The Fig Tree
SynopsisPlot
The Fig Tree is a novel composed of the intertwining stories of the family of Jadran, a 30-something who tries to piece together the story of his relatives in order to better understand himself. Because he cannot understand why Anja walked out of their shared life, he tries to understand the suspicious death of his grandfather and the withdrawal of his grandmother into oblivion and dementia. With all his might, Jadran tries to understand the departure of his father in the first year of the war in the Balkans as he also tries to comprehend his mother, with her bewildering resentment of his grandfather, and her silent disappointment with his father.
Story
About this book
Jadran is in his thirties when Anja walks out of their shared life. Unable to explain her departure, he turns back through his family's history for patterns that might explain his own present. His grandfather died in circumstances never fully accounted for, and his grandmother has withdrawn into dementia, taking what she knew with her. His father left during the first year of the Balkan wars, and his mother carries an unexplained resentment toward the grandfather.
Goran Vojnovic, a Slovenian writer, structures the novel across three generations, moving between the mid-twentieth century and the present day. The story shifts among family members and time periods, layering each person's version of events against the others. What Jadran uncovers is shaped as much by silences and contradictions as by anything spoken directly. The wars of the 1990s in the Balkans sit at the centre of the family's fractures, but the damage stretches both earlier and later than the conflict itself.
The novel traces how private grief and political upheaval grow hard to separate inside one family. Each generation passes on decisions and losses that the next inherits without the context needed to read them clearly, which is where Jadran begins his search.
