In an essay for Literary Hub regarding her debut novel, Slanting Towards the Sea, Lidija Hilje discusses how she tried to set the book in the United States, but it ended up taking place in her home country of Croatia. It seems unbelievable that it would take place anywhere else, with how richly Hilje paints the beauty and tragedy of the Croatian landscape and society. Reading Slanting Towards the Sea is an experience in smelling salt air and tasting rich olive oil: Hilje illuminates the way that the sensory life of the country shapes the emotional lives of her characters. On its face, the pristine coastlines and ill-advised sailboat trips might seem more apt for summer poolside reading enjoyment, but the story anchors on feelings of longing and regret that carry it into fall and winter.
Slanting Towards the Sea centers on the relationship between Ivona and Vlaho, which is described as a great love, but we meet them in the aftermath: they are divorced, though Ivona maintains close ties with Vlaho and his new wife and children. Throughout the novel, we flash back to the start of their relationship and slowly learn how it grew and later ended. Both Ivona and Vlaho are from the coastal region of Dalmatia but meet at university in landlocked Zagreb. There, they bond over the disorientation they feel navigating the city, unlike “back home, [where] all things slant towards the sea.” This same sentiment is reflected in how they relate to each other. Although they are no longer together in the present timeline, Ivona and Vlaho remain inextricably linked, and even outside the relationship, her world is “tipping ever so slightly in his direction.”
The relationship, and its dissolution, also serve as a prism for Hilje to examine Croatia’s geopolitical landscape. All of her characters have to make decisions that will define their lives under the pressures of a collapsing economy and bureaucratic red tape. They are limited in their external choices—career, financial stability, how to care for aging family—and these constraints refract in how they choose to act in their relationships. While the novel is distinctly Croatian, it also reveals universal truths of how to build a life in unstable times and what external forces we allow to define us.
