Nicol Ljubic

A young German, whose father came to the country many years ago from Croatia as a guest worker, finally meets the woman in Berlin who pulls him out of the blandness of his life. Beautiful, temperamental Ana is a student from Serbia. She does evening work as a theatre cloakroom attendant and has an appropriate Shakespeare quotation for every occasion. Her father, once an English literature professor in Sarajevo, was the Balkans’ leading Shakespeare expert. Today, of course, he no longer stands in front of his students to instruct them on the motive of revenge in the works of the English dramatist, but as the accused before The Hague Tribunal, where he has to defend himself against the accusation that he was involved in a heinous war crime in Visegrad. (…) An awkward love story, an awkward novel. Nicol Ljubic, who was born in Zagreb in 1971 and grew up in Germany, narrates from the perspective of Robert, the brooding lover, and switches constantly between two settings and times. (…) At the same time, Meeresstille is a novel that goes to your heart and provides food for thought.

Karl-Markus Gauss: „Zwei Leben, ein Gerichtsstand“
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 March 2010