This is by Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981), a Croatian author we encountered in Zagreb. It was published in 1938, but Zora Depolo's translation from the Croatian didn't come out until 1978.

A pacifist, a Marxist (albeit a critical one), and an enormously influential figure in Croatian literature, Krleza was born in Zagreb.

I was a little at sea with this book, always feeling I was somehow missing the broader context. But the basic points are clear. It's a book about falling out of favour with society. And in an age of group-think and witch-hunts and cancel culture, it's more relevant than ever.

The narrator is never named. We just know he is a middle-aged lawyer. He has lived a quiet, dull life. He has a wife who doesn't love him, and three daughters whose intelligence he doesn't rate highly. No-one has taken much notice of him, let alone smear his name. But that is about to change.


Zagreb, earlier this month

Tending towards the misanthropic, our man is bluntly critical of "human folly". Particular targets of his opprobrium are representatives of "homo cylindriacus" or "top-hatted man", the kind of people who constitute the complacent middle class. The universe, he muses, was created so that people like that might multiply...

His gaze is ruthless: "People are filled by their upbringing with superstitions, prejudices, and lies as if stuffed with straw. People play roles like puppets, as if wound up by other people, to an alien music that is absolutely incomprehensible and unintelligible to them..." But he also has a kind of compassion: "People are egocentric, for they are unsatisfied and afraid of hunger; they are ill-humored because they have been humiliated and hurt."

He's also a man who has been marked by the past: "I remember then in 1918 -- in early spring... -- there was a feeling that we had no stronghold, foundation, or basis: we were in fear of the brutal military force of the Central Powers, in terror of guerrilla anarchy, and panic-stricken in the face of our domestic vacuum. That stupid imperialistic war revealed to us how we had been living in cycles of historical defeats... And today? The romantic wartime illusions from the years 1917-18 are far behind us, in the distant and already historical past, and what has come out of it all?" Sometimes he remembers himself in a trench, wet, cold, dirty.



The novel's pivotal episode takes place at a dinner party in Director-General Domacinski's vineyard. Said director is a pompous know-it-all; he's self-satisfied, narrow-minded, and boring. But he tells, with great gusto, a story about how, in 1918, he had shot four men "like four dogs" in front of his house for trying to steal wine. He's an upstanding citizen, who donates money for church altars and stained-glass windows. He therefore considers himself irreproachable. "Who," wonders the narrator, "could have possibly explained to that donor that he was obviously and logically nobody else but one of the commonest and most vulgar of criminals, a murderer; morally an idiot, a criminal type of man?" For the narrator, the "mad dogs" who were shot by Domacinski were "people who were rising from the indignity of humiliated slaves". And, he wonders, "what kind of laws are those that enable the Director-General to shoot at mad dogs who oppose the war rather than at those who requisition his wine and wish to carry war further? It is all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity."

And the last bit is what he inadvertently says out loud...

He knows he still has time to wriggle out. But he can't. Domacinski says he must apologize, or he will shoot him like a dog too. Things escalate.

And because Domacinski is big and powerful, the townspeople row up behind him. All sorts of stories begin to spread, to the detriment of the narrator. Weird rumours about his sexual life emerge, along with massive exaggerations of what happened at the dinner.

Taking a hard look at "the petit-bourgeois fools around me", the narrator surmises that they "became alarmed at the very thought of the existence of one individual flying his own flag". He won't back down, and grows increasingly isolated: "In brief: the circus grew increasingly mad every day, more and more infuriating, and at times it seemed to me that everything was hovering in the air and that it would be difficult to guess where it would all end. One thing, however, was perfectly clear to me: one should remain logical because logic has never been an unreliable guide. True, I was rather alone, but loneliness is not proof of not being right."



Our narrator is not a pusillanimous man. He stands up to critics; he stands up to "helpful" friends; he stands up to Domacinski's lawyers. In fact, he almost revels in his notoriety. And he has a good memory. Those who have made caustic comments that betray their lack of sympathy for the poor find they have forfeited his trust and respect.

When his wife asks him to leave, he takes up with Jadviga Jesenska. As she has had a difficult background, and has gained something of a reputation, the liaison draws plenty of commentary. But again the narrator draws attention to power disparities: "If she had lived in her own villa, she would have been a distinguished lady."

He's not one to mince matters, and some of his descriptions are far from kind. But his clear-sighted and compassionate attitude to outcasts such as Jadviga commands respect. Later in the book he meets Dr Katancic, a forger, who also points out the hypocrisy of society with regard to crime: "If I had not let people crush me, but had trampled on people myself, I would have been a respected and honored citizen today."

The trial scene is very powerful, and the narrator's acid tongue covers it excellently: "The courtroom, in which His Honor Dr Attila von Rugvay opened the trial to pass judgment on me for the quadruple murder by Domacinski, was more like a concert hall that day than a courtroom. Everybody was assembled as at a sensational first night at the opera."

