(Danka Ivanović, Empty Houses, Partisan Book, Kikinda, 2024.)
Last year, the first novel by the poet and translator appeared in the Montenegrin and regional literary space. Thank you Ivanovic, who holds a master's degree in Romance Studies and is currently a doctoral student studying literary studies in Belgrade. Novel Empty houses was shortlisted from ten works nominated for the NIN Award, and it would seem that there were many reasons for this. Formally and in terms of content, the novel represents a unique literary breakthrough that could not go unnoticed, even among the significantly better-known authors from last year's list of nominees.
Roman Empty houses could be defined as a lyrical novel, in the sense of merging lyrical and epic features, and in many places even dramatic discourse. It is fragmentarily structured, and among its “frames”, as in a poem, “places of indeterminacy” open up, which are easily “filled” with narration. From them, the lyrical history of the narrator in the “house” of conflicting identities can be read. (“There is no word in Icelandic for indentity. When I read it, I was lost for days, not knowing what to do with it.”) From the point of view of literary form, the novel is a combination of contradictory procedures: the narrative is realized through the associative (lyrical) linking of motifs; fragmentaryness does not for a moment threaten coherence; poetic statements are in the service of the discursive. One could say that it is precisely this “oxymoronic character” of the form that contributes to the novel’s Empty houses reads with ease and interest, as if at the same time some lyrical rosary is being read and the veils of the narrative are being lifted. In this way, the genealogical motif and the associative pulsation of a complex, humorous, self-ironic and intellectually rich narrative consciousness are integrated.
The narrator (and her sister) are born into a family where for almost a hundred years only men were born. After a series of deaths, first of their father, various male relatives, and then of their unmarried uncle, the mourner will mourn the deceased “from the head of the whole nation”: “What a dog, and not leave living descendants!” The parental “transversal” connects Grbalj and the Katun district - not without references that will humorously reveal the futile “narcissism of small differences” of the Montenegrin space. (“Did I tell you that grandfather was registered as a Montenegrin”, or: “This is not your priest?”). After the death of all male relatives and a battle with bureaucracy, they will inherit land that “would make even a goat hungry”.
Many voices and special individualities speak through the narrator - heroes and heroines with different, no less authentic and painful conflicts with themselves and the world. A special and defining place (as in Rain) has a father. (“When I cry, the muscles of my forehead and eyebrows adjust so that I can see my dad. Who knows who else is on my face, without me knowing who or what they are, and I can’t recognize them.”) The father was an avid reader (“He wasn’t in the world for anything!”), and the narrator often searches for him in the library. (“I console myself that it’s possible to kill my dad after all.”) She borrows books that he read and finds marked places that “were often banal.” The motif of the father is strongly intertwined with the motif of death (“I often visit the profiles of dead people. Nothing changes on them and no one erases them.”), but also with the question of freedom of choice (“If he were alive, would I have left at all? If he weren’t dead, would I have come back?”) Although deeply tragic, the father’s death opens up a space of unexpected freedom (“In the end, everything ends with women.”) The principle according to which a woman’s place in society is always the one assigned to her, and only men are given the opportunity to assert themselves as sovereign beings is questioned. After instilling in the heroine a love of reading, the father established the heroine's sovereignty with his death, and ultimately her path to literature. ("How many generations of a peasant family does it take to die on the threshold of art, before one crosses that threshold?") The mother can and must do anything. ("Mine carries the world on her shoulders. Alone. With a smile.") There is the uncle, then the grandparents. The grandparents reached Lyon, Sacramento and Venetian ships, and the women were waiting for them. Men die in hospitals, from aneurysms, from strokes, after the laborious construction of stone houses that are then slowly dissolved by moss and the rust of transience. The women in her family never swam, even though the sea was in front of their house and "no one stopped us." The aunt, who will outlive her brothers, will shout more and more often: "Oh, I feel like throwing myself off this pier into the sea. Naked!" That is why Danka Ivanović's novel brings something of the spirit and atmosphere of films Živka Nikolić, although he is not so ruthless in exposing the stubborn and absurd matrices of the long-gone tribal world.
