A month and a half ago, the news of Vedrana Rudan becoming half-blind after she had had Covid-19 spread all around the region. It was none other than this famous woman of letters that revealed this to the general public in a blog post that she had dictated to her husband, but many immediately thought that it was all just one in a long array of her marketing tricks. However, it was not a trick or a spin – Vedrana Rudan really does have serious problems with her eyesight, which she finds very difficult as someone who has been reading and writing all her life. In the first interview that she had after everything that had happened, Rudan talks about her eyesight problems, her new novel "Imprisoned for Life (published by Laguna), the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and many other things.
First of all, how are you feeling? You have been having problems with your eyesight after you'd had corona?
"Thank you for being so caring. I was left blind while I had corona. All I could see on the screens were blurry spots. The doctors said that they didn't understand what was going on, and that I should wait until I came out the other side. I've been waiting for months. That said, it is better now. Dark clouds form before my eyes only occasionally. I don't know when I will have my eyesight fully back. When we take a look around ourselves – those among us who can – perhaps it's better to only see blurs. A sharp eyesight can make you depressed."
In your new novel, titled "Imprisoned for Life" – topping the best-seller lists already, by the way – you revisit the topic of the relationship between parents and children. You treat this topic rather brutally – let me just quote a few sentences from the novel: "Being a mother is being imprisoned for life, without pardon"; "Children are the most expensive investment, which pays off to no one. You'll see how a child can scratch your skin and sell it to you as a gentle stroke"; "Living with a child is a dance on a wire hanging over an abyss". Aren't these words too harsh, even for a novel?
"Everyone who has children, especially adult children, knows that I'm not exaggerating. When a child is born, every responsible parent – in most cases it's women we're talking about here – is sentenced to a life in prison. No mother in her right mind could ever lose the love for her child, no matter what they're like. Or the fear for how their lives turn out. Or the need to help them for as long as she lives and breathes. However, I don't think that "Imprisoned for Life" is a novel about the relationship between a mother and a daughter. It's a book about the relationship a woman has with herself. A story of a woman who spends her whole life trying to define what freedom is and then life free. A huge majority of women don't even dream of freedom and see their enslavement as something normal. I've spent three years with Lola. The woman is amazing."
What do you have in common with your heroine Lola, a well-to-do woman who inherits quite a fortune from her mother and grandmother, and spends her whole life wishing to be loved by this one man?
"Lola is my first female character that I have nothing in common with. I'm not brave as she is. Or brazen. Or honest. Or rich. Or free. I'm not so sure that she spent her whole life wishing to be loved by this one man. She wanted to love him, and that is a very different thing. All my books have been written for women, so that's why they will understand my heroine better than you. For us, it's not difficult 'making' a man love us for a shorter or longer period of time. We find it's much more difficult to force ourselves to love a man over the long haul, and yet we are expected to do so. 'They lived together happily ever after.' That's the 'happy end' of many fairy tales. Is there a horror greater than living with someone for the rest of your life? I'm happy to see that modern women realize that in their lives, it's more important to have your own job, your own roof over your head, and your own key. The rest – should Prince Charming fail to perform – can be pulled off by a dildo. For twenty years, my one message to women has been: Love yourselves! Lola is the only one who's listened [laughs]."
Lola has made sure her daughter is financially well-off, but she's failed to find a common ground with her. Still, some of what she does proves her unconditional love of a parent for her child.
"Most parents would do everything humanly impossible for their children. Bank cards are worn thin to get new sneakers, children get new cars, elderly parents start renting apartments and leave their houses to their children. In short, we kill ourselves in instalments in order to pay off their loan instalments and buy their love. It's all in vain. Children grow up and become adults – mostly adults who think we owe them something for as long as we live. It's hard to draw the line. I took the motto of my book from the song 'Hotel California', which has the best definition of that sick relationship: 'You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.' Sounds better in the original version. All parents should let go of their children at one point and become liberated. The relationship between parents and children is war. It's either us or them. Eventually, they always win, because over the years they become stronger and colder, and we grow weaker and yearn for their love as it might warm us up. Wrong, wrong , wrong. We should kill this yearning in ourselves and invest our energy into other sources of warmth. A passionate self-love, for example."
Have you been afraid, like your heroine Lola, that you will depend on the mercy of your children in your old age?
