{"id":55,"date":"2018-08-02T23:01:50","date_gmt":"2018-08-02T21:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/readerwitch.com\/?p=55"},"modified":"2018-08-02T23:01:50","modified_gmt":"2018-08-02T21:01:50","slug":"walnut-mansion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/2018\/08\/02\/walnut-mansion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Walnut Mansion by Miljenko Jergovi\u0107"},"content":{"rendered":"

The book that outlives its characters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: saga
\n\u2b50\ufe0fStars from Goodreads: 4.21
\n\u2b50\ufe0fStars from me: 4<\/p>\n

The Walnut Mansion<\/em><\/a> is for those who like sagas, histories of families where characters\u2019 stories flow into one another, the characters themselves wither and disappear but the book goes on. You will keep the memories of those characters as if you had met them personally. Miljenko Jergovi\u0107 creates them with the same craft as Leo Tolstoy<\/a> did. The people in their books are alive and breathing.<\/p>\n

The actions take place on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia. I\u2019ve been living on this territory for many years, but I managed to understand it better only now, after reading The<\/em>\u00a0Walnut Mansion<\/em>. To be more precise, I managed to understand that I will never understand it completely. Yugoslavia was only one of the forms this land once took. It also used to be the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book will take you through all those epochs, leading you along lives and story lines.<\/p>\n

It is a highly satisfying read because of how beautifully it is written, but it\u2019s not an easy one. It is a story of many wars, of a country reshaping itself, of very passionate people, and so it cannot be gentle.<\/p>\n

Jergovi\u0107 managed to deliver the horrible without savoring it game-of-thrones way. There will be violence but it will be faded, almost emotionless. Which is, in fact, even scarier. Unfortunately, either following the modern fashion or just a personal style of his, Jergovi\u0107 couldn\u2019t leave the book without several graphic descriptions of sex organs and bodily functions. That\u2019s the only reason why prude me is giving the book one star less than perfect. I believe if a character can be developed without his sex organ scrutinized under a microscope, he should.<\/p>\n

The Walnut Mansion<\/em> was translated into very few languages. Anglophone readers are lucky. The translator Stephen M. Dickey seems to be a great fan of Jergovi\u0107, so the translation is very good.<\/p>\n

Books from other cultures are different from those you are used to. It\u2019s an unforgettable experience to see how an author uses usual tools but creates something absolutely new. For many readers The Walnut Mansion<\/a><\/em> will become this experience.<\/p>\n

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The Walnut Mansion is for those who like sagas, histories of families where characters\u2019 stories flow into one another, the characters themselves wither and disappear but the book goes on. Continue reading The Walnut Mansion by Miljenko Jergovi\u0107<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[123,327,384,508,636,643,691],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/screen-shot-2018-08-02-at-23-07-30-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readerwitch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}