Cyclops
SynopsisPlot
In this semiautobiographical novel, Croatian writer Ranko Marinkovic recounts the adventures of young theater critic Melkior Tresic, an archetypal antihero who decides to starve himself to avoid fighting on the front lines in World War II. As he wanders Zagreb in a near-hallucinatory state of paranoia and malnourishment, Melkior encounters a colorful circus of characters—fortune-tellers, shamans, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and café intellectuals—all living in a fragile dream of a society about to be changed forever.
Story
About this book
Cyclops is a semiautobiographical novel by Croatian writer Ranko Marinković, set in Zagreb during the Second World War. Its central figure, Melkior Tresić, is a young theater critic who chooses to starve himself rather than be sent to the front lines. As hunger and anxiety reshape his perception of the city, Melkior drifts through Zagreb in a state somewhere between waking life and hallucination, encountering the people who still occupy its streets and cafés.
The cast around Melkior includes fortune-tellers, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and intellectuals, all carrying on their routines inside a society that is visibly fracturing. Marinković treats this world with dark humor and close attention to the absurd ways people adapt when the ground beneath ordinary life shifts. Melkior's self-imposed starvation is both a survival strategy and a slow collapse, and the novel follows his paranoid, weakening perspective without offering easy sympathy or heroism.
Originally published in Croatian, Cyclops appeared in English translation for the first time through Yale University Press. The novel belongs to the tradition of Central European modernist fiction, where the personal and the political press against each other in confined urban spaces during wartime.
