(Aleksandar Ćuković, “Fear of the Game”, Kosmos, Belgrade, 2025)
Going uphill, whether in life or art, is not easy. Especially if, in the process, we want to reach the constant of such movement and convince ourselves and others that nothing in this process is accidental. In addition to life energy and the cumulative knowledge that we acquire in the meantime, possessing our own talent and vision is undoubtedly the central link that connects what (in this case) a writer initially initiates as an idea, and what he has transformed into a metaphorically rich linguistic treasure through his imaginative vision. Such progression also moves Aleksandar Ćuković, a poet, prose writer and literary critic, whose creative tempo is clearly on the rise, especially when you consider that his first book appeared less than fifteen years ago. In that short span, he gave us three collections of short stories, a novel, a collection of poems, several studies, and a book of collected essays on literature, artistic creativity, interviews and essays on current issues in Montenegrin literature and beyond. The Montenegrin and Serbian critical public, recognizing the value of Ćuković's intellectual potential, is aware that before them is an author who will have something to tell us. And he has already confirmed this with his new collection of stories "Fear of the Game", recently published by the publishing house "Kosmos" from Belgrade.
It is good that the author included a smaller number of stories from the previous collection, “The Writer in the Bathroom”, in this latest one, because in doing so he revealed the constant, indicated at the beginning of this text, of his own search for the problematic and motif points of his creative microcosm. But, let there be no confusion: here the term microcosm represents a form of making points, or leading a story when it comes to the writer's ideas and thoughts, while, on the other hand, having in mind the wide range of events, both on an individual and a general social level, one can speak of a macrocosm, almost on a planetary level.
No matter what kind of book we have in front of us, in this case, not even counting its value assessment, we generally have in mind two basic parameters, based on which we derive its creative weight and scope, and these are: first, the topic and its relevance, and second, the transfer of content to a linguistic-stylistic platform.
When it comes to Ćuković's stories, what do they offer us, in terms of themes? The answer would be: a rich and very diverse range of questions, which are, more or less, timeless. Although reduced to a minimum in their compositional construct, almost to a single cut, a single stroke, a single sentence, their symbolism transcends the moment of their creation and emanates into a broad, almost planetary experiential area. Given that for a writer, any occasion, idea, conception or, even seemingly peripheral, ad hoc experience, can be a reason for questioning and doubt, whether of his own position or of broader sociological paradigms, this will result in each new page being a new unknown and a new adventure for the reader as well. It would take us far if we were to list all the possible challenges that Ćuković recognizes and invokes with his analytical nerve, but, in essence, it is life, daily, visible, present, and past, and everything that follows it, and figures as: remembered, forgotten and forgettable, individual, uniformed, confused, linear, malleable, voracious, desecrated, weak, emotional, authoritarian, cold (blood), instinctive, spiritual...
In such a multifaceted mutuality, changeability, distance and exclusivity of our existential system, man cannot establish his position once and for all and, therefore, must always seek to recognize himself in others and others in himself. And even then, he cannot be sure that he has found his earthly algorithm, because we have long been witnessing the dissolution of spiritual energy, consciousness and will, as a unique civilizational seal, i.e. a type of “propulsion fuel” that would enable us to move further, and that means - living and living. Provided that unity, as such, ever existed. What is left for the writer in such an atmosphere of disarray and general oscillation of value parameters?
Aware that it is pointless to expect, even partially, a revival of the compactness of the world through the invocation and return to the phenomena of the past, Ćuković leans towards the possibility of a specific analytical action: through the playfulness of symbols, messages, documents, personal experiences, knowledge and other situations that, conditionally speaking, make up the plot, he embarks on an adventure, or rather, into an ironic-humorous-satirical game with, not only this and that world, but also with his own. This is now a new terrain that the author is entering, as he emphasizes in his review and Marijana Zecevic, as in “unexplored territory”. Such a game does not rest on any harmonious, comforting form. On the contrary, it becomes serious, questioning, on whose “edge”, states Zečević, “even the smallest mistake is fatal”.
