Robert Perisić, Our Man in Iraq ****

I bought this novel, part of "The Best of Croatian Literature" series, from the bookstore on the Stradun in Dubrovnik. The title and the helicopter silhouette on the cover led me to expect a glorified genre story, with a Croatian journalist tracking down his missing cousin in Iraq. Instead, I got something I liked better: a literary novel that explores modern Croatian society. The war in Iraq is a MacGuffin.

The narrator of Our Man in Iraq is Toni, the economics correspondent for a Zagreb newspaper. He and his actress girlfriend are considering buying a flat, which leads Toni to consider how he can grow into responsibility without succumbing to conventional stereotypes. His search for a suitable identity -- and his relationship to his "redneck" relatives -- is a metaphor for Croatia's post-communist situation.

I appreciated that Our Man in Iraq works as a personal story even if you ignore its larger concerns. Perisić writes perceptively about relationships and how people define their personal identities. I found insightful passages with some regularity.

It all ran by itself, without any particular plan. We enjoyed that experiment. We went on our first summer holiday together, then there were autumn walks in Venice, the Biennale, Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vienna, Nick Cave in Ljubljana, a second summer holiday, a third, Egypt, Istria, and so on. Mutual friends, parties, organizing things. Everything rolled along nicely as if nature were doing the thinking for us. And then we reached an invisible point.  At a particular moment, ... we started to wait -- waiting for things to keep happening all by themselves like before... (page 19) 

Most of the time the social commentary flows naturally from the story; for example, Toni's attitudes toward his rural background are revealed during a visit to his girlfriend's parents' home. Sometimes, though, Perisić makes his point more directly:

 Listen, Yugoslavia was a sum total of small nationalisms which united to fight the big ones. That's how we got rid of the Italians on the coast and the Germans on the continent. We couldn't have done that by ourselves. Once we'd done that, we got rid of Yugoslavia too... (page 152)

The story moves rather slowly until events speed up (and go a little over the top) in the last 100 pages. Our Man in Iraq won't satisfy action junkies, but I enjoyed it and appreciated it as a souvenir of our trip to Croatia.