Agatha Christie didn't like messy murders - the crime scenes in her books didn't involve spilled brains or bloody walls - everything was clean, white and tidy. Perfect knowledge of medicines was necessary for such scenes
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, translation from English by Aleksandar Milajić, Booka, Belgrade 2024.
Nina Like, We are not here to have fun; translation from Norwegian by Radoš Kosović; Geopoetics, Belgrade 2024.
Last week, the world premiere of Dan Brown's new book The Secret of Secrets took place in Prague. This novel is also set in that city, and the "Vremena" reporter was in the right place at the right time.
Often readers tell me that the book gives them discomfort, sometimes nightmares. My goal, of course, is not to make anyone feel bad, but at the same time, I don't know the purpose of writing that just slips away and leaves no impression, no scent, no memory. In that sense, I'm glad that Cracks they arouse emotions, questions. Discomfort
Not to be outdone: the novels of the Spanish writer Almudena Grandes are enchanting. There are no formal breakthroughs, new literary procedures, language experiments, or labyrinths in them: Almudena Grandes simply knows how to tell stories and is not interested in anything other than storytelling.
The writer Svetislav Basara talks about his new novel for "Vreme", in which the late Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić is the narrator.
Although he remains faithful to the poetics of the fragment, in the novel The Suicide of Leve he is closer to a more classical prose speech. Narrated in the second person, as an address to a dead friend, this novel confronts the fundamental phenomena of human existence: the experience of the world and man's place in it, posterity and the meaning of the family, contemporary art, the modern state, politics, etc. The story, certainly conditioned by the theme, is told in a slightly elevated tonality of modern, dark pathos, and yet with a certain cheerfulness, which is imposed by the fact that the most important event in the story, the denouement, happened already at the beginning
Lucy is reminiscent of striking and self-possessed female characters of the French New Wave who do not hold anyone accountable for their decisions, even if they are wrong or disastrous. Lucy is freedom alone, a freedom that keeps slipping away. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes she is talkative and fluffy, sometimes capricious and silent
Ju Nesbe, the most famous Scandinavian writer of today, was in Belgrade for the promotion of his new novel "Minnesota". He told "Vreme" how he mistakenly got on the wrong train and arrived in Belgrade, on which side his hero Hari Hule would have been during the student protests in Serbia, and many other things.
Written while Marquez was suffering from cancer, the memoir "Story of My Life" represented the need to tell his life story before he passed away.
A characteristic of each of the narrative streams is learning about different forms of resistance. That's why I wrote the novel under a working title Resistance, although I knew I wouldn't publish it under that title. Over time, I realized that there is a common denominator between that working title and the place where the action takes place - the mountain Rtanj, two letters that remind us of the chemical element that the heroes of my novel are fighting for. And that is the "Cape", which, in addition to denoting the protruding free part of the land, is also a symbol for Freedom - a critical mineral that we desperately lack.
The novel "Is it raining at your place too?" by the editor of "Vremena" Sonja Ćirić is one of the ten best thriller novels in the region according to the jury of the prize awarded by the Association of Thriller Writers for the first time this year
Like a person, Lisbon is present in Saramago's life and work. It is difficult to determine who gave more to whom in their mutual exchange - the city to the writer or the writer to the city
The novel "NGDL" is decorated with cheerful humor, which is a departure from the dark wave in which there were several prominent novels, which dealt with the topic in the domain of the ugly, grotesquely ugly and unpleasant - the jury of the Nino Award explained the reasons for awarding this novel by Marinko Arsić Ivkov
In the novel "Mali Murat", Vladimir Vulević talks about treatment for alcoholism in the first person. And that's why the reader trusts him
Recently, a Persian translation of Vladislav Bajc's novel "Hamam Balkania" was published in Iran. Of all the editions of his books, two thirds were published abroad
"Now some other young people have appeared, completely different, who are inspired by the same thing. Maybe they are inspired by someone's religious education, maybe someone's anti-religious education, maybe someone's philosophy... Maybe they are a new world that adapts much better to dramatic technological development. But maybe they actually feel what freedom means in the true sense, even much deeper than we who have uttered the word many times felt it. Perhaps they sense the danger brought with it by the apparent crisis of democracy throughout the world. I confess, I thought there were no more such young people as we were. However, they exist and are realistically much better than us and much less susceptible to manipulation, both by the so-called deep state and by politicians and the media."
"Both then and now, it's as if we follow each other. To that extent, my mention (and even inventing) of the 'Yugoslav dream' is the shortest, but quite accurate definition of the attainability of the spiritual state of the individual and the nation of that time."
The debut novel "AL T" by Aleksandar Nedeljković, which was first published in America and last month in Belgrade, is a contribution to the genre of science fiction, which is insufficiently present among our authors.
Christian Novak: A case of self-destruction; Literary workshop Rašić, Belgrade, 2023.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka, whose novels, for example in To the process, an inexorable force turns a living human into a mechanical device and then "winds" it up at its own will.
More than half a century after the writer's death, EM Forster's cult novel continues to live, now also in Serbian, as that rare and precious example of a novel that has stood the test of time.
