The Houses of Belgrade

Bernard Johnson (Translation) Arsenije Njegovan’s portrait through his obsessive love towards houses which are in his possession. He is able to fall in love with buildings as if they were humans. Symbolically the houses here are a metaphor for mens' yearning for property and beauty. From 1941 to 1968 Arsenije is isolated from the world in his home. The first time he ventures out is in 1968 just at the time of the student’s anti-government demonstrations. There he lands into a fight with the radicals, gets beaten up, and returns home where he writes his testament and dies. With cutting irony Pekić provides a brilliant insight into a mind possessed by a single passion: the love for buildings – the houses of Belgrade. Pekić says: “To enliven history is a work of magic, not of science. The task of literature is not merely to portray an epoch, but to imaginatively resurrect, revive its spirit in a way in which the contemporaries, the protagonists of our historic novel, have experienced it (not we in their place)”.