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 […]
Madonna’s Jewels
V Madoninem nakitu Blašković ustvari štiri glasove, ki se prepletejo v pravi kvartet, in pojejo o agoniji na prelomu tisočletja, ko hočejo ikonografijo preteklosti uskladiti s sedanjo. Madonin nakit je postavljen v zaporniško ambulanto med Natovim bombardiranjem Srbije in je pravi postmoderni priročnik politične nekorektnosti. Včasih poglobljeni in premišljeni, včasih razbijaški, včasih duhoviti vsi štirje pripovedovalci, od katerih […]
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 […]
The House of Dead Scents
The House of Dead Scents is a novel about a collector of rare bottles and scents in a small town in Vojvodina, marked by “spiritual anxiety, a modest circle of friends, the limitations of small-town orbit, and the eternal apathy of people.” It takes us to a mysterious house where scents intertwine with memories and illusions. […]
Nothing’s Lost
Saltykov, the hero of Alexander Kabakov’s novel Nothing’s Lost, is a mature man thinking back over his long life – from his childhood under Stalin spent in a small town and his youth as a trend-setter in Moscow during the Thaw till the present day in a capital where sweet freedom went hand in hand with […]
Leica format
In the novel Leica Format, Daša Drndić depicts a provincial town and the petty-bourgeois mentality of its inhabitants — both the old residents and the ‘newcomers’ and immigrants. The main characters, some of whom were mentioned in her previous works, encourage readers to look for connections between them and to wonder whether they are based on […]
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 […]