Balkan literature


Balkan literature is hardly well known. Here are a few books to start with. When available, english or spanish translations are indicated.


Titre : Mouth full of earth
Author : Branimir Scepanović
Editor : Longship Press
Langue : english

Under a starry summer night, two campers prepare to sleep. At the same moment, in a train, a man thinks of his near death which it chose to give to himself in his native Montenegro. These destinies do not have any reason to come across... But death sometimes, pull strings. Why does the instinct of hunting wake up in the heart of the merry companions ? Why do anonymous walkers, quiet peasants feel the pressing need to follow this fatal mass ? And why does the man who wanted to die doesn't want it any more, why does the survival instinct wake him up, why does he launch himself out in an lost escape ? This book seems to treat with simplicity of this terrible instinct which carries out us to war, murder, and destruction... and all that for what, at the end ? For nothing, and especially, by ignorance. It is surely the great cause of our misfortunes. But enough philosophying, good reading and good reflexion!
Buy this book on Amazon.fr (French translation), Amazon.com (English translation), or Amazon.com (French translation).

[Thanks to Caroline for this file]


Title : Ana Marija didn't like me (Ana Marija me nije volela)
Author : Ljiljana Habjanović-Durović
Editor : Phébus (french edition)
Language : French or Serbo-Coatian
Publication : 2001

Iva is a small girl like many others in her country : Croatian dad, Serb mom. She lives her childhood in a charming village of Serbia where people ended up accepting the foreigner who is her father. He is a good man, but his family-in-law has always treated him pleasantly of an oustacha and a Nazi. Then Iva's parents decide to leave to Zagreb because of the musical career the father. Not only they will have there to undergo the contempt towards the Serbs (uneducated idiots for the Croatians), but also that of the terrible mother-in-law Ana Marija, kind of frozen demon, old and terrifying, a true oustacha wearing fur and pearls. Ana Marija will pursue you in your nightmares, believe me...

In ex-Yugoslavia, the books of Habjanović-Durović are true events. Not consensual, even provocative, they were applauded by all the categories of readers, intellectuals and large audience, for once in agreement. Three of the four novels she published since 1991 have won the Golden Best-seller prize and the last one was crowned by the price of the National Library of Serbia. Ljiljana Habjanović-Durović is a writer and journalist in Belgrade.
Buy this book on Amazon.fr (French translation), or Amazon.com (serbo-croatian)

[Thanks to Caroline for this file]


Title : Au temps d'Anika
Author : Ivo Andrić
Editor : L'Age d'Homme
Language : french (traanslated from Serbo-Croatian by Anne Yelen)
Publication : 1979

Bosnia, this crossroads of the ottoman East and the Slavic world visited by Europe, is an impassioned and obscure area of ex-Yugoslavia, described by a quiet wizard, Ivo Andrić, its bard and chronicler. "At the time of Anika" is a story one does not read often in his life. The life of a dull village is upset by two unexpected appearances, by two brutal events. The slip of a pope in the madness, and several decades earlier, the madness of men for a woman, Anika. This sober account is an invaluable pearl of the world literature. All that Anika does not say, does not explain... reveals the literary magic of Andrić. This woman remains a mystery. To read absolutely.
Buy this book on Amazon.fr (French translation)

[Thanks to Caroline for this file]


Title : Elegy for Kosovo: Stories (Tri kenge zie per Kosoven)
Author : Ismaïl Kadaré
Editor : Arcade Books
Langue : english
Parution : 2000

"Allah ! It is more than six centuries and I am tired, recluse sovereign, in the Christian vastnesses. Sometimes, at the most dark hours, I wonder whether my blood would not be at the origin of all these horrors (...) Please let my blood be extracted and carried out of this frozen plain..." Here is an extract of the prayer of Mourad 1st addressed to God. The sultan of the Ottoman army, fictitious witness of the recent wars in ex-Yugoslavia, wonders whether his victory of June 28, 1389 is not a curse for the people of Balkans who do not stop carrying mourning of it (the Battle had taken place on the plain of Kosovo and was gained in 10 hours). June 28, 1989, date of its sixth centenary, the Serb leader Milošević launched a new massacre in Kosovo, this time against the Albanians. It is this day that the implosion of Yugoslavia started...

The most famous Albanian writer wrote an account of a rare sobriety. This collection, in its impartiality, is an attempt to testify to the lost nobility of this civilization, and an exhortation so that it reappears.

Buy this book on : Amazon.fr (French tranlation), Amazon.co.uk (English translation), Amazon.de (English translation), or Amazon.com (English translation).

