Zoran Drvenkar

This is a psychological thriller written in the second person, and it works. I read an earlier thriller by this Croatian author, Sorry, and I really liked it so I picked this up.
There are two major story lines. One involves a group of teenage girls (Stink, Schnappi, Nessi, Tara, and Jenni) who have stolen a valuable stash of heroin belonging to the uncle of one of the girls.The uncle is a ruthless crime mobster, and now the girls are on the run. The second story line involves a serial killer who murders at widely separated time intervals, but when he kills, his crimes are spectacular. We first meet him when there is a massive traffic jam during a snow storm, and miles of cars are immobilized on the highway. Our killer works his way back through the line of cars, quietly and efficiently killing lone occupants of the stalled cars. When the road was cleared, 26 people are dead in their cars.
This was an expertly written and well-developed page turner, told from multiple view points. The author captures the reality of his teenage girl characters as well as he creates believable criminals. The plot is intricate, but it is convincing and seamless.… (more)

A friendly warning to those who sampled the first chapters of Zoran Drvenkar’s Sorry on Kindle and thought the prologue was merely cartoonishly gory, in the hee-hee-that's-gotta-hurt-as-you-dig-into-the-bucket-for-more-popcorn Hostel-like vein: the novel gets progressively disturbing and repugnant, in ways that get under your skin. I don’t mean that as an (appropriate) pun either; the crime that precipitates the narrative is meant to be deliberately nasty.

The novel’s premise is simple but high-concept. An enterprising startup -- the best thing to call this group of young entrepreneurs -- comes up with a novel idea: they’re hired to apologize to wronged people. (If they had combined this with a mobile app and geolocation ability, they’d be going public by now.) The insulted, the cuckolded, the wrongfully terminated: all are visited by the Sorry team with apologies and/or financial renumeration.

The idea could have fueled a novel alone, as a comment on modernity and emotional detachment. But Drvenkar dispenses with the central theme fairly early, turning it into a cat-and-mouse thriller with philosophical underpinnings.

Sorry, as cleverly plotted as it is, requires not a little suspension of disbelief from the reader. If you ever wondered, say, how Jigsaw from the Saw series managed to drug and kidnap all those people without anyone seeing -- well, this isn't the book for you. The logistics of surveillance and corpse disposal just aren't covered here.

Part of the fun, though, is seeing how much mileage Drvenkar gets out of his sly use of pronouns: while the story is told mostly in the third person, there's also a "you" being addressed and an "I" who's relating another part of the story. But who are they, and who are you? Are the events flashbacks or flash forwards, or are they happening in the present? It’s a clever tactic, perpetually destabilizing the reader’s frame of reference. But its most crucial effect is that it subtly implicates the reader herself with every use of the second person: you kill, and you forgive, and not necessarily in that order.

The pronoun use is clever, but it contributes to a faint sense of a flimsy and judgmental morality infecting the proceedings: can you, the reader, still forgive, especially after being dragged through hell for the past few hundred pages? The ending isn't nearly as satisfying for someone who expected the equivalent of a cinematic twist, as it ends exactly how you thought it would.… (more)

Seeing a couple break-up in public Kris goes over to apologise to the woman. He tells her that her ex is sorry for what he has done, that he wishes he hadn’t, that he wanted to say this himself but couldn’t. It makes her feel better. Of course, it was a lie, Kris doesn’t know this woman. Doesn’t know her boyfriend, he just thought it would help her. And now, it has given him an idea. All around Berlin there are people, corporations who would like to say sorry, but they just don’t know how. Kris is going to set up an agency. A company to apologise on another’s behalf.

And what a success he, his brother and their friends make of this enterprise. Soon they are getting more jobs than they can handle. They are making so much money they don’t know how to spend it. It seems like things are going well. But there is always a but, isn’t there?

In this case it results in Wolf standing in front of a dead woman. A murdered woman, with instructions to apologise to her. And then to dispose of the body. And from here, things get a lot worse.

I’m a bit conflicted over this book. It isn’t my usual sort of read, but I do like to pick up something “different” every now and then, and this is certainly different. It is divided into sections and timelines. Before and After. And while some chapters are told in the usual third person narrator, others are first person, while others are second person. And there is a mystery over who these narrators are. It makes for a confusing read to start with. But once you come to grips with that you can get more into the mystery aspect.

Who is the murderer? Who are the murder victims? And what does it all have to do with the agency?

And then of course there are the bigger underlying themes. What is remorse? Forgiveness? What is an excuse and what is a reason? Where does compassion and understanding end and judgement and condemnation begin.

As I read the opening few chapters of this novel I was almost ready to put it down and forget about it, but the more I read the more interested I became. I still don’t think I’d rave about it, but it certainly raises some interesting questions.… (more)