If we are to believe the famous HL Borges, libraries are our second, metaphysical homeland. They are more stable than ourselves. Longer and more mysterious, because they collect the experiences of the history of man and humanity. Marko Špadijer begins his prose novel with such a premise. And with a previous note about the history of those records, which are the fruit of his youthful notes.
Most of the plot of his first novel (published by NZCH and Skaner studio), the narrator, hidden behind the author's self, the librarian Petar Delja, places in the milieu of the famous Cetinje library, which is also the central national culture of the institutions of Montenegro and Montenegrins.
There, as if in a kaleidoscope, narrative sequences arranged in a narrative line alternate, filled with real and fictional material, characters and action.
The narrator, as we said, is centered behind the disguise of Petr Delja, and he moves very actively and very agilely among the titles of the Library and among his colleagues who are evoked or really current, but alive and active, objectified by the skillful pen of the storyteller. At the beginning, the observations of the narrator Delja alternate with fictional episodes that take place around an incredible, fictional as well as factual, mise-en-scene made up of books and shelves, authors and titles of the Library itself, before gradually moving towards the vibrancy of Cetinje's cafes and streets, grandfather's residences or committee rooms .
The space of the Library is, it is discernible very quickly, another main character, equal to the main character or his peers who occupy the positions of revived youth, evoked by filigree sensibility and sensibility which is deliberately reduced to the meekness of a firm and short sentence, devoid of the excesses of the otherwise recognizable Montenegrin gentleness, grown up on strictness of French expression and poetic diction. Thus, the Library gradually turns from a real place into a surreal meeting place. A surreal meeting place that becomes a workshop for absurd or futile work (the episode with the cataloging of books is deeply ironic) or a place of love encounters, so it remains floating between reality and dream, on the border of the spoken and the unspoken, with a soft travel on the border of the bizarre, a place from which Delja spreads her imaginary and real dialogues with her dear interlocutors.
On one side, let's say it freely, is Delja, and on the other, the rest of the world. The world with which he communicates or discusses, leads erotic memories in a contradictory sequence of exalted memoir images and the political dullness that self-governing socialism exuded before its end.
Spadijer's imagination is considerable, with which he evokes and presents his cultural visions and analogies, interesting to modern and younger readers. These are the pictures that, in fact, with their plastic representation, literary reinstall the time after the Second World War, the optimism of the fifties that had its own peculiarities in the Cetinje area, the taste of peripheral frustration that leads a dialogue with the new capitals.
The scenes that take place in Belgrade salons and family residences, almost parallel to those from the Cetinje environment of the new communist aristocracy, bring the characteristics of the new class. Like a well-choreographed ballet performance, the ladies of the new era and high officials ready to defend at all costs the ideals that have already begun to convert into their opposites slide and take turns.
Vividly and without strain, with the experiences of an eloquent intellectual and reader, Spadijer brings many documentary details from the time of his youth, which emerge before us in all their plasticity and vitality. The most memorable and the most precious are those fictional sections that seem to be the author's own experience. These are, along with several erotic lyrical fantasies, stories related to Delja's cultural circle in Cetinje, set in the bizarre space of one of her classmates, a disabled person. Art and philosophy, politics and morality are discussed there. The Toulouse-Zlotrek ambience of the neglected space is enhanced by the expressions spread by the famous Cetinje rains that soak the entire atmosphere, making it even more impressive by the evocation of memories, very similar to Fellini's from Amarcord.
Should we say that the space of the novel is at the same time a place from which political views are expressed, from which the horizon bursts into view of the ironic ability of the author to play with ancient Montenegrin myths, megalomaniacally enlarged, but also a space from which one sneers at all the coming forms of Montenegrinism that are being lost and thins out with the installation of the latest, informational, national or supranational class, a class that already abdicates responsibility for archery, a frighteningly callous new class of spiritual alienation.
Therefore, this novel can be viewed in the light of a novel with a key or a novel-essay. Not only because it also appears as essayized prose, but because the entire novel can be read as a novel-review, a novel-attempt, in the etymological meaning of the verb essayer, testing the form. Spadijer, a child of modernism and a mature man of postmodernism, builds a fragile structure of narrative architecture on the semblance of novelistic new realism. Well, we won't be wrong if we say that the novel remains open. With the main character moving from a librarian to an editorial position, from the capital to the capital. The absence of classical figuration and fabulation may be a narrative trick to continue the Cetinje saga as a Titograd-Podgorica story. The author's intention is clear and visible. Desirable as much for the author as for the readers.
Bonus video:
