Love and war, past and present, alternate within a story that takes inspiration from the tragedies that have crossed the Balkans, tragedies from which the intense love story of Ivan and Mirna will try to find a way out. A review

Having retired after years of journalism as a correspondent for “Il Giornale di Brescia”, Valerio Di Donato has put his experience, especially that in the context of the war in the Balkans, to good use, to write a novel “Le fiamme dei Balcani”, published by Oltre Edizioni, which tells a long bloody story that begins in Istria, during the years of the Second World War with the tragedy of the Istrian exodus and the subsequent birth of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, and ends in the years of the inter-ethnic war that, in the 1990s, would lead to the dissolution of the same (a war which this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of its beginning).

At the center of the story are two characters: the Istrian Antonio Fabris, an exile in Italy, and the communist partisan Mirko Marinić, to whom a third character will be added, years later: Ivan, the nephew of Antonio Fabris, son of his sister, married to Marijan Marković, and who, unlike her brother, as happened in many families, had remained in her hometown, in this case in Fasana, nine kilometers from Pola, which in the meantime had become, like almost all of Istria, Yugoslavian.

Antonio Fabris, known in his family by the abbreviation Tonci, returned on holiday for the first time with his wife Amalia in 1965, to hug his sister, his brother-in-law and his nephew Ivan, born in the meantime, as well as the few friends who had remained there. Among them were some acquaintances, old partisans who had come from inside Yugoslavia at the time of the so-called People's Struggle, including a certain Stjepan Berčić, who made a revelation to him: "We thought you were a spy and we had orders to kill you". In some way, letting him understand that the sentence was still standing. Naturally, poor Antonio Fabris, who had been a partisan, began to fear the worst, especially after learning who had been appointed his killer: Mirko Marinić, an officer of the Ozna, Tito's political police.

Valerio Di Donato tells his story by going back to the war years that forced Antonio Fabris into exile, first in Trieste, guest of an uncle who was a priest, and then moving to Bolzano.

From exile a leap of years, other returns of Fabris to the family, with his nephew Ivan now grown up, with whom he will find harmony and who, like the others, will learn of his uncle's death sentence as well as the name of the man who swore revenge on him, namely Mirko Marinić. Until the inter-ethnic war breaks out and the nephew Ivan, now a Croatian citizen, after having been forced to be a Yugoslavian, like other Istrians who remained, leaves as a soldier.

He will go to fight in the Vukovar area where he will be wounded and then taken to the hospital in Karlovac, in Gorski Kotar, where, among the nurses, he will meet the beautiful and kind Mirna, at that time the lover of the medical captain Goran Kraljević, a married man who makes the woman, naively in love with him, feel the privileges of his power. The fact is that Ivan, in turn, falls in love with her, and while Mirna takes care of him, he, albeit timidly courts her, not without upsetting the girl. Then she will return for a leave from her parents in Zagreb where she lives and, in the detachment, will have a greater lucidity in evaluating her condition as the captain's lover, interested only in her body, in front of the pure love that she senses animating her peer Ivan. Little by little, between various events, returns to the front, departures, voids, against the backdrop of the war that continues and the revenge of the medical captain who has seen his lover taken away by the young man in love, the great love between the two young people is born. Love that, still in the construction phase of the same, will lead Ivan to meet her parents, who will welcome him benevolently. And it is with them that Ivan makes a discovery that brings him back to his uncle Tonci: he discovers that the family of his beloved Mirna has a connection with Mirko Marinić, the killer determined to kill his uncle Antonio Fabris, firm in his purpose despite the many years that have passed since the end of the Second World War. We leave the ending to the reader.

Meanwhile, love and war, past and present, alternate within a story that takes its inspiration from the tragedies that have crossed the Balkans, tragedies that the intense love story of Ivan and Mirna will try to find a way out of. The result is a gripping novel, very informed, that seems to hinge on a few figures, but that in reality assumes a choral dimension in its entire construction, well represented also by the cover designed for the novel by Riccardo Lenski from Fiume who has been able to interpret the flames that have always shaken those lands.

Diego Zandel
Source: Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa – 20/08/2021

Valerio DiDonato, The Flames of the Balkans, Beyond, Sestri Levante 2021.