The prosecution's case is basically a panegyric to Domacinski: "Such a man must not be spat on, slandered, smeared, without being given on behalf of us all the satisfaction that such a generous idealist is fully justified in expecting: satisfaction in the form of rigid and just punishment."

The prosecution also argues that shooting four individuals in the back was a demonstration of patriotism: "Whoever might have committed any act of restoring civil order in those sad, terrible, criminal conditions cannot by any moral criterion be declared guilty, but just the opposite: such an individual was at that moment, and is still to this day, meritorious in the eyes of his people and his homeland."

The narrator mounts his own defence. But as he says, "I can prove nothing at all as regards Domacinski because he is not a man, an individual. He is an abstraction -- a symbol of social conditions and relations." He brings evidence to show what sort of a man Domacinski is (an embezzler and a police informer). A heckler from the court backs what he says: "I know Domacinski. That man is right: he is a cad and should be put in jail."

This trial is adjourned in uproar, but in the course of a second trial, the narrator is sentenced to eight months' imprisonment for insults and slanders.



During his jail time, he befriends Valent Polenta, another underdog, whose resourcefulness the narrator admires. Polenta likes him too: "The very realization that an individual may be a human being in spite of being a man of learning opened up to him a new outlook on life and the world, and inspired him with the hope that, after all, everything was not lost forever, that some solution would be discovered, and that all wisdom had not perished and all hearts were not dead."

The narrator serves his eight-month sentence. But his troubles are not over. The townspeople just won't let the story go, and inevitably, there are people who want to be agents provocateurs. Plus our narrator never seems to hold back... So there's another case to answer. And another.

Eventually he goes off to Italy, but even there he can't escape scandal.

His musings grow darker (and sound ever more contemporary): "What can a man do in a shipwreck without a lifebelt? Our days pass with our lives like Twentieth-Century Fox newsreels. The news appears on the screen of reality at an ever more maddening speed; the play of light and shade, the mysterious performance of European lies grows increasingly obscure and enigmatic every day, the public's horror is increasingly intensified, and nobody can tell when the bombs dropped on Madrid or Shanghai that we watch from our seats in the cinema will be dropped on our own heads... People generally do not like discussions about the truth being not what we are prone to believe. For, after all, what is truth?"

The final chapter is tellingly entitled: Among the Shipwrecked.

Our man is in trouble again, this time because of Marko, a jail acquaintance who parked a pack of forged notes on him. Marko is one of those people who start out down the wrong track, and just can't get right again. As the narrator puts it, "There are moments in everybody's life when it is possible to hear the wheels of one's own fate squeaking." Once you've slipped, there's no hope for you. Because society is unforgiving, and there are no further opportunities, you keep doing crime.

This is also the chapter where the narrator learns of the suicide of Jadviga Jesenska.

He turns the radio on, and feels acutely the weight of the contrasts that emerge from it. One of the things he notices is "the feeling of a vacuum -- a complete vacuum both in head and in heart, the vertical axis of complete silence around which endless and enormous darkness forms a howling whirlwind". Voices talk about poison gases, but if you twist the dial just a fraction, there'll be an opera. Another tweak, and someone's playing an accordion, and right next to that, there's Madrid and Shanghai, and the thought of those bombs: "Tonight the whole of Europe is dancing the fox trot, and here one man is unutterably alone, encircled by voices -- absolutely alone, listening to the crackling of his box, the tuning of instruments to a performance in a distant opera house."

The book closes like this:

"The dark. At twilight the instruments unfold like flowers, the dark-brown pitchy lava flows, craters of lava smoke, someone pathetically talks about the international balance of power. Little bells ring. The organ plays. The waltz from The Merry Widow: 'Let's go to Maxim's'... If one could just sleep. Fall asleep.

"Certainly and forever. Not to be."



On the Edge of Reason has a very modern feel. Heaven knows we hear enough stories today about people being hounded in ruthless beat-ups, and about big potatoes who always have enough clout to make the world sail in the direction they want it to. Business sounds familiar too: "Our times," muses the narrator, "produce chamber pots and fountain pens, with one thing in mind only -- to make as many of them as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as profitably as possible."

So there's plenty here to engage with, even though I might not be mining all the levels.

A couple of notes to finish up:

-- Lily Meyer describes it as "a tale of refusal" to rank with Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener. Interesting comparison.

-- And Zvane Crnja quotes the enthusiasm of Jean-Paul Sartre for the work of Krleza, and his recognition of the degree to which the Croatian writer had anticipated existentialism. Crnja also points out that Krleza is "recognized by Hungarians as if he were one of their own". Which explains the statue in Budapest, which matches the one in Zagreb:



Krleza definitely needs further exploration. I just need affordable versions in languages I can understand...