Jurica Pavičić’s Red Water is a powerful and unsettling novel that combines a crime narrative with a profound meditation on moral ambiguity, collective trauma, and historical rupture. Set on the Dalmatian coast, the novel centres on the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl, Silva, in the late 1980s, on the eve of Yugoslavia’s collapse. While the mystery of her fate drives the plot, Silva’s disappearance ultimately functions as a metaphor for the disintegration of a social and moral order that had appeared stable for decades.
The narrative unfolds over twenty-six years, beginning in 1989 and extending into mid-2010s. Pavičić employs a shifting, multi-perspective structure that moves between Silva’s family members, police investigators, and ordinary inhabitants of the coastal town where she lived. This fragmented narrative mirrors the novel’s central theme on how personal tragedy intersects with major political events, and how historical forces affect and infiltrate individual lives. A single act of violence reverberates across generations, shaping individual destinies while exposing the vulnerabilities of a society in constant transition.
Red Water is rich in noir elements, often calls to mind the world of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Pavičić’s bleak emotional tone and emphasis on moral uncertainty create an atmosphere of unease and ambiguity. Themes of loss, trauma, repressive memories, and social decay dominate the novel, not only at the individual level but also in the depiction of political and social structures. Pavičić portrays a world in which clear distinctions between guilt and innocence, truth and lies, are consistently blurred and fluid.
The crime genre serves as a framework through which Pavičić explores the social transformations that followed the fall of Yugoslavia. Silva’s disappearance symbolises the vanishing of familiar moral values that had endured nearly forty years. As Croatia undergoes war, economic collapse, and political reinvention, Silva’s family also gradually disintegrates. Her parents separate, while her brother’s adult life becomes defined by an obsessive search for answers about his sister whom he barely knew, slowly eroding his own sense of self.
Beyond the collapse of one family, Red Water offers a broad portrait of the Croatian society over the period of twenty-six years between 1989 and 2015. Pavičić weaves into the narrative the collapse of the communist regime, the violence of the early 1990s, the erosion of state institutions, the tourism boom of the early 2000s, the 2008 real estate crisis, and the emigration of younger generations in search of economic stability abroad. These historical shifts shape the moral and emotional landscape of the novel. The decay of a small coastal town reflects the larger disintegration of collective values.
The characters in Red Water are morally complex and often compromised. There are no idealised figures, including Silva herself. Trauma is presented as something filtered through repressive memories, silences, biases, misplaced feelings of guilt, and selfish motivations. The failure of the police investigation is systemic, rooted in prejudice, corruption, human mistakes and the chaos caused by political collapse.
When the truth about Silva’s disappearance is finally revealed decades later, it does not deliver justice or offers any form of closure. Instead, it deepens the novel’s moral ambiguity, inflicting new wounds rather than healing the old ones. Silence, partial truths, and unspoken emotions prove immensely destructive deepening the moral ambiguity, and leaving both individuals and the broader community trapped in unresolved grief, disillusionment and emotional pain.
Red Water offers a meditation on the impossibility of final answers in a fractured world, and a haunting portrayal of one family’s tragedy intertwined with the collective trauma of an entire society whose search for truth can never be completed.