The novel is also a kind of inventory of "empty houses" that are collapsing equally under the burden of "masculinity" and under the burden of "femininity", along all lines of power and impotence, along all seams of less or more clearly visible constructs. It is a story about a world whose dialectic dictates that feelings of love are rarely expressed in the third person, in the first person, while it is more than desirable to talk about sadness. ("Because, the more sorrows beat you, the better man you are", but not if you are overwhelmed by "modern sorrows, such as depression and trice and the dogs of the lazy world.") Such a world cannot understand the existential and creative hunger of a young woman. (“I am forever hungry. Even while I am eating.”) However, modernity also requires the same adaptation, only now to different constructs of “desirableness” (“All you can see are the tubes of mass that others stuff into drawers of different sizes, depending on how they measured me. They have no way of understanding that whichever drawer they choose, a bloody leg, wrist, finger or nose will be left sticking out, from the unsuccessful closing.”). Whatever the narrator does is never enough, especially not her scientific work and achievements at prestigious universities. (“Well, now you are old enough to get married and have children. Don’t accidentally enroll in any more!”)
Seemingly contradictory, both the tribal and modern matrices imply that the narrator takes on the place and roles that are reserved for women. (“Is it in our culture authentic self possible?”) However, this deeply tribal matrix is imprinted with unusual speed and strength by the reflexes of education, books read, new insights and sophisticated experiences of a trembling “I” that tries to authentically define itself in opposing worlds, in various languages, until it finds its own voice and language in literature. The metatextual thread of the novel is revealed by numerous references to the heritage of world literature, linguistics and literary theory, painting and music.. There is also the inevitable Njegos, from the eternal question of whether he could "walk towards oneself as one's goal, although he did what he was told”, but also quite surprising remarks: “What would have happened if Njegoš had been ugly?” The list of references is impressive, but it is perfectly motivated as an integral part of the heroine’s spiritual world. (“How to belong. To whom?”) Books and languages are her parallel world (“Stir words into a new pan.”), and she collects university diplomas “like napkins used to be”. The novel also talks about the “sin” of spirituality and the need for art in a world that considers it meaningless and unnecessary. Because of this Empty houses Danke Ivanović, although in a different social and cultural milieu, is reminiscent of the novella Thomas Mann Tony KregerThis “suspicious citizen” who engages in the “dishonorable” profession of an artist is very reminiscent of the “suspicious dress” from Empty houses. In a certain sense, they are also connected by the fact that the hero of Mann's novel, in a conversation with a painter and friend, questions all the roles and identities of the artist, except his identity as a creator. (“Is the artist even a man? You should ask the 'woman' about that”).
In addition to the complex characters, the novel's special value Empty houses represents language itself, whose primary function is not to shape a certain content, but rather the potential for content to (self)form in its “cracks” and ambiguities, full of tragedy and humor at the same time. Danka Ivanović plays with the language that circulates tribal customs, collective consciousness and subconsciousness that her narrator deconstructs, ironizes, and finally abolishes. She does not do this with hatred but with humor, because the bearers of that collective system of values and opinions are most often the people who are emotionally closest to her, and often distant and unacceptable in terms of values. A particularly effective stylistic procedure in Empty houses represent enumerations (accumulation), which “package” in a reduced way large sequences of time and space, conflicts and generational gaps, complex spirituality and observation in collision with all possible forms of oppression. The most painful are those that come from loved ones, and only then from those others who have the need to destroy and annul, and are part of the modern environment. (“The other side of the coin is duality: one language at home, one at school.”) Therefore, one could say that they Empty houses on the trail Bakhtin's attitudes about the polyphonic novel. Polyphonicity can also be seen as a structural analogy to internal conflicts. Incidentally, in a significant number of female authors on the world literary scene, the process appears as a multiplication of the heroines' streams of consciousness, torn between the traditional and the contemporary, the expected and the personal. This also happens in an authentic way in the novel Empty houses, which further indicates its importance on the regional and Montenegrin literary scene.
Roman Empty houses has rekindled in the signatory of these lines an old feeling of how beautiful and dangerous the job of a literature professor can be (she also taught Danka Ivanović for four years). She easily reconstructed the dates when a certain work from the high school reading was written, and the author of the novel was at the same time going through some of the most difficult moments in her life. This gave her the opportunity to enjoy even more the creative process, devoid of any pathos, with which Danka Ivanović created her striking heroine and tragic-funny world from life and literature Empty houses.
Bonus video:
