With A City in the Mirror, Mirko Kovač completes his prose opus with a work that gathers his essential life and literary experiences, arranging them with remarkable precision into a mosaic of characteristic events and fully realized, vivid characters. Subtitled A Family Nocturne, the book takes the form of an intimate chronicle in which the narrator consciously plays with autobiographical elements, portraying the profile of a writer in the making. The unnamed setting clearly refers to Dubrovnik. The appeal of Kovač’s prose lies in his deliberate guidance of the reader through the currents and side channels of the intricate plot, in his awareness of the compression and omission of certain narrative threads, and in his digressions on the very nature of writing itself.
