At the age of three, he learned to read and write. After that, everything went smoothly, and he became one of our most significant writers. So far, he has published nine novels and four collections of short stories, along with several novellas, plays, and essays. He says that in his youth, he decided to write because it seemed beneficial to him: If someone published it, great, if not, he'd continue because he enjoyed it. Certainly, he also enjoys the award he recently received for the collection of stories Borderline States. An example of how fate can intervene in anyone's life is that his father worked in the factory that now bears the name of that award
One of the easiest writing tasks is certainly composing a speech for a literary award named after a certain writer. The laureate assesses whether the author after whom the award is named impresses him poetically. If not, he rejects the award; if yes, he accepts it. In the speech, he discusses the author's work and tries to connect it with his own.
How to be poetic and personal when the literary award's name is related to a factory? I don't know, but in this specific case - easily. One of my late father's first jobs, where he stayed the longest, was in the factory that awards the Golden Sunflower, which I have just received for the book of short prose Borderline States. Not only was my father the head of the "Vital" refinery, but, thanks to that, we lived in a studio apartment near the oil mill. When my sister was born after me, we moved to the Sava Kovačević block of apartments. Whenever my parents travelled, and even when they didn't, the nanny Marica took me/us to my maternal grandmother's house on Marshal Tito Street, a huge house belonging to the forcibly expelled or possibly murdered Germans, where her family settled in the colonization at the end of 1944, coming from the border between Montenegro and Herzegovina. I dedicated the novel Mother's Hand to that house, the persecution of the Germans, and Vrbas.
Quiz Winner
Shortly after my birth, my parents often travelled to Zagreb because my father competed in a general knowledge quiz with an emphasis on the Olympic Games. Oliver Mlakar hosted it, and the quiz was called "Tko zna" (Who Knows). My father won the entire cycle and, as a prize, received a complete work cabinet and some furniture, a waterproof automatic watch Darwil, and a Blaupunkt TV. Perhaps it was one of the first colour televisions in the second Yugoslavia. I found watching TV much less enjoyable than listening to records. I entertained guests before I learned to read by guessing the artist and song from the single labels' letter count before the singles would be taken out of the sleeves and stacked under the needle handle, in order to be played in sequence. I didn't share the guests' enthusiasm because, on the one hand, I felt like the lyrical subject of the song "Phenomenon" by the band Šarlo Akrobata, and on the other hand, I noticed that the elders possessed the power of reading, making me not only weaker but also an outcast.
Library and Travels
The first frustration from that side came in the form of a thousand books in the home library, which my mother used for professional reasons, and my father to keep up with contemporary American literature. Tired from work, which sometimes took him to Sweden, where he went to Vital to procure new technological parts, he used to scold me when I asked him how to pronounce certain letters. My mother was more accommodating, perhaps because she was a teacher of the Serbo-Croatian language, which course she completed alongside Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, the city where my father secured the title of a technology engineer. When acquaintances hear about my mother's profession, they usually say that I followed in her footsteps. I'm not entirely sure because she taught at the Economic and Technical High School in Vrbas and, when we moved to Bar, at the Niko Rolović School Centre, while I took an individual path in literary pursuits and refused several offers to work in a preparatory school. Maybe it would have been different earlier, but it would no longer occur to me to transmit knowledge to students that most of them are not interested in.
To reduce the advantage of the older ones over me, I learned to read and write at the age of three. At that time, my parents sometimes took my sister and me on their travels. In a hotel on the Croatian coast, my father approached Peko Dapčević, introduced himself, and then introduced him to me. The famous communist played too roughly with me for my taste, so they say I accidentally slapped Peko in self-defence.
The Spanish episode
Associating in Barcelona with the writer Mathias Énard, who speaks 11 languages, or lawyer Julio Pinjela, who is weaker by one, I would feel shame calling myself a polyglot. But for the few languages I speak or am able to express in writing, I could find roots in the family. Great-grandfather Rako, working as a miner in the USA, learned English; Grandfather Radomir-Bečo spent two years in Italy and returned with knowledge of the language; Father spoke English, French, and Russian, while my mother was a teacher of Serbian and German.
For the needs of researching material for the novel Heat, I followed in my grandfather's footsteps. I didn't write about him and them, but they shaped a significant part of the said book. I travelled to Gaeta and Formia, small towns below Naples, where the Italian state opened support camps for Montenegrin greenbacks, fighters for King Nikola, who first surrendered, then was dethroned and died. Feeling how the scents and colours on the Tyrrhenian Sea are sharper and cleaner than on the Adriatic, I could understand why the similar impressions of the poet Gottfried Benn, whose first collection is called Mortuary, prompted him to write a vitalist cycle of poetry, but not my grandfather's comrades, who stood out in Gaeta by breaking coach wheels and not paying for services to carriers and cafe owners. He is one of the few greenbacks who returned from there with knowledge of the Italian language, which would cost him his life.
