the lack of “jobs if all you’ve got is a high school diploma.” David’s father, Boris, also highlights the emergence of different classes through repeated arguments with his New Age second wife, who is obsessed with the latest health food crazes and pricey diets, fads where the benefits are financially unattainable for the majority of Croatians.
Gašić uses long tram rides as a particularly effective means of observing the changing city. Before he is hospitalized, David travels the breadth of Zagreb noticing numerous businesses “closed for renovation,” homeless people who board the tram smelling “like filth,” and a man digging plastic bottles out of the trash, all further examples of the haves and have-nots that, ostensibly at least, did not exist under socialism. Characters also eavesdrop on these tram rides, overhearing conversations that are often laced with angry, misogynistic, and obscene language, prompting one “woman in her 70s” to remark to a “woman in her 80s” that “it’s horrifying — this doesn’t feel like Zagreb anymore.”
The novel leans a bit heavily on isolated individuals telling their stories, as opposed to developing characters through their interactions with each other. This tendency is especially apparent with Big Boy Damir, a 52-year old “hunchbacked and mentally disabled” man who never speaks aloud but carries on extensive internal dialogues with the Virgin Mary he imagines in the palm of his hand. Damir makes one outing to show his imaginary saint around Trešnjevka, but otherwise he is simply sitting in his room rehashing plot points and “interrogating” his faith. Katarina also observes the changing neighborhood during solitary walks, commenting on how the replacement of single-family homes with multistory apartment blocks has meant that “now people don’t know what they used to know about their neighbors.” Most of Katarina’s time is spent sitting at David’s bedside, however, where she reads fairy tales to the unresponsive child. She and Boris talk briefly when their visits overlap, but these interactions are unsubstantial. Both characters reveal their true feelings and motivations only through expository sections that can seem forced. In one section titled “What David’s mother would have said about David’s dad to the school counselor if she had attended her appointment,” Katarina links her hardscrabble childhood to her adult relationships:
“Maybe this will sound funny to you, but it seems to me that my attitudes toward people have something to do with poverty, not my character. I’ll try to explain. Why not? Something stupid to do with poverty. Fine, not real poverty, but doing without. […] I didn’t even take my own child in my arms the same second they brought him to me. I waited, waited so the magnificent moment of receiving a gift would last longer. It’s probably that I always put off that moment when something nice begins to happen, so it lasts as long as possible. I unwrap everything slowly. And I unwrap people slowly. Human relations. I think I expect others to do the same. [Boris] always watching me, not opening up to me fully, that attracted me at first, it was seductive, alluring. I wanted to be something wrapped and precious. For him to discover. Then it lasted, lasted. In the end it turned out that I felt like an unopened package, which he stepped around and ultimately left behind. Unopened. That happens.”
Boris also has hypothetical interactions with the school counselor. During these imaged therapy monologues, he largely focuses on the “days of wartime euphoria” when having a common cause became “our blanket excuse for everything.” The result was “a time with no doubts. A time with no examining what ought to be examined.” After the war, ethnic tensions persist of course, as when Irma notices a group of school children surrounding a classmate and chanting “Kill, kill the Serb.” But pulling back that “blanket excuse” also reveals schisms within Croatian society that had been hidden or ignored during the war, schisms that transform back into “open intolerance.” Many of these prejudices are linked to a person’s geographic origins. Boris and Katarina have a shared past, but as far as he is concerned, Trešnjevka was the wrong side of the tracks: “Though we were both born and bred in Zagreb, I’d gladly swear that we’re not from the same city.”
No division is more critical to Water, Spiderweb than the one that separates its two lead investigators, who finally return to the forefront of the action near the end of the novel when Vidošić goes to visit Kasumić. The latter has returned home to Lika, Croatia’s largest and most sparsely populated county, which lies about 80 miles south of Zagreb and runs between the Dalmatian coast and the Bosnian border. The Homeland War began in Lika, and the county was the site of brutal fighting and targeted massacres between ethnic Serbs and Croats who had lived side by side for decades. Vidošić finds Kasumić living in a “a barely recognizable cluster of something that had, not so long ago, some fifteen years back, been a settlement.” The county’s residents are referred to as “rednecks” several times in the novel, and early on Vidošić, whose family is from Herzegovina, mocks Kasumić’s origins by saying, “Who knows, maybe this is the moment when a new theory in the Lika branch of criminal science is born.”
Vidošić has come to find answers related to the murder of the Spanish teacher, but he also has an eye toward Croatia’s future. The discussion between the two colleagues focuses as much on the environment that nurtured — or failed to nurture — the murderers as it does the identity of the criminals, a conclusion hinted at during an earlier conversation that Katarina overhears in Zagreb. After visiting the cemetery on All Saints’ Day, she listens to two ambulance drivers arguing about the wisdom of building a children’s hospital next to an old folk’s home, one place dedicated to strengthening future generations, the other to easing out the past. The impassioned back and forth ends with one man declaring that Zagreb is “a city like any city. We can’t bear the sight of each other, and it’s all the city’s fault.” The verdict is clear: there is plenty of guilt to go around when everyone is to blame.
[Published by Sandorf Passage on October 29, 2024, 520 pages, $21.95 paperback]