In the packed hall of the Mostar Cultural Center tonight, as part of the International Cultural Event
"Mostar Summer 2026" organized a promotion of the novel "Underneath" by Adnan Džolota.
"The most that moves a person to do anything is the need to do something, some inner urge to write something,
to express himself. One of the main motifs of the novel is war, but it is not shown here directly but more as
a retrospective image of the main character's memory. It is reflected through the main character and his passage through the novel
the experience of a man who is unable to find his way in the world. He is a literature professor who was in the war, who
was wounded, but he can't find his place in the world, but despite that he tries to
positions itself somewhere. So, the novel is permeated with the classic themes of man, his relationship to the world,
the relationship between society and the individual, the relationship towards the past, family, memory, that is, that human
rootedness in the world he lives in. At the same time, questions of friendship, the search for happiness and
own purpose, because every man is in some way searching for himself. After all, all great writers, on the
"One way or another, they talk about the same topics - about man and his place in the world," Džolota pointed out.
On the literary values of the novel "Underneath", its autofictional structure and the themes it addresses
one of the promoters, Dr. Lejla Žujo-Marić, spoke.
"So far we have had the opportunity to meet Adnan as a poet, and now we are getting to know him as a prose writer. She said
I would like to think that the emphasis here is on prose in a broader sense. So, it is a text that
focuses on a writer who survived the context of the war in Mostar and who strives from that perspective in this time
to write a novel. We would expect it to be a novel in the making, but paradoxically, to some extent
self-ironically, it is about a novel in disappearance, written essentially by the hero of Giolota. It is about one species
autofiction, which is now popular in BiH literature. This means that writers find literary material for
their writing in reality and strive to build on it, analyze it, and artistically shape it in a certain way.
The reasons for this are deeply individual but also of a collective nature, because we are mainly talking about writers who are
born in the late 60s and mid 70s.
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