In the novel Night-Time Showing, the reconstruction of a person’s earlier life in a city and the search for reliable facts about that life turns, step by step, into a narration about origins, about family, about fate and about the confrontation of individual actors in the face of historical givens; likewise, it becomes a sort of family genealogy, while being also an onerous story about growing up, about otherness and differentness, about concealed family stories and secrets, and also a sort of sociological and historical guide to anticipations of Novi Sad, its destiny, its rises and falls. Succeeding to reconstruct an epoch from the shards of objects, like an inspired archeologist, Oto Horvat suggestively and convincingly, under the dimmed lighting of prose, reconstructs the personal and private life of the protagonist of Night-Time Showing, and also the private life of the city.
Franja Petrinović