(Aurora, Balša Brković, Podgorica, Nova knjiga, 2023)
"This is where the sea ends and the land begins". Jose Saramago begins the description of Lisbon in the novel Year of death of Rikard Reiš. "This is where pathos ends and love for the city begins," we could say for Aurora, the latest novel Balša Brković. Here we are between four terms spacious enough for literary interpretation, powerful enough to take on the metaphorical meaning of a story about a city, and universal enough to wrap a literary effort around them.
One city is lapped by the infinity of the sea, another city is enveloped by tenderness, it is always endless. Saramag's novel is about the city and the poet Fernando Pessoa alias Rickard Reisch, a druggie novel, Aurora, the poet Brković dedicates to the city. Through an intellectual game, the author shows how a small town develops and internationalizes, and how it acquires an urban biography in this way. The topos of the city is metaphorized through the chess club, which symbolically leads to a gradual metamorphosis from a pre-war town to the capital. Balša Brković is a novelist Aurora gained authorship over a fictional city that is convincing to us as if it were real and attractive as if we did not know the real one. He shares the authorship with numerous real and fictional characters who live authentic and imaginary lives in his novel and while following them we sometimes forget that the land under the city is hard and war is on the horizon.
The city is Podgorica, and Balša Brković wrote a great novel about the city, which was missing.
Aurora it has almost four hundred pages and fifteen chapters. The central theme of the novel is the opening of a chess club, which represents a great cultural undertaking for Podgorica at the time, and all of this is followed by a series of events that change at high speed. Each chapter deals with its own theme that contributes to the general line of development and dynamics of the plot as well as the complexity of the characters in the novel. Cultivating the thought game does not stop only at the idea of engineer Nester about a men's chess club, but also extends to women's, and this is already a reason for alarm in the town. The drama surrounding the founding of the women's club produces a series of interactions in the novel with the aim of showing the pluralism of voices regarding the development of an environment and a society. The literary template with many characters is not accidental, it is a convincing way to depict mentality, psychology, fixed patterns of thinking, communication skills, all often dressed in humor. The idea of opening a chess club is the backbone of the novel with numerous secondary narrative streams that directly or indirectly support the central plot. Additionally, the mysterious murder of a woman complicates the narrative and creates tension fueled by human curiosity and a face in uniform.
The poetics of the layering of the novel has some similarities with Russian matryoshka dolls. The layering is in the text, in the diegetic authority of the narration and the logic of causality. It is only important to set the goal well. The game of chess is new, it needs new people or people with a new awareness - that would be the biggest babushka. New people and changed consciousness mean new energy and aggregation of similar affinities, and they are found in connection with more advanced environments - that's the next babushka. Podgorica cooperates with Dubrovnik, Bora Kostić comes to the opening of the club, ties with developed areas intensify. This game requires intelligence and calmness, especially focus. It's a well-hidden little doll. As the smallest babushka in the series, or perhaps the largest, we could imagine overcoming the bazaar mentality. In Miluša Tijović's interpretation, it looks like this:
"Listen, child," says the oldest among them. "Our greatest enemy is neither laws, nor depressed men, nor outmoded institutions, but - the bazaar. Here, people think something, but they don't know why they think it. Because they don't form an opinion in their head, but pick it up in the bazaar, like daily provisions... This is important for us to understand." ... (str.169)
"When you do something from the beginning, you set the order" (p. 169), says one of the protagonists of the novel. We cannot escape the impression that these words have an all-time importance.
The plot with the drama of attitudes around the women's club, and one murder, give the author a template for vivid storytelling, and the reader the undivided pleasure of the narrative, which includes numerous events, a multitude of characters and fine psychological nuances. The dialogues are lively and convincing, while devoid of any redundancy that would slow down the action or dilute the narrative or discourse focus. On the surface level, the heroes and actors of the novel talk. At a deeper level, it is about intertextual bravado. There, eras talk to each other, ideologies compare, personal and political convictions are challenged, the characters in the novel refer to justice and injustice, including that towards women, tradition and the known order in society are evoked. Everything is seasoned with humor and clothed in the softness of the narrative, which resembles the first snow that fell at the end of the novel. It is soft, but the snow is cold and can stay for a long time. The author Aurore it demonstrates brilliantly.
The time is before the Second World War, Balša Brković gives the anticipation of danger as an increased dynamic of the movement of people and the opposition of ideas. You can feel the coming change in the air, tense balancing and ideological persuasion are omnipresent. Many travelers came to and left Podgorica at that time. It is possible that Tin Ujević was a guest on some occasion, so he wrote the girl a dedication for a collection of poems that she happened to have with her. It is very likely that Milovan Đilas and Radovan Zogović were in Podgorica. Not necessarily together, the author knows better, that's why there is this significant exchange of two historical figures in the novel.
"Sometimes I think it's dangerous to stare at the sky," says Zogović later. They are in front of the house again. Night has long since fallen. The starry sky above the Pipers looks like the most beautiful illustrations. "What are you afraid of?" Milovan asks him. Radovan replies: "That I won't be able to look down on anything else..."
