...Grey lives

Powerful evocation of the significant harm humans do to one another, of the grave consequences of violence & conflict and of how easy it is to forget humanity if we listen to the lies of stereotypes. Patric's novel made me remember the vast misery of the 'Yugoslav' wars. How quickly we had forgotten it. How quickly moved to other tragedies, to other dramas -Jovan & Suzana's story is one I needed to hear. It is very sad and often grim but they hold on & the book offers more than a little hope. I am still trying to make sense of Dr. Graffito. 4 & 1/2 stars. ( )

Powerful, moving and affecting, this book's images and story will stay with me. Where social realism meets parable, the story is about the migrant experience in Australia.
Jovan and his wife Suzana are Serbian refugees living in Melbourne. They're intellectuals who are unable to use their intellects. Their two children died after eating poisoned food in a refugee camp.
Jovan works as a cleaner in a bayside hospital. He is tormented by a graffiti vandal whose defacements he has to clean.
The tort is one of the sources of tension that builds to a disturbing climax.
Black Rock White City is a glimpse into the struggle life is for new Australians.
Patric inhabits his characters who stayed with me between reads.
( )

In his unsettling and explosive first novel, A. S. Patrić tells the story of Jovan and Suzana Brakochevich, Serbian refugees living in Melbourne, Australia. Jovan is a janitor at a hospital. Suzana performs household chores for families in a suburb called Black Rock. In Sarajevo before the war both had been educators, lecturing on literature at the university. Jovan was a published poet, Suzana a fiction writer. They also had a son and daughter. When the war came they were forced out of their teaching positions, persecuted and tortured. Fleeing the conflict, Jovan and Suzana eventually escaped to Australia, but their children did not survive, perishing under tragic circumstances in a refugee camp. Years later the parents exist in a purgatory of guilt and self-loathing and suffer from a kind of emotional paralysis. Jovan no longer writes and the two barely communicate. At the hospital, graffiti has started appearing, and Jovan is tasked with cleaning away the cryptic and eerily disturbing messages and drawings from the building’s walls and floors. Despite the increased vigilance of hospital staff, the wave of vandalism persists and evolves, the perpetrator emboldened by success. Letters are carved into the skin of a corpse; after a message appears on her eye chart an ophthalmologist commits suicide. Then a woman is gruesomely murdered. Jovan, disgusted by the public’s fascination with the unknown culprit, whom he calls Dr Graffito, starts to wonder if the messages are targeting him personally. As the weeks pass and the situation at the hospital escalates, Jovan’s ongoing affair with a sexually ravenous dentist becomes combative, he encounters a drug-addled nurse who convinces herself that Jovan is the graffiti artist, and Suzana’s memories of a university professor from her student days who treated her with astonishing cruelty become more vivid. In the final scene—a frenetic crescendo—some questions are resolved, others are not. Black Rock White City, never simple or easy, pulls the reader into the grim, haunted reality that refugees like Jovan and Suzana inhabit, a world that has been shattered by senseless brutality and violence that obliterates everything in its path. But at the end of their story we can see that a seed of hope has been planted: clearly they will never put the past behind them, but together maybe they can move toward a better future. ( )

The heat of the Melbourne summer certainly came through.

I think I might have 'enjoyed' this even more if I was Australian. ( )

There was genuine disappointment in our group for this first 2018 meeting. The themes and content of Black Rock White City seemed promising and everyone was keen to delve into the tough issues, namely the refugee experience of displacement and culture integration.
But not even the most persistent and stalwart of us could gleam any real value in this award winning novel. And yes, we all stuck with it in the hope that at some point a light would turn on and reveal, if not a masterpiece, at least a thoughtful and stimulating work.
Unfortunately it was unanimous that there was no real chance of ever connecting with Jovan or his situation. His character stayed one dimensional and fostered no empathy with our readers, no matter how hard they tried. And let’s be honest, you shouldn’t really have to try too hard!
There was a slight hope that his wife Suzana might salvage the wreckage, but alas no, she also fell into the category of uninspiring protagonist.
So having all the right elements in place for a good novel does not necessarily guarantee reader success. With good reviews and a literary prize, we acknowledge the skill expertise on show here, but concerning a good read, what ever the critics discovered between these pages got lost in the translation for us. ( )