[Thanks to Caroline for this file]


Title : The dictionnary of the Khazars
Author : Milorad Pavić
Editor : Editions Vintage
Language : english
Publication : 1989

This extraordinary book is a dictionary which can be read like a novel (of A to Z), as well as a novel which can be read like a dictionary (while following the links between articles). This true hypertext novel was written before the internet era. Its central topic is the conversion to Judaism of the Khazar people (people located between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea) at the IXth century. But the author has a particularly inventive and funny style to mix-up authentic history with legends. The reader will find vampire stories, Christian Saints biographies, dream hunters, Muslim philosophers, cabalistic legends... Warning, the book has two editions : a male, and a female. Both editions differ in a subtle way on one of the articles. Due to economical reasons, the reeditions are known as "androgyne", and the author explains in their foreword which was the difference between the 2 editions.

Umberto Eco of the Balkans, Milorad Pavić defines himself as a mighty author : in spite of the great success of this work (translated in more than 28 languages), he regrets to write in "the language of the most hated country in the world". Milorad Pavić was born in 1929 in Belgrade where he still lives. He holds his own Internet site : www.khazars.com


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Other great books of Milorad Pavić available on Amazon.com :


Title : La Forteresse
Author : Robert Hasz
Editor : Editions Viviane Hamy
Language : french (translated from hungarian by Chantal Philippe, not translated in english)
Publication : 2001

Maxim Livius hesitates between two sisters, Cécilia and Antonia. To escape from this dilemna, he joins the army. Fifteen days before being demobilized, without explanation, he is transferred to the fortress, in the heart of a mountain. There, men are unaware of their situation, except they must obey an enigmatic Order. The enemy is invisible, the borderline hypothetical : the soldiers wander in a paranoid universe, hanging to a past and absurd certainties.

The Fortress concentrates ex-Yugoslavia's events, the State decomposition and the civil war, in a single episode. The author oscillates between naturalism and onirism. We find shades of Kafka, Borges, Buzzati, Gracq...

Robert Hasz was born in 1964 in Voïvodina. In 1991, when the conflict gains this old Yugoslav province where lived the Hungarian minority, he takes refuge in Hungary and settles in Szeged. He also published the garden of Diogène in 2001.

Buy this book on Amazon.fr


Other great book of Robert Hasz :


Title : Les Bosniaques
Author : Velibor Čolić
Editor : Le Serpent à Plumes
Language : french (translated from Serbo-Croatian by Mireille Robin, not translated in english)
Publication : 1993

This book is not a novel, it is a cry. Today political refugee in France, Velibor Čolić, Bosnian born in Zagreb in 1964, wrote during the Balkans war almost at the front . Engaged in the army, he was made prisoner and manages to escape. This book is a collection of portraits, anecdotes, sharp souvenirs, violent or funny. They describe with a raw accuracy all the hardness and the nonsense of this war. This book contains three parts : Men, Cities, Barbed wires. The first part also contains three parts : Muslims, Serbs, Croats. Each one depicting sharp and cruel portraits of innocents or criminals, like showing (just like Emir Kusturica) that this country has a heart, a unit, even if the ethno groups fight each other.

This book was followed by Chronicles of forgotten. Velibor Čolić also wrote novels (Motherfunker and The extraordinaryly short and fantasmaticly strange life of Amadeo Modigliani)

Buy this book on Amazon.fr or Amazon.com


Title : The bridge over the Drina
Author : Ivo Andrić
Editor : Le Livre de Poche
Language : english
Publication : 1945

In Višegrad, a bridge connects the two banks of the Drina - but also Serbia and Bosnia, East and West - and concentrates since the XVIth century the life of the inhabitants : Christians, Jews, Muslims of Turkey or "islmaized". There, people talk, fight, play cards, listen to the speeches of the successive Masters of the country, Ottomans then Austro-Hungarian. This four centuries chronicle was written by Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andrić, Nobel Prize of literature in 1961 ; it mixes legend with history, fun with horror, and gives life back to thousand and one characters.

Emir, among other projects, had once thought making a film from this book.

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Title : Titanic et autres contes juifs de Bosnie
Author : Ivo Andrić
Editor : Belfond / Serpent à plumes
Language : french (translated from Serbo-Croatian by Jean Descat)
Publication : 1987

These tales and stories of Ivo Andrić are chapters of the history of the Jewish people. Sephardim rejected from Spain in the XVth century, Ashkenazim arrived later from Eastern Europe, the Jews of Bosnia marked this country of their print, as well as married its misfortunes. Exposed to discriminations of Islam, then with Ottoman oppression, before knowing the holocaust, they maintained their identity and safeguarded their culture while remaining faithful to an ideal.

Titanic, rich and complex story closes the book. The other stories are quite as interesting, and in particular "the Words", which I found very beautiful and moving.

