Izborna šutnja

The selective silence of Drago Hedl, the best Croatian journalist, contains everything a crime story should contain: a good, long story on 350 pages and a parallel montage of events characteristic of a modern narrative. The writer brilliantly builds an ominous atmosphere that leads to crime in a small town, the pace of the narration and restrained style betray a serious master, and the ambience is precisely defined in a journalistic way. The place of the event is not some nameless town in Pannonia, but Osijek, and the procedure of the police and the judiciary is accurately and expertly described. Everything here is real, except for the characters, who are contaminated by reality and become the real heroes of a political drama.

The novel Izborna šutnja is like a mirage in the Sahara of Croatian literature, where playing with the patterns of the genre most often produces bastard, pretentious, down-to-earth stories that only pretend to be a crime novel. On the cover of Hedl's Elective Silence, it should be written: this is not a Croatian crime story, this is a true crime story that can be immediately translated into a Scandinavian television series.

Denis Kuljiš