Zajednička kupka

When Ranko Marinković published his second novel in 1980 under the title Communal Bath, the book did not arouse enthusiasm among critics at the time. Her main handicap consisted in the fact that everyone compared her to Cyclops: although fifteen years had passed since the publication of that novel, it was still fresh in the memory, because in the meantime it had turned into a classic work. So it happened that at that time, and in fact even afterwards, even those features of Marinković's novel, which make it undoubtedly original and which - already in themselves - should have been enough to encourage efforts to decipher the meaning of that narrative structure more carefully, remained unnoticed.

"In the Common Bath, Ranko Marinković also spoke about literary skill, so that novel should be viewed in that light as well, as a kind of ironic commentary on his own literary oeuvre. It is an ambitious work that in many aspects synthesizes what Marinković had done in prose up to that point." - Pavao Pavličić