The Cartier Project

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Crumbs

Miha Mazzini, Crumbs, book cover, Freight Books, 2014, ISBN, 978-1908754394.jpeg

Second edition
Author Miha Mazzini
Original titleDrobtinice
Translator Maja Visenjak Limon
Country Slovenia
Language English
Publisher Freight Books
Publication date
1987
Published in English
2014
Media type Print (Paperback & E-book)
Pages 256 pp.
ISBN 978-1908754394
Followed by Guarding Hanna

The Cartier Project is a novel by Miha Mazzini. It was first published in Slovenia (then still part of Yugoslavia) in 1987 under the title of Drobtinice ("Crumbs"). It sold 54000 copies and won "the best Slovenian novel of the year" award and "Zlata ptica" award for excellent artistic achievement by a young writer, 1988.

Miha Mazzini Slovenian writer

Miha Mazzini is a Slovenian writer, screenwriter and film director with thirty published books, translated in ten languages. He possesses a PhD in anthropology from the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis and has MA in Creative Writing for Film and Television at The University of Sheffield. He is a Voting member of the European Film Academy.

Slovenia republic in Central Europe

Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a sovereign state located in southern Central Europe at a crossroads of important European cultural and trade routes. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, and the Adriatic Sea to the southwest. It covers 20,273 square kilometers (7,827 sq mi) and has a population of 2.07 million. One of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia is a parliamentary republic and a member of the United Nations, of the European Union, and of NATO. The capital and largest city is Ljubljana.

Yugoslavia 1918–1992 country in Southeastern and Central Europe

Yugoslavia was a country in Southeastern and Central Europe for most of the 20th century. It came into existence after World War I in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the Kingdom of Serbia, and constituted the first union of the South Slavic people as a sovereign state, following centuries in which the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire and then Austria-Hungary. Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign. The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.

Contents

Story

The first person narrative follows Egon, a well-read, degenerate chancer living in a non-descript, poverty-ridden foundry town in what was then Yugoslavia (now presumably Slovenia given an allusion to the towns proximity to the Italian border). Most of the town’s residents work at the foundry, with some occupying the guarded dormitories there. Egon shuns this, instead spending his days bothering his friends and a string of lovers for food, beer, sex, and shelter, something he finds remarkably easy on account of his good looks and charm. He funds what he feels absolutely necessary through writing trashy romances under a pseudonym – whether he has higher literary ambitions is unclear. One of these necessities is a perfume he wears – Cartier pour l’homme. The novel opens with the realisation that he has run out. From there, Egon sets in motion a morally bankrupt plan that will recover him a new bottle. Meanwhile, a friend of his at the foundry is slowly losing his mind to an obsession with a film-star, and relationships Egon had always depended on are falling apart, only to be replaced by new & volatile ones. Over the course of the novel, Egon’s mental health issues and problems with self-identification begin to surface. The book’s final chapters are a mess of consequences, as grim as they are hilarious, and indicative of nation undergoing radical change

Film

In 1991 TV Slovenia made a film based upon the novel - Cartier Project . [1]

Cartier Project is a Slovenian TV film based upon the novel The Cartier Project by Miha Mazzini. The Slovenian title is Operacija Cartier.

Translations

First American edition was published in 2004 by Scala House press under the title The Cartier Project. Detroit Free Press selected it as one of the Top 10 Books of the Year 2005. [2]

English edition was published in 2014 by Freight Books under the title Crumbs.

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References

  1. "Operacija Cartier". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 30 January 2009.
  2. Salij, Marta (7 December 2005). "Holiday book guide 2005: A fantasyland for fiction lovers". Detroit Free Press . Retrieved 30 January 2009.