The travelogue Behind the Mountains of the Moon is the fourth book by Hrvoje Ivančić, who as a reporter and globetrotter honed his pen during a ten-year wandering through Africa and the Middle East.
Hrvoje Ivančić’s travelogue Behind the Mountains of the Moon is tangible, full of colors, smells and sounds of hot African days and nights. Authentic characters are described, and their goal is to survive. In a tense sequence of events, which seemingly revolve around the author and his reporter’s goals, the reader learns how this bare survival unfolds, be it stories from the perspective of young warriors, old priests, prostitutes, UNs, entrepreneurs, fishermen, salesmen a trifle, a woman from an orphanage or anonymous passers-by, putting together a rich mosaic that introduces us to the three-dimensional experience of an African street, but just as much of Africa’s powerful and rich nature.
Everything is there: Africa as a postcard, as a distant exotic destination, a lion, a giraffe, a tall young man with a spear, armed guys in a truck, dust, malaria, genocide, machete massacres, poverty, child soldiers, magic water … while night birds on high heels they hang around the muzungu, in the nightclubs that are the factories of their dreams and white fornication, which in Goma sublimates all the evil that has soaked the African soil with blood and from which the flowers of some future freedom are just shyly sprouting.
Ivančić knows that he is alone on his journey and although in his adventurous solitaire he meets dozens of colorful characters and through them gives us an insight into the African tradition and chaotic present, he twists his interior and masterfully compiles the novel Road and through essays, written in a superb reportage style, which is why this book can not be put down easily.