Cover Design by Emma Ewbank. Photograph © Nathan Landers
text by Poppy Baring
Ivona and Vlaho personify the often-felt but never easy human experience that is being so close but ultimately, impossibly, and frustratingly out of reach from the ideal happy ending. Told by Ivona, Slanting Towards the Sea depicts a heartbreakingly intense and oh-so-tangible love story set against the lapping Croatian sea. Passing between their youth and budding university relationship, following through a childless marriage, and divorce brought about by wider family pressures, this story tells the effects and sadness of love and longing.
Touching on themes like death, infertility, employment, and numerous other relatable life events, Lidija Hilje writes this story openly, never skimming a subject but revealing it in sharp focus. As Ivona attempts to find her feet in her homeland, she is continuously hit by attacks that seem to throw her off balance, whether it’s adoption difficulties or visa frustrations, only in the end does she realize that the life she has remained attached to has not fully served her.
This is a book that you never want to end, one that is a joy to go back to and which feels like you are zooming into a summer romance. Describing the life of Ivona and bringing readers along as the characters discover hidden and complex parts of themselves, Hilje writes with vivid imagery of Croatia’s changing seasons, where we can feel the stillness of a night at the height of summer or picture the hush of the olive grove that comes “seeping into your soul if you make your self still enough.”
While Ivona moves through the chapters of her life, which remains tethered to her ex husband’s, Marina (Vlaho’s wife and mother of his children) and Asier (Ivona’s new love, the first in nine years) provide sounding boards to her actions and inner voice. With the potential she holds looming over her head and while she’s kept by aging parents in her childhood home, our protagonist tries to claim a life of her own, free from concealed resentment.
The story ends with a poignant statement about parent and child relationships. Vlaho’s life is revealed to be “a sum of his countless confessions to others,” and in the end, he makes a decision in the hope of changing a pattern of choices that goes back generations. Slanting Towards the Sea is Hilje’s debut novel, but it feels as though it has inhabited our bookshelves for years, collecting watermarks from summers past.
Lidija Hilje. Suzy New Life Photography.