With Ćuković, everything can be both a motive and a reason for a story. There are no only "elite" themes, neither contemporary nor de passe, neither just random nor deliberately chosen, neither exclusively important or unimportant, nor challenging, nor stereotypical. The writer finds them in the forgotten as much as in the remembered, he finds them in time as an absolute, just as much as in what we call the past or memory... Life, as we perceive it on an individual level, or the one formatted through various sociological-political paradigms, or through the general civilizational level, in Ćuković's stories is reduced to symbolic fragments, to a short reminder, to an appeal, a remark... Hence, the poetic narrative is, more or less, in each of his stories extremely crystallized, whether it is its associativity, metaphoricity, symbolism and all other branches of literary transformation. In its most reduced form, sometimes even two or three lines, the story manages to give rise to a rounded, dramatic soliloquy; it manages to capture, as if in flight, man's iron-hard habits through the abyss of daily transience; to abstract time into seconds, space into millimeters, analytically transform it into a symbol, and to send the message to the reader for insight by directing it, most often as a challenge, towards his intuition, his mental perception and reception, and his readiness to decode the increasingly complicated fate of man today as rationally as possible. For example, we cite the story "The Banality of Evil": "- Not only how does he read, but how does he sleep next to that lampshade made of human skin?! - Ana Harent wondered. What does he read? wondered the creator of that tattooed lampshade." Crime against humanity, as a concept of the bloodiest evil, which we recognize in only a few words in the first sentence, in the second - it already fades, without delay, without punishment or any consequences, into an ordinary curious question, the kind often heard in everyday communication, and which associates with a completely different topic.
Questions of meaning, survival and the future of our lives can be approached in different ways. How does Ćuković do this? By most often introducing himself into the newly begun analytical discourse, as a creative target, then shifting the direction of the story towards others, their vigilance or indolence, in order to bring to light through a strong imaginative narrative all the civilizational decay of our time, which, as through fragments of broken glass, is reflected in countless variants, offering the reader, as an individual, and the multitude, as a system, an even more questionable map of many, in the meantime, absolved, human values.
At first glance, one might think that such a gloomy totality inevitably emerges and seeps into nothing other than a nihilistic framework! However, this is, after all, an illusion, because Ćuković, with his far-reaching literary intuition, gradually transforms this narrative into another, allegorical-humorous-ironic stylistic complex. Through this type of analytical discourse, the author will “grab” many social phenomena, the fate of man as an individual, sometimes interspersed with malicious, evil aspirations, a complex of historical themes, mythologized content, political (mis)understandings... (“Little People and Great Competitions”, “Hero”, “Curriculum Vitae”, “Images of Flesh and Youth”, “Ljilja’s Father”, “Psychologist” and other stories).
With such a narrative that offers not just one, but several analytical options in decoding human situations and problems, of which the humorous-ironic one is the most present, Ćuković seeks to make the familiar Kunderin transform the paradigm of the “unbearable lightness of existence” into the slogan “the lightness of unbearable existence”. In other words, to make all that overcrowded gibberish of life more bearable, more relaxed, through this kind of stylistic subversion and open humorous playfulness of language, so that, by dislocating it, if not otherwise, then through a sarcastic thread, we can maintain ourselves in that same life.
In a number of his stories, Ćuković has specifically addressed the phenomenon of creativity, in this case, mainly literary - writing, publishing, choosing topics, style, the fate of a book, as a cumulative-creative testimony to the emergence and existence of man, to his traditional-national-cultural subjectivity. Today, the book has found itself in the gap between its own cosmos, which is to say both the author's own and the external one, on whose fate it is solely focused. Ćuković, in the "rearview mirror" of such conditions, suggests to us the idea that writers, as people, are not without flaws, and that the scale of values in art can be interpreted differently; and that the human and creative compass can in practice function as two disparate concepts. "(No) Time", "Overlook", "Writer in the Bathroom", "Refuge", "Paper Crucifixion", "Gropan", "SF", "Before the Story", "The Sorrows of the Courtier", are just some of the stories in which the concepts - motif, book reading, library, writing, reading, ironic dispute, memory, imagination... are in the foreground and, often, viewed through a certain dystopian aura, the fundamental of which is the stronghold of less and less agreement, and more and more autosuggestiveness and self-willed, monological perception. In what way does the author achieve a rather fragmented and, on the other hand, convincing dynamic of his literary approach to problems? By introducing himself as a creative and conceptual subject into the topic he has just begun, he shifts the direction of the story in another direction, "surprising" both himself and the reader. By doing so, he presents the possibility of an ad hoc, longer experience of the presented material, even of a different setting, which, in the end, both broadens and crystallizes, at the same time, the reader's perception. All of this, on the other hand, branches the problem into new unknowns, and forces the reader to decipher them again.
If we were to briefly name Ćuković's literary world, which he has already selflessly introduced to the reader for insight and possible assessment, we could conclude that it is, in its overall creative legitimacy, both challenging and pessimistic, both foreign and close, real and elusive, in a word, miraculous! And that is why it cannot leave you alone. And that is the most beautiful sign that you, together with the writer, have become a witness to his unusual and provocatively deeply conceived literary adventure.
Bonus video:
