Our last entry into the ever-expanding Write Brain TV Radical Library is a controversial seedy, semiautobiographical modernist tale set in Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb.

Cyclops from 1965 by Ranko Marinković is one of Croatia’s most beloved and acclaimed novels, a story of immense scope and complexity that rivals some of the Western World’s most cherished novels, frequently drawing comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses or Homer’s Odyssey. Marinković, a playwright originally, had started his literary ascent many years before this publication, in the 1930s in fact, but he was captured by Italian fascists and sent to a refugee camp during WWII. He rose to prominence with his first major work, the 1955 drama Glorija, which garnered the writer a great deal of controversy due to its anti-Catholic sentiments.

Set in Zagreb’s streets pre-war, Cyclops sees our protagonist staggering in the slums, delirious from hunger and paranoid with fear, seeking to find comfort in the other strangers in the city who avoided service and are attempting to go on living as if the war didn’t exist. In a local saloon, he joins a drinking club of other intellectuals, where they quote from the Classics and live life according to the ethos ‘life should imitate art.’ Attempting to dull out the horrors they know live beyond their alcohol-drenched environs, the intellectuals construct a boozy alternate reality where dialogue unfolds like a play and irony cuts like a knife.