The novel AURON is an intriguing and innovative novelistic text, focusing on the ideal and single perfect proportion to the human’s eye – the golden ratio. The golden ratio, a universal code present both in all of nature and in the universe as the complete harmony between the whole and its parts, has inspired artists and scientists of different profiles for centuries, especially painters, sculptors, architects, mathematicians, designers and constructors. And while earlier-period authors were familiar with it as well, adapting their epic poems, sonnets, dramas and even epigraphic monuments (Baška tablet being the most beautiful one) to the demands of the ideal composition, twentieth-century literature (whether in aspiration for avant-garde shocking or in the practice of postmodernist disproportion and fragmentation) has almost completely lost its sight for such quests.
By incorporating the golden ratio, on one hand, in its fundamental compositional and narrative concept (through the ratio of chapters and narrators with regard to several different criteria) and, on the other hand, in its main thematic orientation (the golden ratio is the subject matter of several topic threads, described in various and for the reader interesting ways), Auron presents a novum not only in Croatian literature but in literature in general. With its theme placed in the contemporary age (Šibenik and Osijek in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century), presenting an attractive theme (confirmed in reality) about the theft of the halo from the St. Mark sculpture on the Šibenik Cathedral and the confession of the act following about 20 years later, a variety of different male and female characters in everyday life situations (family, love, business and recreational affairs) recognizable to the contemporary reader, Auron presents the ideal read for an exceptionally broad spectrum of readers; from those looking solely for a good and interesting story, over the ones prone to the search for a perfected narrative-stylistic bravura, to artists, scientists and everyone else willing to seek the eternal and ever-intriguing codes of the world we live in.
Translated By: Josipa Forko, Master of English and German Language and Literature