Magic realism, lazy days of passion, and human destinies fuelled by plum wine in the post-war Balkans.
Author: Ville Hytönen
Finnish original: Luumun polte
Publisher: Gummerus, 2018
Genre: literary fiction
Number of pages: 262 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original
Srdjan, a Serbian man who grows plum trees, is as wan and apathetic as Sarajevo after the war. His everyday life is, however, transformed by a lunch at a restaurant when he meets Zorana, a vivacious Bosnian woman. She’s everything that he isn’t: colourful, wild and without boundaries.
The ill-matched pair is irresistibly drawn to each other, and the tensions of the recent war are released in a passionate relationship. Zorana starts painting a portrait of the invisible Srdjan, and the man’s features become stronger both in the picture and in reality.
The Heat of the Plum is charged with eroticism; it’s a love story told by a mystic blackbird and it’s filled with plum wine and idle days of passion. Ville Hytönen knows the region well and moves the story, with its echoes of magic realism, from the mountain village of Knez Zelo to Belgrade while painting a clear picture of the Balkans and a mental landscape tested by war.
“The Heat of the Plum demonstrates stylistic virtuosity in its prose and as a Künstlerroman.”
– Aamulehti newspaper
“The Heat of the Plum is convincing in its musical language that stresses the unity of contrasts. The aesthetics of wasteland and derelict buildings meets the mystical experiences of blackbirds, ‘the Yugoslav gods’. Rarely is a book filled so abundantly with smells, tastes, sounds and colours. The same richness applies to the food and drinks of the Balkans, its vividly described history and the air of melancholy that wafts above everything.”
– Parnasso literary magazine
About the author:
Ville Hytönen