Shortlisted for the Predrag Matvejević Award 2021
Longlisted for the Fric Award 2019

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There has been a crisis in the Cabinet, which is a kind of small, private, non-profit museum that houses the legacy of ‘sentimental and trivial literature’ – mostly written by women, of course.

 

The curator, an elderly man who writes letters to the late museum founder Rosa, realizes that not only does the Cabinet need a ‘cash injection’, but also a new, younger and healthier guardian to replace him. None of this is easy to achieve; and a job advertisement that includes the key sentence of the novel: ‘Your story is more important to us than your qualifications’, will further complicate matters. Ten candidates apply to the ad that had inadvertently implied that candidates should also be writers; they bring stories about their professional and private lives, sometimes completely bizarre, every story marked by the distinctive voice of the teller.

 

While the curator fills letters to Rosa with fragments from the Cabinet’s past and present, the candidates appear one by one before him with their narratives, enabling the novel to emerge from the closed space of the Cabinet into the outside, towards contemporary life, its peculiarities and problems. In this way, the author manages to deal with a wide range of topics: art and activism, social responsibility, commercialization and the entry of capital into unprofitable spheres of human activity, feminism, science, technology – but also love, which is one of the common concerns both in interpersonal relationships and in the efforts to preserve some treasures from the past.

 

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Additional Information:

Published 2018 (Croatian) – English translation - 9789537760885 – Paperback - 204 pages

 

Rights: World