Tesla: A Portret with Masks

Тесла: Портрет међу маскама
Serbia
vladimir-pistalo
Vladimir Pištalo
When I breathe in a certain way, I begin to lift off the ground. I fly through the chimney, leaving behind the room and my terrifying brother in it. I rise toward a solitary star, not asking whether I’m leaving my body or not.

Tesla: A Portrait with Masks, considered “the most convincing biography of the only thunder-wielder among men,” cannot really be placed among conventional biographical novels. It is an unusual narrative about a very unusual man—an artistic portrayal that, through three chapters, Youth, America, and The New Century, gradually reveals and illuminates the inner world of a genius.

The literary character of Nikola is placed among many other literary figures in such a way that we come to know him through his thoughts, feelings, fears and delusions; his successes and failures; his rises and falls—but above all through solitude and loneliness, his most persistent companions. Events from reality serve only as a starting point for numerous excursions into the irrational and the surreal.

It is a novel about Tesla’s inter-vibration within the world and above it, where reality is interpreted through various narrative techniques in such a way that, in the end, the reader wishes to return once again to the beginning.

Vladimir Pištalo (1960) is one of the most significant contemporary Serbian writers. Among his best-known works are the poetic prose collections Picture Book, Manifestos, Mars Teas / Nights, short story collections The End of the Century, Stained Glass in Memory, Stories from Around the World, novels Millennium in BelgradeTesla: A Portrait with Masks, Venice, The Sun of This Day: A Letter to Andrić, and the essay collection The Meaning of the Joker. Tesla: A Portrait with Masks has been translated into 20 languages worldwide, making Pištalo one of the most translated Serbian authors, and it became a bestseller in Turkey.

He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, including the NIN Award, the Meša Selimović Award, the Borisav Stanković Award, the Todor Manojlović Award, the Grigorije Božović Award, and the Teodor Pavlović Award. For his translation work, he received the Miloš Đurić Award for his translation of Charles Simic’s poetry.