Özet:

Dimosthenis Kurtovic sets the plot of his novel in a fictive city during a Balkan literary contest. This contest allows the juxtaposition of three distinguished approaches of a supposedly real historical event occurring during the second phase of the Balkan Wars. Each novel develops its own version of what happened, based on various hypothetical sources, such as memoirs, correspondence or family memories. The novel’s structure coincides with what Hayden White calls the competitive narratives regarding contentious historical events. The debates focusing on the historicity of the intrigue and the analysis of plot’s elements in terms of historical accuracy, depicts the complicated relations woven between a novel which treats historical events or periods and the historical reality, particularly when these events are issues of controversy among different scholarship viewpoints. Besides or maybe thanks to these theoretical reflections between the writing of history and the writing of fiction, this novel and his author question as well the dominant nationalist paradigm of exclusivist and nationally-oriented lecture of historical events. In doing so, he revisits the Balkan Wars, opening them to a more pluralist lecture, allowing for a multiple perception of what happened as transmitted by different documents and various testimonies.

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