'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.' (Publication summary)
Black Rock White City by A. S. Patric : Notes
Melbourne
:
CAE Book Group
,
2018
13925280
2018
single work
criticism
'Alec Patrić's Black Rock White City (2015), a tale of two cities and two war refugees, won the 2016 Miles Franklin Award against the backdrop of an ongoing worldwide refugee crisis. Besides its topicality, this poignant rendition of migrant experience makes readers privy to the lives of suburban Melbournians, invites them to undertake detective work in solving a crime, and takes them on a journey across genres and modes of writing. The immediacy of the first-person narration is interrupted with scattered fragments of poetry, dislodged from Jovan's mind by the graffiti; passages from a novel-in-progress, which mark the beginning of Suzana's regeneration; and flashbacks from the characters' past, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that readers are completing alongside the search for clues in a murder mystery. [...]it is up to them to decide if they are convinced by the unraveling and the final image in Suzana's admiring eyes of Jovan, "as expressionless as god remaking the world" (248), as he seizes the second chance to protect his family.' (Publication abstract)
'Australian author AS Patrić’s debut novel tells the story of two migrants from the former Yugoslavia trying to rebuild their lives in late 1990s Australia. Black Rock is a suburb of Melbourne with a large immigrant population, and “white city” – the literal English translation of “Belgrade” – connotes renewal and regeneration, the blank slate of a fresh start. His protagonists, Jovan and Suzana, lost everything in the Balkan conflict: their two young children, their livelihoods and much of their will to live. Suzana was raped and Jovan tortured. In Australia they take jobs that are beneath their level of education: she works as a carer; he, formerly a university lecturer, is now a hospital janitor. Jovan used to be a prolific poet and Suzana wrote fiction, but neither has done much writing since they migrated.' (Introduction)
