Requiem for Bella Nemeth

Requiem for Bella Nemeth, by Croatian–Australian writer Vladimir Jakopanec, is the first of his three novels to be translated. It tells an intriguing, exciting, truly soul-scorching story.
Bella is a polymorphous transgressor if ever there was one. She operates at times as a smuggler. At other times she is an interpreter for UN forces in war-ravaged Yugoslavia—another kind of border-crossing, to add to her breaches of sexual, relationship, political, and social norms. Acting as an interpreter (and sometimes a translator), Bella conveys the perceptions, preoccupations, and besetting anxieties of other people; but she herself remains a mystery, never confessing in the role of a narrator.
Many characters are familiar enough. We know people like the main narrator, and probably think we’d act as he does. We never learn his name or his line of work, but are at ease in his interior, behind his eyes. Here is a reflective and always helpful soul who elicits sympathy and understanding, going about his good deeds for the tortured and troubled protagonists he encounters.
We get the most clearly etched depictions of Milan Šoštarić. Milan arrived as a child migrant in Melbourne, with his honest hard-working parents. We learn much that is true to life in the Croatian diaspora through episodes he recounts to the narrator—or when the speaker’s staff is handed temporarily to Milan himself, or to a reminiscing friend. Milan’s encounters with women loom especially large and threatening, with Bella Nemeth as his archetypal nemesis.
Quarrelsome but quiescent, belligerent but passive, impotent victim but ferocious sexual opportunist when the mood takes her, Bella assembles many opposites in one ingeniously drawn character. Bursting across conventional boundaries and categories, she is effectively no one in particular. Or to put it another way, she is every one of us. Kind and gracious Milan is a watchmaker—a regulator or coordinator of social harmony—but with his own mechanism broken.
Reader, you will receive this very fine work of Vladimir Jakopanec in your own active fashion. Readers, like translators, cannot do otherwise; we are not Google’s automated translation facility, and we are not neural-network reading machines. Fine reading is an act of artistic creation—just like fine writing, and just like fine translating. So I now pass Vlado’s challenging and engaging novel to you as the next collaborator in the chain.
—Alan Crosier (translator)