Several years ago, when she was a student of comparative linguistics and the English language, Lara Paukovič worked at an inn serving Serbian cuisine. She knew that the restaurant business wasn’t in her future, but she discovered that she had found herself in a picturesque environment that was just calling out to be turned into a literary work.

That’s how Nastja, a pretentions intellectual, was born. She has a meticulously composed list of Latin proverbs, quotes for every situation, and very clear ideas about why "čefurji,” as she calls residents of other ex-Yugoslav nations, aren’t worth her time. She works in a Serbian inn, where her mother found her a job as a waitress, but everything bothers her there, from grammatical errors on the menu, to hard “L”s in the accents of her coworkers. But most of all, she is bothered by the realization that despite all her lofty “principles,” she is increasingly attracted to one of her colleagues.

“I guess that in your debut novel you try to show what you’ve discovered as writer,” admits the 24-year-old novelist. “As for the book’s topic, I feel that I haven’t exhausted everything that I would like to say.” But her first outing has resulted in A Summer at the Inn, an eminently readable novel that was published this year by Beletrina. Because of its title alone, the book is destined to find itself on many summer reading lists. Even though the plot is sometimes predicable, the novel is a stylistically successful literary work. It places Paukovič in the company of young authors from whom we are likely to hear again in the future.

Ana Jurc
Translated by J. B.