Family history: My father
I don't know who is a more tragic figure in this fierce competition — my father or my sister. I am not able to speak about her even 20 years after her death at the age of 34, but I will have to, when I feel strong enough, through a novel. As for my father, he developed a lump on his breast back in Vrbas. Isn't it a fantastic characteristic of the Serbian language to call a male breast a breast, although I'm not sure if that gender is capable of breastfeeding, although, considering the development of technology and human rights... who knows? My father allowed surgeons in Vrbas to remove the lump, but not the doctors in Bar, where, after leaving Vital and returning the factory apartment in the Sava Kovačević block, he became the manager of the Primorka factory. After a few years, he left the oil and juice factory and got a job at the Federal Market Inspectorate in Belgrade. He didn't have time to move the family to the capital. But that didn't make him tragic; it was the recurring lump in the form of breast cancer that cost him his life in a hospital in Ljubljana, at the age of 41.
Family history: My grandfather
His father lived two years longer than his son. As soon as he returned from Italy, he signed loyalty to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and all his civil rights were restored. Unsuccessfully, he tried to become an MP for the Serbian Radical Party. He was fierce and conflict-prone, gaining notoriety through fights in Nikšić. The fact that in 1941 he was the only inhabitant of Nikšićka Župa who spoke Italian prompted the occupiers to offer him a job as an interpreter. Bečo agreed on the condition that he would not express opinions on what he translated or engage in politics. Italians, considerate occupiers, especially compared to the majority of the male population, adhered to his conditions. Instead of payment, they allowed him to exploit the wood from the reserve of King Nikola, for whom he fought. He translated, cut, and sold wood from the reserve, and stayed away from politics. This did not prevent some neighbours from the Partisan ranks from confiscating his pistol, labelling him a collaborator with the Axis forces, and fatally shooting him with his own pistol and another man’s rifle, without any semblance of a trial, in his home, in his asthmatic chest. I even picked up a few rhetorical questions from the powerful and long-lived oral culture, by which it is not clear whether my grandfather was killed because he got rich or because he was fierce and conflict-prone. Later, the communists resettled his killers to southern Serbia, and they did not bother my father in Vojvodina, on the Montenegrin coast, or in Belgrade. They knew how to alleviate guilt and reduce the number of anti-communist families.
Given the short lifespan of my grandfather, father, and sister, I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that I had outlived all three of them. I was sure I would continue the tradition of the family and, between my thirties and forties, permanently ascend to a worse place.
Studies and music
After an unsuccessful military service, I enrolled in Serbo-Croatian Language and Yugoslav Literature course at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade to thoroughly learn my mother tongue. The literature offered by the faculty program mostly did not interest me; I found my favourites through a separate path. At that time, I thought I would, like a two-year-old who could almost blindly guess the performer and title of each single, engage in rock and roll. I had several bands, two albums, one of which was a singer-songwriter one, but the songs mostly went under the radar, except perhaps the dark cover of the song "Another One Bites the Dust, and "Radovan Throws Planks," by the band Stvarno Kvarno, in which I sang and wrote lyrics and all the music, except for covers of Queen and the Sex Pistols. But I persisted: I still have a band, Ultrazvuk, where I only sing and write lyrics, and a little over half of the songs. Soon we plan to release an EP with three songs in Serbian and Spanish each, and a double album on the same principle is also in the works. We are recording. The band includes bassist Predrag Mitrović, drummer and rock critic Ivan Ivačković, and guitarist Dušan Jovanović. One of the conditions was that every band member must be at least 50 years old and accomplished in another profession, so we only meet when our main duties allow.
After writing lyrics, I wrote newspaper articles. I started collaborating with the Yugoslav Institute for Journalism in Belgrade, but due to a family tragedy, I moved to Podgorica to be closer to my family. In the capital of Montenegro, I became the editor of the cultural section of a weekly and the editor-in-chief of a forgotten literary magazine, Fragment. I used the columns in the weekly to practice my prose style, and some parts of them ended up in my prose.
