Book 184: Montenegro (English) – The Son (Andrej NIKOLAIDIS)

 

Everything would have been different if I’d been able to control my repulsion, I realised.

The sun was still visible through the lowered blinds. It had lost all its force and now, unable to burn, it extended all the way to the pebbly beach of Valdanos and on as far as Kruće and Utjeha; bays sardined with bathers determined to absorb every last carcinogenic ray before going back to their accommodation. There they would douse their burnt skin with imitations of expensive perfumes, don their most revealing attire and dash off to discos and terraces with turbofolk music, full of confidence that tonight they would go down on another body with third-degree burns; possessing and then forgetting another human being almost identical to themselves. 

 

 

This novel was translated from Montenegrin, one of the world’s newest languages, although in fact it is still virtually indistinguishable from the other varieties of what we used to call Serbo-Croation (Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian). When I visited in 2014, in all the bookshops I visited trying to find a translated novel I could read (Montenegro was one of the several countries in Eastern Europe where I was unsuccessful), the native literature seemed to be fairly equally divided between Roman and Cyrillic scripts.
‘The Son’ won its author the European Prize for Literature in 2011. Its ‘hero’, a hibernating writer, is the most cynical, misanthropic character I’ve ever come across. (In fact if he had been named he may have become a famous character like Tartuffe…) He self-exiles himself from the boorish, sunburnt tourist masses outside.
In the background the coast of Montenegro is burning in wildfires, just as the almost the whole eastern seaboard of Australia was burning the day I read the novel.
His great-uncle’s olive grove has burnt down three times in a decade, leaving him depressed. He goes wandering around the southern town of Ulcinj, where a tragic and perverse parade of misfits, some already known and some new, encounters him.
He killed older brother with a climbing dare. He is alienated from his father, despite living nearby; he endlessly hates him and finally murders him, for having always forgiven him! He is so selfish that he keeps his mother’s death unannounced, so no one else can turn up at her funeral. Not a nice guy.
On the other hand, there is the daughter who loved her father despite him having pimped her (and his entire family).
The anonymous narrator is totally impossible to identify with. Maybe if it hadn’t been so unremittingly black… but it is very well written. I just suggest you don’t read it if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal!

 

NIKOLAIDIS, Andrej, The Son, translated from Montenegrin by Will Firth, London, Istros, 2013, ISBN 9781908236128