words by Millie Harris
photo by Heidi Kewin
What does it mean to have a ‘once in a lifetime’ love and still walk away from it? Lidija Hilje tackles this question in her debut novel Slanting Towards the Sea, a story centered around Ivona and Vlaho, two people bound by their love for one another despite the devastation that follows their lives.
From the opening pages, there’s an ease and urgency to Hilje’s writing that instantly hooked me, pulling me through scenes and conversations as if the prose were tugging on my sleeve. Hilje is Croatian, writing the novel in English, her second language, and that awareness never fully left my mind as I was reading. In the Thoughts from a Page podcast, Hilje is frank about wanting the book to travel beyond Croatia’s small readership, and about an earlier attempt to bring a Croatian manuscript into English via a translator that left her so disappointed she decided to do the work herself. From this determination, her writing demonstrates such precision and command of language that nearly every page contains a sentence worth pausing for. It is a book that made me feel slightly greedy, always wanting more and racing ahead to consume the next beautifully crafted line. I kept finding lines that stopped me in my tracks and then I’d immediately need to turn the page to see what on earth had happened to these people, and what they would do next.
“They gave me hope that one day I might find someone who’d shuck me like an oyster and find all the pearls I was hiding within, and this hope became my bread, my water, and my air.”
The novel is structured in five parts: four centred on different characters, with a final section that acts as an epilogue. This structure gives the book a strong forward-pull, shifting between past and present so we can see certain choices as they’re made, whilst also witnessing the aftermath of them. Instead of the novel relying on plot twists or withheld information, the narrative is focused upon circling a wound we keep on returning to in deepening detail. It’s a structure that suits a book such as this one, one so invested in consequences and the clumsy ways in which we love each other.
What moved me most was how deeply rooted this novel is in Croatia. The sea, the bura, the olive trees, the coastal-town atmosphere — these elements are all so entwined within the story and feel written with intimate familiarity of what is being shown to us, with affection and impatience both. The country shapes the characters’ choices, showing the beauty and history present in Croatia alongside the pressure of trying to build a life in a place that does not always feel like it is built for you. The novel’s social reality sits alongside its love story, this combination giving the novel such heartfelt complexity. This love that tries to run alongside expectations around children, marriage and money pressures applied by parents and a country that doesn’t make it easy for anyone to start over when things go wrong.
“They talk and laugh, and then without warning, one of them hums the beginning of an elegiac Dalmatian klapa song. The other men stop talking, their gazes softening into the distance, and they join their voices a cappella. [...] It’s tender, and beautiful, and as I imagine what it might evoke in Asier, exposed to it for the first time, I feel another surge of pride in my country.”
The love story itself is extraordinary. Hilje writes a once-in-a-lifetime love story which is the emotional core of the novel. It is intense, messy, consuming, and written with such emotional clarity. Hilje understands how a relationship can be both the thing that makes you feel most fully yourself, and the thing that hurts you the most. You feel how deeply Vlaho and Ivona see each other, how each becomes a version of the self that only the other recognises. We see that recognition built throughout the novel: we watch them meet as students, fall hopelessly in love and marry young with this idealised future ahead of them. Then we see it all fall apart. From their past together there’s this warmth and ease between them, and at the same time a capacity for damage that they don’t seem able to control once certain lines have been crossed. I love a messy love story more than an easy one, and this one commits to the mess. At times, their love feels like the novel’s most honest element; at others, it reads as an indulgence that everyone around them ends up paying for. Regardless of any right or wrong between them, their relationship kept me on edge, and I struggled to settle on a clear stance.
Ivona herself is one of the strongest aspects of the book. On paper, we have little in common. She is 38 years old, divorced, living in Croatia, looking after her ill father and dealing with the long aftermath of her marriage; her life circumstances are very different from my 23 year old, un-divorced and English self. Yet, I felt so close to her. She made decisions that frustrated me, decisions that hurt people, particularly in how she handles Vlaho and the life he now shares with Marina, yet I still found myself rooting for her to find peace once more, however that may look like. There really is such care in the way Hilje writes her that even when I completely disagreed with Ivona’s decisions, I still understood where she came from with them. She is flawed, impulsive, selfish at times, and still deeply sympathetic. Watching her recognise what she has allowed and accepted in her life, then what she truly wants, stirred up a plethora of emotions within me. I rooted fiercely for her, even when she did the very thing I didn’t want her to do.
“I knew myself only in relation to others: a daughter, a student. I understood myself only in negatives — what I didn’t want, who I didn’t want to be.”
Vlaho tested my patience constantly, and I say that as a compliment. He is very easy to empathise with and very difficult to excuse as you feel the weight put upon him, and yet still have to watch him distribute that weight onto other people. Hilje writes him with a clear understanding of the cultural and gendered expectations he’s carrying: the duty to be reliable and the pressure to keep his family stable. We see through him how the model of a ‘good man’ can become a way of avoiding responsibility. His love for his children, his fear of disappointing everyone, his urge to opt out and his refusal to actually do it: all of it is maddening to read. I kept wanting to reach into the pages and shake him.
There is also the character of Mariana, the first true friend Ivona makes after her divorce from Vlaho, and someone she instantly hit it off with and felt connected to. So, when Ivona’s best friend and her ex-husband start dating, marry and have children together, it would have been easy to paint Mariana as the villain; the other woman, the replacement, the person who seems to effortlessly step into the life that used to be Ivona’s... In some ways, she is. Whilst her steadfast efforts to maintain her friendship with Ivona despite everything was often endearing, when I discovered the truth behind her relationship with Vlaho, I had to close the book in pure anger. It felt, to me, utterly unjustifiable. The way the three of them cling to one another out of love and guilt, despite the damage they do, left me furious and completely invested.
And yet, the reason this novel sits at four stars instead of five is due to its ending. After all the pain, and after the novel builds hope of Ivona finding a life beyond what haunts her, I felt genuinely irritated by the lingering suggestion of romantic possibility between her and Vlaho. Part of that reaction is most likely a compliment as Hilje made me care enough to feel so passionately about this, to want something badly for her protagonist. But I did, admittedly, want the book to be a little more ruthless in letting Ivona’s future belong to her. As so much of the novel is about what it means to break a cycle, to begin again, I wanted the ending to follow through more decisively.
Still, Slanting Towards the Sea is a gorgeous debut that handles love, marriage, womanhood and the search for happiness with real grace. For me, this is a solid four-star read: immersive, beautifully written, emotionally gripping and sharpened by an ending that had me arguing with it in my head for days. I left the book feeling pained, pleased, annoyed and unexpectedly attached to this specific stretch of Croatian coast and its unglamorous realities. As a debut, this novel is distinctive and impactful. I am very excited to see what Lidija Hilje writes next.
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Millie Harris studied English Literature at York St. John University, graduating with a First Class Honours, alongside reviewing books for Zimmer’s Book of the Month column. As Literature Editor, she curates and plans the magazine’s Literature section. Aside from her work at Zimmer, Millie is extremely passionate about film, books and all things media. She spends her spare time researching, reading and being with her cat. Millie has happily been a part of Zimmer since the beginning and has loved every moment!