The Traveller
Recognizable even in the Yugoslav frameworks as a master of short stories, with his only novel Putnik – The Traveller, Sreten Asanović enriched the Montenegrin novelistic production with the text made in the best tradition of the picaresque novel. Narrated in the first person, as an autobiographical statement of the main character, the novel Putnik follows the […]
Auschwitz Café
The Auschwitz Café by Dragan Radulović, in the subtitle designated as a dystopia, is in many ways distinct phenomenon of contemporary Montenegrin literature. The action of Radulović’s dystopia takes place in Budva, in the immediate future, where a joint-stock company for production and distribution of agony Scaffold (Montenegrin original – Gubilište) at the Square of […]
Mimesis
The main character and the narrator of Mimesis, Konstantin Teofilis, an offshoot of the Montenegrin family of Greek origin, born in Sarajevo, living in the southernmost Montenegrin coastal town of Ulcinj, is a passive witness of inferno of 1990s. From his cynical but isolated perspective, Konstantin tells stories of himself and others, the family, environment, constraints of […]
Private Gallery
Private Gallery by Balsa Brkovic signaled an emergence of a generation of Montenegrin writers of a new sensibility, aimed at questioning traditional model of fiction writing and thinking, and facing the poetic paradigms of contemporary literature. The main character and narrator in Privatna galerija, Bartholomew Baki Braunović, is the editor of the local newspaper and a cynical chronicler […]
Tamara
The literary work of Mihailo Lalić, one of the most important Montenegrin novelists of the twentieth century, was almost entirely devoted to a thematization of World War II and the cruel fate of an individual in the time of evil. In his last novel, Tamara (1992), published just before he died, Lalić approached a theme of war […]
The Star of David
The novel The Star of David written by Zuvdija Hodžić brought to the Montenegrin literature a spirit of oriental storytelling, incorporated in the model of postmodernist historiography meta-fiction. These two narrative models form a peculiar narrative process, based on the fragmentary narrative threads unified by the universal theme of human destiny at the border of different […]
A Myrtle-Coloured Rob
In his last novel, A Myrtle-Coloured Robe, Čedo Vulević sublimated thematic preoccupations and stylistic trends that have marked his entire novelistic opus. The action of the novel Ogrtač boje mirte mostly takes place in the room 23 of a psychiatric hospital of an imaginary seaside town Dubrave and its immediate surroundings. Although temporally and spatially tightly limited, with […]
A Way to Karadag
The only published novel by Pavle Jovanović, The Way to Karadag, belongs to the works of great narrative power and artistic value. Written as a roman-fleuve, Put u Karadag consists of four independent novels following four generations of Montenegrin family Bogišić from Orlica. Through four books and the fate of the four protagonists, Okiča’s Beso, Bešo’s Djurdjo, […]
Crnoturci
The novel Crnoturci of Husein Bašić deals with one of the ancient themes of world literature – the exodus. But the exodus that is the subject of Bašić’s interest is not burdened with a mythological aura of a biblical prototext but is focused on a particular episode of the Montenegrin history of the end of the 19th century […]
A City in the Mirror
In his last completed novel, A City in the Mirror, the great master of storytelling, Mirko Kovač turned to the sources of his narrative adventure: the past, family and homeland. The mythical town of L., on the historical and geographical border of the worlds, in the triangle between Nikšić, Trebinje and Dubrovnik, is an area […]