‘On the Edge of Reason’ by Miroslav Krleža (1938) – 188 pages                Translated from the Croatian by Zora Depolo

The Doctor and his wife are invited to a dinner party in the vineyard on the veranda of the summer house of the great industrialist and benefactor, the Director-General. The Doctor and his wife were frequent guests of the Director-General as they were well-respected members of the community.

That night the Director-General is expansive, and regales his guests with stories from his past. He tells about how in the early days of his wine-making operation, some of the men who worked for him wanted to start a union. Then he brags about how four of them trespassed on to his property, and he shot them like dogs.

The other guests sat there not saying anything, but the Doctor says absent-mindedly, almost but not quite under his breath, that “It was all a crime, a bloody thing, moral insanity.”

The Director-General overhears the Doctor and is hugely offended. He even claims a little while later that the Doctor himself should be shot like a dog too.

The Doctor’s life collapses in the following days. No one else dares to offend the Director-General. The townspeople rush to castigate this Doctor who had the nerve to criticize their town’s great industrialist and benefactor. The doctor finds out his wife has been unhappy with him for a long time and she asks him for a divorce. He finds out that she has been carrying on with her baritone music teacher for years. However the Doctor agrees to take the blame legally for the divorce. Soon there is a newspaper article about the Doctor:

“It stated that I was a promiscuous person, a slanderer, a paramour, divorced through my own fault, according to witnesses a confirmed adulterer, a problematic man, a morally sick case.”

The police start harassing him, and soon the Doctor is dismissed from his job and put on trial on trumped up charges.

Do you say what you really think, or are you like most people who keep their mouths shut and keep their opinions to themselves, especially concerning prominent people in your community?

In ‘On the Edge of Reason’, the Doctor accidentally reveals what he really thinks, and the results are disastrous for him.

“Truly, you have set all the high-placed consciences of our elite against you for having dared to call attention to a common bandit and to tell him in public he is what he is: a bandit.”

Grade :    B+