"This is every parent's worst nightmare, I think. The only cure for that is money. Money can buy you someone who will bring tea for you or change your diaper. The old, the helpless, and the poor are of no interest to anyone. Everyone should think about this while they're young and powerful. And always give children less than they can. Children only respect parents who love themselves more than they love them."
You book also asks the question of what it means to be free today. What is freedom to you? Is a human being "free as long as they don't love," or are they free only if they are financially secure, without bank loans and jobs they go to every day? You say, "Money works wonders," and "When you have money, then you are the master of your life."
"Money is freedom, no matter what the overlords that keep underpaying us tell us on the subject. Of course love spells the death of freedom too. That's why one needs to control oneself. You're right if you think that it's easier to say something like this in your seventies than in your twenties, when your hormones are running wild. I agree. I've become intelligent at a point when this intelligence is of no use to me. Now I can live a relaxed life without love, without either a prince or his horse. Today, it is the doctors that are the heroes of my dreams. Which brings us back to the start. Money is both freedom and happiness. Some will say, the rich cry too. Of course they do, occasionally. The poor cry all the time. Nothing that makes people happy comes cheap. Love is expensive, medical treatment is expensive. Lola was tremendously lucky. She was rich all her life. I envy her for that. Unlike me, she didn't have to write books so that he could get a CT or MRI scan without waiting, or get a hip replacement [laughs]. Luckily, I still have my own hips. [laughs]"
I am under the impression that you idealize Yugoslavia, i.e. the life in that country, in this novel again.
" 'In this novel again…' I wasn't aware that I was 'idealizing Yugoslavia'. "
Well, reading your autobiography "Dancing around the Sun", I got the impression that Yugoslavia was a perfect country for you.
"I lived in it and have always described life in that erstwhile country the way it was. We were poor, but we lived without stress. We lived in a 'dictatorship' and dreamed of 'democracy'. Yes, we were better off because we had dreams. Today we live in a permanent nightmare, consumed by a horrific fear of losing our jobs, failing to pay the loan instalments or our children's schooling. The medical treatment that we assumed we were entitled to in Yugoslavia is now a privilege of the rich. Education in Yugoslavia was top-notch. Back then, not every ambitious yokel could buy a PhD overnight, which is what keeps happening in Croatia. Schooling was free, there were student loans, and poor children could get university degrees. Today it's all a pipedream. Our politicians are criminals and have no intention to hide that fact from us. The media have been bought off, and here I'll repeat the worn-out phrase from a US film: 'We are all one paycheck away from homelessness.' Ordinary people live in a pure horror, no matter where they might by slaving their lives away. Seen in this light, Yugoslavia does seem to some people to be a sort of paradise on earth. I'm not one of them, I wouldn't go back. I lived hoping it would disappear and turn into something better. It disappeared in a war, smoke, and blood, it was torn into pieces populated now by slaves terrified of what tomorrow brings."
In this new book, you also touch on the topic of the 1990s wars in the region, when Serbs and Croats looked at each other down the barrels of guns, and when pulling strings and producing cash could get you anything – buying an apartment or a house for petty cash, or not getting sent into the warzone. It's interesting that at one point in the novel, a character says, "Tito is gone, we will have Croatia". Have the 1990s irreversibly pushed the region back in some ways, and planted the seed of hatred that is difficult to eradicate even now?
"The 1990s didn't push back the region, they destroyed the lives of millions of people. I don't mean the dead, they fared the best . In the 1990s, money could buy anything in the same way it can now. Those years marked the start of the killing what is human in people in these parts. Nonetheless, I find it hard to believe that hatred is raging among the peoples, among the Serbs and the Croats. Hatred is promoted by politicians, and they make money off of it. The media, as servants to their rotten masters, keep up the rabble-rousing. I may by blind and stupid, but I have never seen or felt this hatred among ordinary people, Serbs and Croats. What idiots scribble on web portals shouldn't be taken too seriously . We're not dumb, we know that both you and we are victims of scoundrels who make coats out of our own skins. It's been thirty years. Who in their right mind in Serbia can believe that the 'Ustashe' are to blame for the life that they live? Are there really madmen in Croatia who truly believe that the 'Chetniks' are to blame for it all? I don't think so."
Boban Karović
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