"Ghosts" by Vladimir Arsenijević: Tears over Serbia

With the novel "Ghosts" (Laguna, 2023), Vladimir Arsenijević completed the tetralogy, which is not only an excellent literary reading about one generation, but also a testimony of time, social development, physiognomy of several decades. It started with a thunderous award for the first part "Potpalublje", which brought the then young, unknown writer the Nino Prize in 1994. In order for the work to mature and be worthily completed, the author needed three decades.

Arsenijević ironically called his four books a "soap opera", which is a bitter joke on himself and at the expense of his work. There is nothing "soap" in this serious, demanding and important reading. The reader must pay full attention to this reading, but if he does so, he will not only enjoy it, but also better understand the world around him and himself in it.

By reading Arsenijević, everyone will gain something by summoning the spirits - ghosts - that sea us all together. By facing them, we will get rid of them more easily. If that is even possible.

Representatives of the generation of Arsenijević's heroes who survived their acquaintance with narcotic drugs, mourning their friends who died, will remember what it was like when they were going through terrible challenges. Those who do not have such experience, like me, for example, will get acquainted in an impressive way with the tragedy of addiction, but related to a place and time that was particularly favorable to it. Whoever knows Belgrade as I know it, will see it from a different perspective, which he had no idea existed.

In the part "Ghosts" that takes you to the wars in Bosnia, they are shown as brutal, incomprehensible sadistic, in a way that I have never come across anywhere, without the author rooting for any side, even though he observes only from the viewpoint of a hero of Serbian nationality.

The reader is helped by the rhythm of the words, which is best felt if he reads aloud to himself. Don't be ashamed if you do, I check some passages like that sometimes, even though I think I'm a really experienced reader. After long, complex sentences, there are several short ones of one or two words. After a winding, fast, mountain river, everything seems to resolve with a sudden waterfall. Slide down those cascades.

At the end of that book, ending the four-book series, Arsenijević's hero wails over the corpse of his mother, with whom he quarreled a lot, was unwilling or unable to understand her. "'Mama mama mama', I sighed and moaned, 'mama-mama', and I have big tears - finally, finally! - one after another poured down the cheeks as if they would never stop."

I also understand that mother as Serbia.