The Traveller

Putnik
Črna Gora
Sreten Asanović
Sreten Asanović
But it looks like that the troubles do not end with the childhood, but are only then emerging, because a child from our regions, as soon as he starts crawling over the threshold, must fight and bite if he intends to live and not be pushed down by other children and make him a pitiful man; and thus he lives until his death, always being in a state of ‘who will win’.

Sreten Asanović was born on 22 February 1931 in Donji Kokoti, near Podgorica.

He was the author of a collection of stories Dugi trenuci (1956), Ne gledaj u sunce (1960), Igra vatrom (1966), Lijepa smrt (1971), Opojno piće (1977), Noć na golom brdu (1980), Lice kao zemlja (1988), Martiri i pelegrini (2000), Nomina (2006), Zvijezde padaju (2009), Kratke priče (2015) and a novel Putnik (1994). He has prepared for printing the selection of short stories of Camil Sijaric, Sablja (1969), and, in cooperation with Čedo Vuković, the selection of Montenegrin memoirs Svjedočenja (1978). Some of his stories have been translated into more than twenty languages.

He received numerous awards, including the Prize of the Writers Association of Montenegro (1957), the July 13th Award (1972), the Goran’s Award for the Best Book of the Year written in the Serbo-Croatian language for Noć na golom brdu (1981)…

He was the President of the Association of Writers of Montenegro (1973-1976) and of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia (1980-1981). He was a member of the Duklja Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He died on 3 June 2016 in Podgorica.

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 fulfilling life of Božo Živkov Tomović, who in his early age started travelling from Donji Kokoti into the world, reaching Hungary, North and South America, France and Spain, always accompanied by “local” persons and concerns. Finally, at the beginning of World War II, he settles down in Montenegro. In two chronological wholes, “Đetinjstvo i mladost” and “Zaludnja zrelost”, in 40 short chapters, Asanović presents an authentic biography of his literary hero, in the period from 1888 to 1939, imbued with the quest for a better life, wars, politics, roads and byways, which are made unusual from a perspective and dealt with a slightly ironic tone, mark a stormy period in the history of  Božo’s homeland and its people.