My wife saw me reading The Banquet in Blivta and sort of chuckled, your in for some heavy lifting. Only a few pages into the affair, I had to agree. The novel is a complex affair of people struggling and existing within a police state, one rife with corruption and mendacity. There are no straw figures to move the plot. Every action and contemplation is appropriately conflicted. The characters resonate and remain unsure even while commiting the irrevocable.

Okay, so a dramatist wrote a political satire of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a tumult of ideology, how is the novel structured? Krleza is a Henry James of despair. Each character knows he’s doomed. The assassin who takes care of the wet work, knows glory and duty are moribund. The artists and journalists depicted liken themselves to whipped curs, tails between their legs and shouldering the way to the carrion. Krleza shifted the location of the narrative from the Balkans to the Baltics, inventing a pair of nations (Blitva and Blatvia) whose origins echo that of Serbia and Croatia. This was endeavored for sound reasons. Finding himself in bad favor for actually acknowledging and condemning the Stalinist purges, Krleza created some topical breathing room with his authorial license. Banquet in Blitva isn’t enjoyable but rather a powerful aesthetic and emotional experience.
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This is a quintessential political novel, in true sense of that word, of the present and last century. Krleza is a master of dialog, in a smoke-filled room where political decisions are made, heads put on a butcher's block, and destinies of whole nations decided. The questions it asks of the reader are simple but eternal: Can armchair liberals (intellectuals) triumph over tyrannical persons of action (Hamlet vs. Claudius)? How can one love a homeland that one hates? Are politics inevitably immoral just as they are inevitable? If so, how to minimize that immorality: force of law, culture, civil society, revolution (violent, bloody, a hog that eats its own sow), or, is brute force sometimes the only solution? Krleza wrote this novel at the hight of Stalinist terror, looking back at the botched project of nation-building and utopia socialism. It testifies to the fact that in modern age politics, in a narrow sense of the word, is destiny. To paraphrase a time-tested shibboleth: You may not care about politics, but politics certainty cares about you.

ps. the word play is lost in translation, which is almost always the case.
Blitva-pun on Croatian for Cabbage (cale)and Lithuanian-means literally "Land of Cabbage". Its neighboring nation Blatva--pun on Croatian for Mus and Latvia--means literally "Land of Mud", a quagmire. Barutanski, the dictator = son of powder keg. ( )