Black Rock White City

Starred review from July 31, 2017
Patric’s suspenseful and harrowing debut brilliantly explores life as a refugee in Melbourne, Australia. Jovan Brakochevich works as a janitor at Sandringham Hospital while his wife, Suzana, earns money housekeeping for upper-middle class families in the suburb of Black Rock. Graffiti begins to appear around the hospital, and Jovan is ordered to clear the vandalism. David Dickens, a psychologist hired to study the graffiti in order to deduce the identity of the vandal, believes an employee in emotional crisis might be the perpetrator. The vandalism grows in severity, and so does Jovan’s obsession with it. He begins to suspect the messages are meant for him. Tensions rise as the hospital’s defacement leads Jovan to reflect on his past pain and his old life as a poet and educator in the former Yugoslavia, which he and Suzana fled in the chaos of the war and which has strained their relationship. These conflicts within them aggravate memories of their shared pain and manifest as damaging behavior. A sense of dread builds throughout, culminating in a shocking and unforgettable ending. Patric tackles the pressure to assimilate and the longing for one’s former life. The book is littered with quotes from Miloš Tsernianski and Ivo Andric´, and nods to Meša Selimovic´, Danilo Kiš, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky; the inclusion of these voices and narratives, along with the novel’s shifting tones and points of view, help articulate the experience of many forced migrants. This is a heartbreaking yet hopeful work about how trauma can erase identity and drive people to reinvent themselves.

July 1, 2017
Devastated by the country's civil war, a Serbian couple is haunted by evil.In his debut novel, Patric (Las Vegas for Vegans, 2012, etc.), who immigrated to Australia from Serbia as a child, offers the dark, surreal tale of Jovan and Suzana, immigrants in Melbourne beset by memories of their past. Forced out of their homes, fired from their jobs as university professors, tormented and tortured, they ended up with their two children in a refugee camp. On the first day, all except Suzana ate a dinner that turned out to be poisoned: the children, ages 4 and 6, died; Jovan writhed in pain for two weeks but survived. The children's deaths were an unspeakable loss "of God and the skies, it is the loss," Jovan reflects, "of the past and the future." Overwhelmed by grief, the couple "found a way to live without response," which makes them, as fictional characters, unusually passive. In their adopted country, Jovan takes a job as a hospital janitor; he cleans the bloody remains of medical procedures and miscarriages and also the weird graffiti that appears with maddening frequency on all surfaces: "Dog eat dog eat dog," "Winner rapes all," "Masters of Destiny/Victims of Fate," "Ethical Cleansing." Jovan calls the mysterious writer Dr Graffito and comes to feel that he, personally, is being targeted, even when words are slashed into a woman's corpse; even after an ophthalmologist commits suicide when messages appear on her eye chart; even after a woman is murdered. Echoes of the television series The Bridge come to mind, but Dr Graffito, malevolent as he is, does not seem to be politically motivated. Instead, he appears to represent sheer, demonic evil. Patric's poetic language is highlighted by occasional passages from Jovan's poetry, though these slow down the novel's deliberate pace. The surreal, dreamlike atmosphere is intensified by Jovan's unbelievable affair with a sexually voracious dentist, his confrontation with a drug-addicted nurse who accuses him of being Dr Graffito, and Suzana's stark memories of a sadistic professor. A grim, unsettling tale of wounded characters.

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Starred review from August 1, 2017

Halfway through this arresting debut, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australian author Patric says that, compared with lived horror, television broadcasts of atrocities such as those in 1990s Bosnia "are only ever images." But his images will remain indelibly and affectingly in readers' minds. Jovan, a Bosnian refugee working as a janitor in a Melbourne hospital, is forced to wash away increasingly disturbing graffiti that finally seems directed at him; he's obliterating and cleansing terms like obliteration and ethnic cleansing. He and his wife, Suzana, lost everything during the war--home, university jobs, and their two children--and they are no longer intimate. They face prejudice in their adopted homeland not just as refugees but as Serbs, blamed for the Balkan violence. Yet as Jovan helplessly muses, "Bosnia was some kind of horror show where monsters killed other monsters" for reasons that were never clear, and both he and Suzana bear mental and physical scars that Patric bares to us. As they struggle to reconnect, Jovan contends with the devil he sees incarnate in humans and finally, violently, faces down the perpetrator himself. We learn little about the so-called Dr. Graffito, but his identity is less important than the journey we undertake with Jovan and Suzana. VERDICT A highly recommended study of human loss and endurance.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017

Halfway through this arresting debut, winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australian author Patric says that, compared with lived horror, television broadcasts of atrocities such as those in 1990s Bosnia "are only ever images." But his images will remain indelibly and affectingly in readers' minds. Jovan, a Bosnian refugee working as a janitor in a Melbourne hospital, is forced to wash away increasingly disturbing graffiti that finally seems directed at him; he's obliterating and cleansing terms like obliteration and ethnic cleansing. He and his wife, Suzana, lost everything during the war--home, university jobs, and their two children--and they are no longer intimate. They face prejudice in their adopted homeland not just as refugees but as Serbs, blamed for the Balkan violence. Yet as Jovan helplessly muses, "Bosnia was some kind of horror show where monsters killed other monsters" for reasons that were never clear, and both he and Suzana bear mental and physical scars that Patric bares to us. As they struggle to reconnect, Jovan contends with the devil he sees incarnate in humans and finally, violently, faces down the perpetrator himself. We learn little about the so-called Dr. Graffito, but his identity is less important than the journey we undertake with Jovan and Suzana. VERDICT A highly recommended study of human loss and endurance.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2017
Winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Award in Patric's native Australia, Black Rock White City is set in the late 1990s and focuses on Jovan and Suzana, a Serbian couple who fled the Yugoslav wars. Literature professors in their homeland, they work as cleaners and caregivers in Australia. Patric portrays this displaced pair as they try to adjust to immigrant life and piece their marriage back together. Jovan's having to cope with the bizarre graffiti appearing around the hospital where he works adds a gothic quality to the plot. As do the frequent flashbacks to the horrors Jovan and Suzana experienced during the wars in Yugoslavia, a history which looms larger and larger over the course of the novel. Jovan and Suzana constantly feel estranged, not just from people they have lost but also from professional prestige and from their native language and cuisine. For fans of A. M. Homes and Andre Dubus III, or people interested in the Yugoslav Wars, Patric's debut is an unsettling, wonderfully stylized work that paints a fascinating portrait of immigrant life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)