The literary program of the jubilee Grad Theater organized an author's evening on Poets Square by Ognjen Spahić, one of the most significant and expressive representatives of the contemporary Montenegrin literary scene.
To a large audience on the Budva square, in a conversation with the author, journalist Brano Mandić, in addition to a review of his works (books of short stories "Everything", "Winter Search", "A Head Full of Joy", which won him the European Union Award in 2014 literature, the novel "Hansen's Children", for which he received the "Meša Selimović" award in 2005, and the "Ovid Festival Prize" in Romania, as well as the last novel "Masalai"), Spahić is presented from his completely personal creative vision.
Thus, admirers of his books could hear what is important to him as a writer and what makes him choose a certain topic, how he communicates with readers, how he sees the importance of literature today...
"When you are very young, literature attracts you through some superficial layer, through a couple of summer readings and through biographies of great writers, including their photographs, such as Albert Camus, Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, and then through that superficial image you begin to see yourself as someone who wants to imitate them. That imitation is very important, because I, for example, throughout high school tried to write a crime novel that would resemble Auster's 'New York Trilogy'. Fortunately, nothing of that was published, and later, of course, I tried to imitate Carver, and fortunately, I gave up on those attempts as well. Because, in the end, a person might find something of his own, and some unique literature of his own. The Montenegrin language, especially this dialect, so clearly embodies how bad it is to be original - when something is bad, Montenegrins say that it doesn't look like anything. That is why it is important, and I always convince young people of this, that it is important to look like something else. It's important to imitate and try to be someone else, and that's the only way in literature, if you have talent and luck, you can reach your own original voice that will be recognizable to readers," Spahić said.
When asked by Mandić what the writer will do with his voice, Spahić said that he was always guided by the advice he received back in high school.
“Seeing that I wanted to write something outside of the written assignments, my professor told me that I had to keep one thing in mind, and that was that I had absolutely nothing important to say. That's the best advice I've ever received, and I still stick to that very useful maxim to this day. Because she focuses writers on the other side of the mirror, which is the text itself, and the language as such, without the idea that his books will gain importance, although in a strange way there are always people who underline a few lines, believing that he wrote something very clever, and then you remember the moment when you made that sentence, and that you didn't understand it yourself. These are the labyrinths in literature, and that's why every reader is always right. There is no such thing as a wrong reading of any book, as critics tend to suggest in some literary polemics. The text is an autonomous fact, it functions as one substance under a glass bell, and the reader is the one who lifts that glass bell and adopts everything that is offered to him. The way he does it is something that brings literature closer to meaning," explained the writer.
In response to Mandić's questions, Spahić also spoke about the fact that we here have been victims of a Soviet concept for decades, according to which a writer should also be a socio-political worker, and speak wisely about various phenomena, know how to "play the violin" well, that be accessible to all possible media, as well as what is expected of a writer in the West.
"I have nothing against that Soviet concept, but I just don't have the capacity to do anything else, except writing." Let's say, this tradition of literary evenings, at least my experience shows, is dead in the West, precisely because nothing is expected from the writer, except to express what he is and thinks on more or less pages of his book. All the literary evenings I have had outside consist of reading that text, of some symbolic communication between the writer and the readers who have already adopted that book. People here often accuse me of creating some self-imposed isolation in relation to the media, and that is not the case. Abroad, no journalist would think of approaching you with any question, unless they have read the book you wrote. That's why I don't want to make any statements, in which I should analyze what I wrote myself," Spahić pointed out.
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