Podgorica between place and non-place

Tonight's promotion of the book "Podgorica Trilogy" by the writer, poet and journalist Balša Brković turned into much more than a literary evening. It was a conversation about a changing city, about literature trying to catch the pulse of the times, and the need for Podgorica, despite its rapid transformations and global sense of "non-place", to return to itself.

At the beginning of the conversation, the moderator Aleksandar Ćuković opened the question of what Brković's vision of Podgorica looks like today, when the three novels are united under the same cover. The interviewee noted that the trilogy gives the city back the possibility of growing from an anonymous urban space into an authentic place - a space of identity, emotion and memory. In a time when, as has been said, we ourselves are moving into statistics and impersonality via the internet, Brković's prose goes in the opposite direction: it insists on a concrete city, concrete people and their stories.

Brković replied that ever since the first novel, there had been a controversy surrounding the belief that Podgorica was “not literary photogenic.” He recalled that many young authors had set their stories in other cities, believing that Podgorica did not have a strong enough identity for literature. His belief was the opposite: that a literary place is not created by geography, but by the talent and perspective of the writer.

"You can make any place a literary space," said Brković, explaining that he was not interested in the folklore or nostalgic image of old Podgorica, but rather a city undergoing profound changes. He recalled that Podgorica had grown from a city of around fifty thousand inhabitants into an urban space of many times greater proportions, and that such a transformation necessarily changes the way of life, identity and stories that the city produces.

Speaking about the trilogy, the novels "Private Gallery" (2002), "Paranoia in Podgorica" (2010) and "Plaža Imelda Markos" (2013), Brković emphasized that they are connected by contemporary Podgorica, but also by the position of the narrator who always actively participates in events. He described the first novel as a "bohemian Podgorica" ​​of young artists and a generation that was trying to find its own voice at the beginning of the two thousandths. He recalled that it was this novel that brought one of the first significant regional echoes to contemporary Montenegrin prose.

The conversation then turned to the issue of intimacy and privacy. Ćuković noted that throughout the trilogy, the focus gradually shifts from the personal to the social and political. Brković explained that intimism was his response to fatigue with postmodernist experimentation and “crossword puzzles” that, as he says, often became an end in themselves.

He wanted to return to the most personal, inner and experiential, believing that it was precisely there that literature could regain its authenticity. At the same time, he emphasized that the novels were also provocative, so much so that many readers recognized themselves in the characters. However, instead of complaints, he received unexpected reactions from people who stopped him on the street asking why they, in particular, did not end up in the novel.

A special segment of the conversation was devoted to the motif of fatherhood, which changes and develops throughout the trilogy. Brković spoke in detail about how "classic" fatherhood appears in the first novel, absent and traumatic in the second, and in the third the search for a father figure becomes an almost symbolic search for law, authority and meaning. This layer, as he pointed out, represents one of the hidden inner lines of the trilogy.

Speaking about the novel "Aurora", which precedes the trilogy in terms of time and returns to Podgorica in 1932, Brković explained how different it is to write a historical novel. While contemporary prose is built on personal experience, historical prose requires research into every detail - from public lighting to everyday city habits. Through an anecdote about when Podgorica received electric lighting, he showed how literature often arises from small, almost imperceptible facts.

One of the most lively parts of the evening was a discussion about "Imelda Marcos Beach" and the symbolism of the real Imelda Marcos as a global figure of emptiness, kitsch and political absurdity. Brković explained that this figure served as a metaphor for time and social mechanisms that he recognized in the Montenegrin context.

When asked whether contemporary Montenegrin prose can be relevant without directly confronting the deviations of society, Brković replied that the Montenegrin cultural space is extremely challenging for writing precisely because of its hypertrophied mythology. In such a space, he believes, literature must dismantle myths and open up questions that society tries to hide.

A particularly emotional moment was when Brković spoke about female characters in his prose. He said that the absence of female characters has long been a serious problem in Montenegrin literature and that it was important to him that his novels bring strong, complex and equal heroines. He also recalled real people who partly inspired certain characters, emphasizing that reality for him is never a copy, but only the initial impulse for literary transformation.

At the end of the evening, the conversation opened up the question of the future of literature in the era of superficiality and artificial intelligence. Brković noted that dictatorships and bans paradoxically created an additional hunger for books, while today's times are more dangerous precisely because of the dominance of superficiality and the feeling that nothing has real weight anymore.

Yet, despite this skepticism, he concluded that literature survives precisely because it gives meaning to the world.

"When we write about the world, we not only discover it but also constitute it," said Brković, adding that he did not see any of this as a debt to Podgorica, but rather as a writer's job - to leave a collection of images and questions for some future time.

The literary evening ended in an atmosphere of open dialogue and visible satisfaction from the audience, with the feeling that the "Podgorica Trilogy" seems perhaps even more relevant today than at the time it was created.