People at the table, a novel Srdjan Valjarevic from 1994, has just been published by "Laguna".
The conversations of two guys brought together by the war of the nineties, from which they fled to Amsterdam, as well as the imposed role of emigrants in which they do not know how, Valjarević is in the novel People at the table translated into a general story about the fate of all those who left their native home fleeing the pogrom. In their conversations are their new experiences, memories, relatives, sadness, fear.
The publisher says that each chapter of this novel is divided into two parts: one that impressively and powerfully, with a simple style and lyrical charge, describes everyday troubles and situations in a new and foreign environment, and the other that, in a dramatic manner, without descriptions and additions, gives a witty, casual, but often poignant and touching dialogue between two young men.
Valjarević wrote this novel while staying in the Netherlands:
He says that "writing in Amsterdam kept him away from the despair that it wasn't going the way I wanted. I wrote all the time I was in Holland. I ended up doing that work in the National Library, the old notebook was copied into the new one, and I left it in a drawer at my parents' house, so in a safe place. After that I was free, I could go on."
He says that it was a "documentary manuscript, with a little, let's call it, prose direction, and the main characters, naturalists. I had no literary ambitions, what I wrote then, there, in Amsterdam, I couldn't and didn't want to twist later, I didn't want to make a story out of it, twists and turns. There weren't any. That then, there, that was the writing then, at that moment. I couldn't change anything later. Nobody lives then, neither do I." That's how I live now. That's what I'm interested in. Now, after thirty-five years, it's all gone."
However, now there is a novel. People at the table. He appeared again, after more than three decades. As a witness.
And there is no need to waste words on Srđan Valjarević. He is there all the time, the way he was in Komu, one of the most popular novels in this region.
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