By Dragan Velikić
Translated from the Serbian by Christina Zorić
22 Sept. 2025
IBSN: 978-1-912545-544
Winner of the 2015 Nin Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Serbia
The news of his mother’s death finds the writer in Budapest and prompts the opening of an old black box of family mementos. Inevitably, this leads to an unravelling of multi-layered stories and an investigation into everyday lives and times that no longer exists. The Investigator contains everything that has made the author so successful in his homeland: a perfect sense for detail, linguistic precision, a brilliantly polished style. While the novel starts as the search for a lost mother, it soon becomes a story about a country and a people who have passed; an elegy for Yugoslavia as well as a family.
“What makes this book so well worth reading apart, obviously from the fact that Velikić is a superb writer despite his mother’s criticism, is the way we read fascinating stories about a host of character s, primarily though certainly not only the author, his parents and Lizeta, but also both excellent stories about the interchanges between these families and how they cope with the ever-changing political situation in the region as well as a picture of how the region dramatically changed…”
“Through his patchwork narrative, Velikić’s point is to impress the essentially demented nature of being Yugoslavian: of the radical forgetting that permitted the repossession of homes belonging to the Serbs of Pula (the author’s Croatian hometown), but that also allowed the very conditions within which Yugoslavia could be formed in the first place. In his mother’s final days, she starts speaking Fiuman (a dialect of Venetian), a language she could not have spoken for many years; it serves as a reminder that the forgetting that characterised the post-90s history of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia was in keeping with much that went before it.”
George Marsden, Decadent Serpent
“Christina Pribichevich-Zorić’s beautiful translation of Velikić’s muted conflicts insists on a slow read; his ruminative plot appears to leave no loose ends while in fact creating sheaves of them. . . With uncertainty pathing the text, The Investigator’s greatest revelation may indeed be the creative promise latent in the truth’s vulnerability.”
Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Asymptote Journal
