CELEBRATION

Damir Karakaš
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

Karakaš is one of the most respected contemporary writers in Croatia

He is the winner of the prestigious Meša Selimović Award for the best novel in the Balkans

Award-winning translator Elias-Bursać is the former president of the
American Literary Translators' Association

BLUE MOON is the second translation into English of any of Karakaš' seven novels and three collections of stories; CELEBRATION was published by Selkies House in 2024

BLUE MOON follows Charlie, a young rockabilly fanatic at the end of the Eighties. A failed student, he cares deeply about his pompadour hairdo, symbolic of his desire for an identity shift away from his peasant roots, and he wears it with obsessive, vain pride. The quiff is his crown, his best self.

Charlie searches for mirrors in the street in order to admire the quiff at all times, has located shop windows that reflect the quiff at particularly good angles, spends much time grooming it, and has even devised a way to sleep (with three carefully positioned pillows) to minimise quiff ruffle. And it is this very hairstyle that his father, a man so violent that he borders on psychopathic, hates with a vengeance. By the end of the first chapter, following a bloody fist fight between father and son, it is clear that the claustrophobic and violent darkness that looms over Charlie's childhood home, and Yugoslavia at large, will eventually devour him and those of his generation.

Blue Moon delves into the inability of a world that is approaching a new war, to selfreflect. The arteries of the novel are themes of masculinity and violence, and the traditional, conservative preference, in the face of difference, towards selfpreservation. A doubling down into homogeneity.

This leads, of course, to the theme of war, the looming undercurrent that Karakaš masterfully weaves through the story, drawing a stifling darkness around its edges and building the mounting pressure in ways simultaneously surreal, humorous, and suffocating.

BLUE MOON is a poignant picture of the effects of collective and individual violence, but it is Karakaš’ humour which gives it a unique edge – it provides the much-needed spoonful of sugar to make the acridity of war go down.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Damir Karakaš is an award-winning Croatian author, playwright, musician and journalist. Born in 1967 in the remote, mountainous region of Lika, he later studied law and agronomy in Zagreb. During the 1990s he worked as a war reporter from the front lines in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo for national daily newspaper Večernji list. His novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Arabic. His plays have been performed across Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Chile and Ivory Coast. Selkies House published his short novel CELEBRATION in 2024.

Ellen Elias-Bursać is an award-winning translator of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, who has served as the president of the American Literary Translators' Association. Between 1972 and 1990 she lived in Zagreb and for six years she worked in the English Translation Unit of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. She is the translator of celebrated authors including Dubravka Ugrešić and Daša Drndić whose novel, Trieste was hailed as "monumental" by the Financial Times.

COMPARISON TITLES

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby (Penguin, 2014)

Subject: Literary Fiction/Translation
Format: HB
Extent: 288pp
Publication date: May 2025
Price: £20.00
Territories: UK/ANZ.
US Publisher: N/A

ISBN: 9781917254250
Trim: 198 x 129 mm
Word Count: approx. 37,000
Audio: Yes
Agent: Ampi Margini
Illus.: N/A