Promotion of a new book by a young Montenegrin writer Nikola Nikolić "Cut the tall trees" will be held today in Podgorica, at the newly opened Kosmos bookstore in the Master Quarter at 20 p.m. The presentation of the book is organized as part of the 15th Regional Festival of Books and Writers, the traditional Winter Book Salon BOOKA 2023.
The collection of stories "Cut down the high trees" was published in the edition of "Nove Knjiga" from Podgorica, and the editor of the edition is a prominent writer. Zvonko Karanović.
"In his new book, Nikolić writes about wars, dictatorships, genocides, from the perspective of individuals that ultimately come down to numerical balances," the announcement states.
A bookshop Lana Bastasic indicates that Nikolić's stories remind us that every personal history is inseparable from the place and time in which it was created.
"The world that opens before the reader here is painfully accurate and painfully ours: the mistakes in it are human, and the consequences are massive. However, Nikolić skilfully turns his lens towards an individual who carries the burden of history on his flesh and blood back, avoiding turning difficult world events into dry statistics. The hope of this book lies in its call for empathy and the reminder that the suffering of one, regardless of miles of distance, is always the suffering of all", she wrote.
A writer Faruk Sehic assesses how Nikolić sovereignly rules his narrative space, language and style in his new stories.
"His (anti)heroes are people who fill the world news with their (sometimes other people's) blood and bodies. The author chooses a documentary, reportage style of storytelling, in which we can see echoes of Latin American prose, and the stories are often set in the geography of Latin America. Most of the stories, after the endings, have factual explanations based on historical facts, with which the author wants to tear from oblivion the suffering and suffering of people, which is suppressed in the face of increasingly new and crazier world events. Human destiny is the central motif of this book... 'Cut down the tall trees' is a noble book,'' he points out.
Critic Uroš Đurković adds that Nikolić's collection shows the terrifying scale of planetary horror through a geopoetic and geopolitical panorama.
"With these stories, even when there are flashes of humanity, it's very hard to be optimistic. Nikolić accurately evokes landscapes of suffering with measured, reduced and calculated storytelling. And although evil has different voices and expressions, its basis is the same, ineradicable and as such deeply admonishing. That is why encountering the stories in this collection is confronting disturbing attempts to repeat evil, as well as proof of how much the culture of forgetting can hurt," he says.
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