Jugo

They only see each other once a year, and each time, they end up in an argument. The father who came to Germany as a young man, started a family, worked in hospitality, and left the country thirty years later for Croatia. And his son, who lives in Berlin and has become a writer and is now holidaying in his father’s guest house on the Adriatic Coast. In their arguments, they free themselves from things that have been keeping them apart. And in seemingly insignificant moments – sailing a small boat out to an island just off the coast accompanied by the warm southern wind, the Sirocco, known in Croatian as the Jugo; playing tennis on the court of a dilapidated hotel; or visiting the small family farm in Bosnia – they discover an unexpected closeness. Gradually, they clear old paths that had become impassable – paths to each other, and to their shared history.

Jugo is a moving portrait of father and son. A declaration of love to a father who is at once distant and close. And whose return to his old homeland was even harder than his arrival in a foreign country. With great empathy, Ilija Matusko explores the past – both personal and collective – and tells a story about a fractured family, analysing the feeling that connects father and son: that of never truly fitting in.

»An honest, stirring, and moving portrait of a father and a son, and of all the many, fine hyphens in their father-son relationship.« Saša Stanišić

»Jugo is a sensitive story about the unspeakable vacuum between countries and classes, fathers and sons.« Toxische Pommes

»›Gore i dole‹, up and down, talking and weeping. Ilija Matusko's writing represents the great and tender gesture of completely accepting the things that make up life: family, origins, memory.« Martin Kordić