The sky over Podgorica, or Piperi, whatever. The sky over Berlin. The associations are numerous. The hustle and bustle in the novel is a foreshadowing of a paradigm shift that is being hinted at, and will result, we know, as a different social order, as the victory of an ideology and as a series of emancipations, among them the female one. Everything, we know, will be preceded by war. That in the novel Balša Brković was dealing with big ideas dressed up in one very specific goal, which is the opening of a chess club in Podgorica, two, in fact, we see through what is called in pragmatics common ground. It is a common knowledge about the time that is outside the novel, and includes known history, politics, culture, development, building of a country and much more. "Much more" is in the presupposition or assumed experience that connects the writer and the reader so that the latter can easily understand the fictional world of the novel. Through the novel, we travel from a small town to an assumed urban development, from a patriarchal inhabitant to a projected citizen. One chess club can create an exciting plot, one murder can add to the drama of the plot.
Balša Brković conducted extensive and serious research in preparation for the creation of this novel. The research was wide-ranging and related to major political, economic, social, security situations, and included details that we know to be thoroughly researched and credible, a process comparable to that of the best storytellers. Passengers arriving in Nikšić by train are met by a bus at a certain time and driven to Podgorica. A reference quite worthy of one Orhan Pamuk who thoroughly researched a tram route in a German city because his fictional hero used that tram at a certain time. There must be no mistake. In a similar way, with the ear of a chronicler and the attention of an excellent storyteller, Balša Brković introduces about one hundred and fifty authentic characters into the novel. Their very names carry the authority, color and signature of a time, which the writer Brković and the enthusiast Balša combine their forces to translate into an amazing read of the fictional chronicle of the city. In that chronicle, the author unobtrusively gives us fashion, gastronomy, customs, habits and local communication folklore, whether of a ritualistic or spontaneous character. We have details of dresses, dancing, the taste of the middle class, we have books to read, we know about food and drink. The novel would be somewhat harsh without the love and eros with which it is delicately impregnated. Love is daring, it begins where the pathetic ends. The pathos remains in the songs about Podgorica, love is daring, and he travels to America with his lovers.
In stylistic bravura Aurora abounds in genre diversity. Sometimes the quick dialogue exchanges look like a dramatic text, and some sentences look like didaskalies that end or interrupt the scene: "They get out of the compartment." (p. 17); "No one breaks the silence." (p. 16). In addition, in the novel we come across reports, formulaic language of letters, high-level correspondence with different degrees of intimacy, poetry, town rhetoric and puns of the original. Each text passage is registerally appropriate for the situation, interlocutor, their rank, context and other requirements of the given discourse situation. In addition, the prose text of the novel is decorated with several languages. During the time covered by the novel, Esperanto was present in Podgorica. We have it in the novel. There have always been Roma in Podgorica. We have Romani in the novel. Turkisms were significantly represented in the speech of the people of that era. In the novel, we have them in the ratio that the author considered sufficient. They were to the city what clowns are to the court. Both of them said what the others were not allowed to say. Original Pula Poskočica from Aurore while speaking in verse. It is a special genre in the register of humor from Podgorica. Extraordinary genre and register diversity are the special value of the text, they stylistically add additional artistic value and unmistakably contribute to the complex representation of Podgorica as multi-ethnic, multi-confessional and give the image of an open city where no one is a stranger. The above represents deeper layers of the text that communicate the author's ideas about humanity and democracy, without which any settlement of this type would be a candidate for the cursed courtyard.
In Montenegrin fictional production, machismo mostly rules through the dominance of male characters and the treatment of themes where there are no women or they are present in such a way that they are neither visible nor important enough. Contrary to tradition, Balša Brković made this novel feminist in the true spirit of equality. The metaphor of the male and female chess club sufficiently conceptualizes its gender concept in contemporary society. He did not fail to mention "the thief Stoja" (p. 112), that's how the newspaper called the communist involvement of a woman from the famous Marković family. She already has a gender-sensitive occupation, pejorative colors, of course. Stoja has a stake in self-preservation at that time and modern-day rebellion. Such women can play ideological tricks and chess. Passages like these are not part of the text for superficial intrigue or political correctness, they are there for a deep humanity that includes gender equality, but also race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation - all of which contribute to the deeply humane tone of the novel.
Although the novel is full of authentic characters, real, possible and fictional events, the main character of the novel Aurora is Podgorica. That Podgorica should be taken metaphorically as a topos that communicates openness and coexistence. With that idea in mind, it would be interesting to analyze the novel from the perspective of network theory, since it is a theory that uses quantification. Equidistance of the city and its inhabitants is an initial assumption. The web of communication between the characters in the work would show preferences, frequencies, affections, fields of attraction and repulsion. Network theory has the potential to turn time into space, so there is a possibility to conceptualize pre-war Podgorica as a city in the present moment and to make the past visible as the present. When such a network of a work of art is made, then it is no longer about a specific literary work, but about a model by which other authors could write about the same subject in a different poetics and in a different style. Then it would be quite clear that this structure of the novel is an invention with a strong cohesive potential and convincing stylistic solutions. Network Aurore he holds fast for the sake of the city of Podgorica.
Balša Brković does not correct history or mentality, does not apologize for the past, but leaves a legacy for the future, with his humanity, which is the only valid ideology. With this novel, Podgorica received a literary monument, and Balša Brković further strengthened the epithet of an excellent writer and an established writer.
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