The Return of Philip Latinowicz

After twenty-three years away, the painter Philip Latinowicz returns to the provincial Pannonian town of his childhood in Croatia to confront his illegitimate birth, his estranged mother and his own creative and spiritual crisis. Krleža draws the town and its region from provincial Croatia: the small Catholic town with its square and church, his mother's house and tobacco shop, the flat muddy Pannonian plain, and the decadent manor world into which the fatal Bobočka draws him.

Philip Latinowicz

The provincial town

The return

Stepping off the train after twenty-three years, the painter Philip Latinowicz walks back into the drowsy provincial town that made him, its dust, its smells and its faces flooding him with the past he fled. The return, and the town's stubborn sameness, sets off the long interior reckoning with origins and identity that is the whole book.

The opening

inspired by Philip returns to the small Pannonian town of his childhood, drawn from provincial Croatia; the town is invented and sited in the real Pannonian countryside of northern Croatia.

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