Genre: Novel
250 paages
Setting: Northern Croatia, Mediterranean region, the Dinaric Karst

Plot:
The Dinaric Karst is the natural landscape at the centre of the unfinished novel The Song of the Earth. It is a hydrogeological system that is extremely harsh for its inhabitants, and yet people have lived, built, worked, and died there for thousands of years.

Where the karst shapes the landscape, two cartographies could be drawn: an above-ground map of the visible world, and an underground one, recording all caves. Horizontal and vertical structures, sinkholes and ponors, dried-out passages and labyrinths of subterranean rivers and streams form a hidden network of water veins running through the mountains. It is a world barely accessible to humans, only fragmentarily explored by speleologists. And yet, in its upper layers, the history of those who inhabit the surface is inscribed. Everything meant to remain unseen or forgotten lies within the openings of the limestone. Children once left their belongings—what they valued most—within the stone. Countless niches and crevices became places for hiding and memory. Lovers passed time there, cats went there to die. Birds, foxes, and bears all used the shelter of the rock. Even the remains of the wars of the 20th century are written into this landscape.

Here Lena, the novel’s protagonist, found a new home more than fifty years ago. She arrived in a country that was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. She came as a stranger and stayed, living a life in which the only constant was the seemingly barren and austere mountains surrounding the valley. She withdrew into a lonely house at the edge of society. Her life, like the karst, is marked by the trauma of the past hundred years. She married, lost her husband, gave birth to a son and lost him as well, and never fully became part of the village where she lived. And she left behind the people of the Black Forest village from which she had originally come.

Now, at 73, she wants to do one final thing: to read and write her life. Because this is not easy, she is supported by many fictional companions—writers whose books she is currently reading. They materialise in her house, accompany her on walks, and help her put her final book onto paper: her own story, inseparable from the karst itself.

Among them is Kamilo Orešković, a famous Balkan writer, himself an outsider, who writes against the wound of not belonging in a fractured world. The English author Andrew Macmartin, who has travelled many unknown paths, climbed mountains and walked through forests, reading landscapes as if they were poetry and translating them into language. Ellen Godfrey, who understands birds of prey and teaches Lena what white-tailed eagles can reveal about life if one is willing to listen. David Morrison, the Scottish poet who, like a hierophant, finds the fleeting within the everyday and the earthly. And Matthieu Illard, a traveller who crossed the Balkans in a breathtaking journey, able to recount it in a single long monologue, one sentence that holds both light and darkness, beauty and ugliness, becoming a musical composition: a Song of the Earth.

As Lena listens to this music and its interpreters and turns nature into her reading material, she begins to understand herself more deeply. From each of these imagined authors she learns something that makes her struggle with writing her story easier. Or perhaps, in the end, it is the authors themselves who are writing Lena’s book. Quite possibly.

The Song of the Earth is about reading the world, reading the karst, and surviving in a seemingly inhospitable nature whose richness and beauty reveal themselves quickly to anyone who dares to enter.