The novel "After the party" (Imprimatur, Belgrade 2023), crowned with the NIN award for the year 2024, is approached with a kind of ambivalent feeling. As you read the first chapters, questions come naturally whether it makes sense to read so many pages dedicated to a marginal person, since the main character of the novel is exactly that, a marginal person, who became that for one reason or another. And what's even worse, he sneezes, or stubbornly refuses every thrown life belt to return to some socially acceptable streams. There is also a dominantly male perspective of everything, which in addition to intensifying the hopelessness in which the hero lives, also intensifies even more the reader's resistance to the novel. Why insist on reading such a gloomy novel, when one has already been read Michel Welbeck na koga se i sam Grabovac in the novel he invites, first of all because both of them fell into that macho dead end in which not only the two of them, but also millions of contemporary men on this planet live, searching for a mission or the meaning of their own lives. In a word, looking for a straw to grasp and avoid self-destruction. With the difference that Uelbek still has a zest for life, he does eros, both the concrete one, tinged with strong sexuality, and the one that wants to cast further, to deal with the discovery of a not at all happy European and world future, the one that will come after the inexorable Islamization of the world we know. The process that Uelbek himself so sensationally announces in some of his works (Michel Huelbeck: Subjugation, Booka).
It cannot be denied, however, that the novel "After the Party" even in those first chapters, which are slow and describe an extremely gloomy environment of post-war Bosnia, and especially of Republika Srpska, where the only certainty is living in a provincial town, both before and after the war , also has some fantastic moments. Moments that show that this is a racist writer. One such ascent was achieved, for example, in the portrayal of the main character's father. We learn about him, step by step, that from a promising JNA officer, during an unusual process, he transformed into a kind of absurd scribal whose lost cases only intensify his further desire for enormous writing activity, for writing that is a kind of therapy that his father prescribes for himself. And just when we think we have understood why, when we accuse the communist system of another absurd waste of human resources and a monstrous redirection of eros, Grabovac makes an incredible feat when it comes to the complete truth about the father's fate. So only after the break, when we have almost forgotten about him, about that bizarre figure of the father, and when we have completely sailed into other narrative levels of the novel, he, the father, pops up unexpectedly once again. But, as it is one of the most interesting moments of this novel, we will allow the reader to meet both the figure of the father and the dilemmas that he puts on the agenda for each of us when it comes to the time between the two last wars in our region, the the war that we labeled as the Yugoslav revolution and this last one, fought in the 90s.

Only somewhere around the middle of the novel can it be said that the devil comes for his own, since only then does the tangled tangle of both the narrative and the meta plan of this work begin to unravel. That's when the joker comes, as Grabovac himself says in his novel. He, joker, is that mischievous one who doesn't allow everything to go according to the already seen and already well-worn trends, even when the actors stubbornly refuse to follow his call. The Joker comes, it can be said, according to a specially prepared scenario, precisely because we humans often want to obstruct his intention and prefer to stay away and prefer the beaten paths and the routine of life. In the novel, his performance begins somewhat benignly, with a slightly stupid party, gathering a generation of former elementary school students, who were scattered around the world by the war of the 1990s. And then, through a side branch of the story, there is an earthquake, a kind of mini-revolution. Revolutions that will shake up the already largely stale milieu in which the main character, the aforementioned provincial marginal, lives his shortened life, forgetting that historical fate always has its own way of shaking us. Even when we refuse to activate, when we think we are more dead than alive. Here he comes all the way from Sweden, disguised as Damir, a friend from childhood who is difficult to oppose and reject (Deus Ex Machina, joker, we can call it what we want). So transformed joker it starts to irritate, to demand action, to warn that things can become radicalized, that in some situations we don't have the right to say "neither". He emphasizes that we simply have an obligation to meet history again face to face and jump into its flywheel.
This description of the main character's resistance, otherwise steeped in life's defeats, to step onto the main scene of life and his final agreement to take part in clarifying a terrible episode from the last war (it is an episode that completely illuminates the issue of selling organs in the last war) represents the climax of the novel. The pace suddenly becomes faster, narrative perspectives change with an intensity that leaves us as readers breathless. Just to mention the chapter Children in which the perspectives of Zeka and Emma alternate every now and then, the perspectives of the executioner and the victim. Or the very end of the novel, in which Damir, that famous friend from childhood, comes and asks, honestly, with the help of social engineering, that something be done and justice brought to an end, as his, and also the generational effect of settling accounts for all that what happened in the terrible war of the 90s. This is his bequest, since he is terminally ill and is aware that he will not be among the living as soon as tomorrow.
This chapter about joker and our desire to play the role of a proactive subject, it seems appropriate to end with a reflection in which the hero himself sums up his relationship to the historical: "All this is absurd. I live a very ordinary life, I have a very ordinary job, nothing happens, and it shouldn't happen... And then you appear out of nowhere with a story that looks like you copied it from one of those crappy American melodramas... . if you were to retell it to yourself, I wouldn't believe that you managed to get me out of my routine, to put this story together for me, that we are sitting on this gasoline, none of that, it all seems a bit pointless to me." (After the party, st.360).
In the end, when we close this novel full of impressions, which is well-deserved, considering its construction and structure, especially the amount of raised dilemmas that cannot be shaken off for days after the last pages have been read, we will understand why this novel became this year's laureate of the NIN awards. And not only that, but he is one of those who are a kind of literary interlopers who cannot be bypassed.
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