Slanting Towards the Sea, Lidija Hilje
Lidija Hilje’s new novel, Slanting Towards the Sea, is as lush as a Mediterranean summer and as heart-wrenching as the plane ride back home. Following Ivona, a thirty-year-old woman who feels like she is stagnating after moving back home post-divorce to help her father. She is still friends with her ex-husband and his new wife, an old friend of hers; more pressingly, she is still in love with her ex-husband, and she cannot move on.
This novel deftly weaves its stories together. In five parts, it introduces the reader to Ivona, her family, her ex-husband Vlaho and his wife Marina, and a whole cast of characters who flit in and out of Ivona’s life as they become busy with their own. Ivona’s loneliness is palpable throughout. Trapped in her love of Vlaho, she feels at once like she is still the teenager who fell in love with him and the jaded thirty-something who still wishes she was with him. Slowly, Hilje reveals to the reader the tragic, brutal circumstances of their divorce, a story that will leave you heartbroken and sour-mouthed.
While the novel at times falls victim to a habit of telling, rather than showing, the emotions and motivations of its characters, it pairs this telling with enough showing for it to flow convincingly, and the short chapters make it a very fast read, despite coming in at 361 pages (at least in my review copy). Hilje’s command of language is commendable, turning the Croatian cityscapes and glistening sea into an experience so richly sensory that you can feel it through the pages. There are moments when the ocean becomes almost erotic, a vessel for private moments of sensuousness, while the cityscapes around Ivona carry the heavy baggage of memories she cannot escape. It is an experience that will be familiar to anybody who has moved back home after a long absence and felt themselves regressing back into a person they used to be.
More than anything, though, Hilje imbues her novel with layers upon layers of grief. Ivona’s experiences steadily pile up, revealed to the reader through vignettes of the past and reflections on the present. Elements of her grief, whether familiar or not, are nonetheless touched by that universal quality of feeling as though one has let life pass them by, lost opportunities to time, and is finding themselves only in their thirties. As such, the novel ends on a touchingly optimistic note – Ivona is not perfect, but she is freer than she has been since her teenage years, ready to find her purpose in life outside of Croatia, Vlaho, and her family.
The perfect sultry summer novel, Slanting Towards the Sea reaches into the recesses of an ever-present contemporary sorrow and reveals that stagnation does not mean that one can never escape. A message of hope for the contemporary age – beautiful, lush, and deeply human.
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