Adios, Cowboy
SynopsisPlot
Dada’s life is at a standstill in Zagrebshe’s sleeping with a married man, working a dead-end job, and even the parties have started to feel exhausting. So when her sister calls her back home to help with their aging mother, she doesn’t hesitate to leave the city behind. But she arrives to find her mother hoarding pills, her sister chain-smoking, her long-dead father’s shoes still lined up on the steps, and the cowboy posters of her younger brother Daniel (who threw himself under a train four years ago) still on the walls. Hoping to free her family from the grip of the past, Dada vows to unravel the mystery of Daniel’s final days.
Story
About this book
Dada has been drifting through life in Zagreb, caught between a relationship with a married man and a job that leads nowhere. When her sister asks her to come home and help care for their aging mother, Dada leaves the city without much resistance. The coastal town she returns to, however, is thick with unfinished grief. Her mother stockpiles medication. Her sister smokes constantly. Their father's shoes still sit on the steps years after his death. And the bedroom of their younger brother Daniel, who died by throwing himself under a train four years earlier, remains unchanged, his cowboy posters still hanging on the walls.
Dada decides to look into the final days of Daniel's life, hoping that understanding what happened might release the family from its paralysis. The novel follows her search through a small Croatian town where silence, gossip, and old loyalties make answers difficult to find. Savičević writes about a generation shaped by economic stagnation and the long aftereffects of the 1990s wars, people who grew up in a country that was itself trying to start over.
The story is set against the Dalmatian coast, mixing domestic tension with a broader portrait of post-war Croatian life. Savičević is also known as a poet, and the prose carries a compressed, physical quality throughout.
