Ana Brnardić publishes first novel: 'Jezero' explores father's death, grief, and mourning

Poet Ana Brnardić has ventured into prose with her debut novel, "Jezero" (The Lake), published by OceanMore. The book delves into the profound experience of losing a father, exploring the ensuing grief, sorrow, and the irreversible changes that such a loss brings.

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Ana's novel resists strict genre definitions; it can be read as a diary and as a memoir, but an autofictional novel is also an absolutely fitting genre definition.

Nataša Medved from OceanMore described the novel as resisting strict genre classifications, suggesting it can be read as a diary or memoir, but firmly identifying it as an autofictional work. Medved highlighted the text as an intimate record from the heart of sorrow, specifically the unique grief that follows the loss of a loved one. She noted Brnardić's use of her poetic senses to lyrically portray the confrontation with illness, the proximity of death, and the final farewell.

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Ana Brnardić opened all her poetic senses and wrote a lyrical novel about how we face illness, the proximity of death, and finally how we face that final farewell before the inevitability of that death.

Brnardić explained that the real-life illness and death of her father served as the direct impetus for the book. Initially, she sought to process these overwhelming and difficult events through poetry, but found her lyrical voice becoming trapped in sorrow, bordering on lamentation without resolution. She realized that certain sentences within her notes held a greater potential to illuminate the reality of the event, a reality that threatened to render her speechless.

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I started writing because it is actually a way in which you can resist that disintegration of reality and those catastrophic events in life that are indigestible and lead you to a kind of bottom, to a sorrow with which you can do nothing.

"These sentences carried much more than poetry could," Brnardić stated, explaining her shift to prose. She discovered that in this new form, she could move beyond the grieving self to an objective observer capable of describing the mourning process. Literary critic Branislav Oblučar praised the novel's powerful emotional, imaginative, and intellectual impact, calling Brnardić's writing dense and strong yet accessible, captivating the reader throughout.

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These sentences carried much more than poetry could. So I went into prose.