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Title : Soixante-neuf tiroirs
Author : Goran Petrović
Editor : Editions du Rocher
Language : french translated from Serbo-Croatian by Gojko Lukić and Gabriel Iaculli)
Publication : 2003

To read is not a quite and innocent activity. It is also to live, sometimes dangerously, like the extraordinary adventures of the characters of this novel show it, impassioned readers who carry out a double life, circulate between their daily reality and their readings, meet each other in these two dimensions.
Thus Adam, student in letters and temporary corrector, is being proposed a singular work : to alter, for the account of obscure customers and reasons that it will be necessary for him to elucidate, an old mysterious book. Plunging itself literally in this text, he realizes quickly that he is not alone. Other readers haunt it, among whom an old eccentric lady, an old agent of a very special section of the secret services, a girl with a nice perfume ...
Surprising story, this novel is a ludic praise of great spaces of the reading without which some of us could not breathe.


This book is undoubtedly one of the best novels I've read for a time : the writing is splendid, full with images, poetry and inventiveness, at the service of a beautiful story. The Yugoslav literature comes where noone expected : not a single reference to the recent conflicts in this book. This book already won the greatest Yugoslav literary prices. The author already wrote other novels which seem quite as interesting, let just hope that the translators will continue their superb work!

Buy this book on Amazon.fr
Another great Petrović book was translated in Spanish : "Atlas descrito por el cielo" is available on Amazon.com


Title : Un peuple de promeneurs
Author : Alexandre Romanès
Editor : Le Temps qu'il fait
Language : french
Publication : 1998, new edition completed in 2003

Fourth of cover :
Forty-five years old, Alexandre Romanès remained almost uneducaed when he starts to write the first sentences of his book. He had hardly read more than ten authors, but his experiment is such as the stories and the reflexions he delivers put him naturally in the wake of great intuitives of History. He is not a man of litterature, but his way of seizing reality goes more quickly than his thoughts. If his wild decisions come very close sometimes to crime, he can also empty his pockets in those of the poor, and his uprightness always makes him find the heart of the other. After being foolish and diverting the reason, he ended up being wise.

Alexandre Romanès was born in Paris in the famous gipsy Sinti family ; he is the son of the trainer Firmin Bouglione. Disappointed by the "industrial" aspect of the family circus, he searches his way during twenty years. In 1994, he creates the first gipsy circus : the Cirque Romanès, which has since gained a solid reputation by its shows, his ceaseless music, and... its cats.


Chosen extracts :
My great-grandfather had three women and a bear. "The annoying, he said, is the bear."
Yehudi Menuhin came to see us. At the end of the spectacle, he said to me: "Until my last day, I will think of you."

Buy this book on Amazon.fr


Title : Burry me standing
Author : Isabel Fonseca
Editor : Vintage
Language : english
Publication : 1995

Fourth of cover :
Salman Rushdie : This attractive book reveals a world at the same time ignored and secret, persecuted and unknown.
Yehudi Menuhin : Superb, single, alive and documented, impassioned and controlled, this book is the chronicle of people close to me. The Gypsies and me have been waiting a long time for it.

You read this book from the beginning to the end in a tornado of images, anecdotes, and stories more poignant, surprising, sad or poetic one than another. The author gives an analysis on the origins of the gipsies, their habits, their language, what links the groups disseminated on the 5 continents, through her own experiment : during years, she lived with families, shared their daily living, learned their language, to try to bore their secrecies. It is a rare document on people which are not accustomed to delivering themselves also openly to the gadjé.

Buy this book on Amazon.co.uk (English), Amazon.de (English), Amazon.com (English), Amazon.com (Spanish translation), Amazon.fr (French translation).


Title : Anthologie de la nouvelle Serbe
Authors : Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, Vladan Desnica, Branko Copić, Antonije Isaković, Aleksandar Tisma, Milorad Pavić, Miodrag Bulatović, Borislav Pekić, Dragoslav Mihailović, Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Danilo Kiš, Branimir Scepanović, Filip David, Vidosav Stevanović, Milisav Savić, David Albahari, Jovan Radulović, Radoslav Petković, Dragan Velikić, Svetislav Basara
Editor : Gaïa
Language : french
Publication : august 2003


This collection which claims to be "anthological" gives a very great number of Serbian authors of the second half of the XXth century and gives a good idea of the large variety and great richness of its literature. Very interesting.

Buy this book on Amazon.fr


Title : Défaut d'origine
Author : Oliver Rohe
Editor : Allia
Language : french
Publication : august 2003


Without even quoting his home land, we quickly understand that the author means ex-Yugoslavia. Indeed, flying back home after ten years of exile, we "hear" his thoughts, his souvenirs and his reflexions on the events which occurred ten years ago, interrumpted by the absurd and funny discussion attempts by his neighbor, the hostesses, the commander. After a few hours, he comes to the conclusion that "Nobody is singular ; nobody is original : nobody thus can reasonably, and in any way, claim individuality. "

A deep, strong and sometimes funny book.

Buy this book on Amazon.fr