Cities of the former SFRY
Staying in each of the six cities in the three countries where I lived had different, and in some, substantial significance for me. In Vrbas, I learned to read and write and started listening to music. In Bar, I learned hard gestures that helped me survive in the nineties and later, and if it hadn't been bad for me there, I wouldn't have started fleeing to Belgrade at the age of 15 for every winter and summer break, hanging out at the Academy and making friends. Belgrade is important to me as a place where I lost my virginity. It was the last relay in honour of the late comrade Tito; participants from prep schools in all the federal units and provinces of the SFRY were housed in the "4th of July" barracks in Voždovac, and I became close to a Macedonian girl, and we made love at night on the grass, in front of a guard who pretended not to see us.
In the first phase of my permanent stay in Belgrade, I failed as a rocker and student and started working in journalism. In Podgorica, I decided to focus on writing. I had an existential crisis that neither my so-called friends nor psychiatrists knew how to respond to. Writers answered me: Thomas Bernhard and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, with the novels Loser and Journey to the End of the Night. I realized that some of the ideas that came to my mind didn't sound as abnormal as they seemed to me at first. The mere attempt to create prose relieved me of part of the burden of non-selective memory and made me feel good. I decided to write because it benefited me on its own: If someone published it, great; if not, I would continue because it pleased me.
My wife
I met my future wife by commissioning an article for her from Fragment. Actually, Podgorica became significant to me even before I lived there, when it was called Titograd. In that town, I definitively freed myself from the military service during the 1986 re-enlistment process, and I had started the process two years earlier in Sombor. Based on the atmosphere in the Yugoslavian Armed Forces, I could sense in 1986 that a war between Yugoslav nations, or most of them, was imminent. The fact that, despite my intuition, I did not go abroad in time is one of the greater mysteries of my life. But at least I got out of the army, which might be my biggest life success. While younger, pacifist-minded men in the nineties were avoiding conscription, I always carried my green booklet stating that I was unfit for military service and could be at peace.
Through the reviews I published at that time in the weekly, I met the owner of Stubovi Kulture, Predrag Marković, who liked the manuscript of my novella Deception of God, and he published it as a novel. I returned to Belgrade, continued and completed my studies, and published books. Although I replaced my earlier rock-journalistic acquaintances with literary ones to a large extent, I was not yet in a position to break free from journalism. I helped with editing culture at Blic, Blic News, and Dnevni Telegraf, where I was employed when Slavko Ćuruvija was liquidated.
The divorce
When Milošević was toppled, I followed my wife, who received a scholarship for a doctorate in Barcelona. I, too, enrolled at the Autonomous University for a master's degree in World Literature, not to complete it, but to learn literary Spanish. My wife and I had too many problems for this not to affect our marriage abroad. Even after the divorce, we remained friends and support each other to this day. Meanwhile, I – still talking about Barcelona – moved to a separate apartment. I excelled in the master's program in the Construction of Dramatic Texts module, which was enough for the Theatre Institute to offer me a year of work, and my play was performed in their production. I wrote the play in Spanish, but that doesn't mean I could write a novel in it. Theatrical texts accept the language that can be heard on the street, while prose requires a much finer filter. The play Nomads was performed in 2004 in Catalan, and a few years later, under a different title, in Serbian. Based on the title of the first play, a collection of my plays was published last year. There's been no place for my plays in Serbian theatres for ten years; they say they are too dark.
In addition to Spanish, I learned Catalan in Barcelona and delved into the atrocities of the local civil war from 1936-1939, which have been simplified and tendentiously interpreted here. It became my obsessive theme and, alongside Jasenovac, the centrepiece of my best-known novel Remains of the World.
When I wanted to dedicate myself to writing, I looked after the apartment of a former friend in Port Bou, a town on the border of Spain and France. German philosopher Walter Benjamin committed suicide there because the local police didn't want to let him sail to the USA across Spanish territory and intended to return him to Vichy France, where, as a Jew, he wouldn't have fared well. I doubt that there is another place so marked by one philosopher that even the residents who don't read know something about him. Port Bou brought me that experience, as well as several prose preserves.
The final word
Belgrade is the only city I have returned to twice, spending half my life there. After returning in 2006, I tried my hand at journalism again, this time as the deputy editor of the Europa weekly, founded by my late friend Dušan Veličković. However, that job, as well as the editorial work I did in his publishing house Aleksandrija Press and a similarly named magazine, or in Laguna, transplanted my blood into others' manuscripts and texts. Only since I dedicated myself to writing have the reactions of the professional circles towards my books become much better, and perhaps they are more mature than the earlier ones. But Belgrade is not the only city I return to; Barcelona is also one of them. Yet, writing and returning between these two cities bring me the most joy. In mature years, a person commits a great sin against themselves if they do not arrange their further moves according to what pleases them the most.
