posted on april 24, 2004
Guzva
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Not
since Vladimir Arsenijevic’s novel U potpalublju (“In The Hold”) has one
book so successfully captured the attitudes and lifestyle of the young
people of Belgrade as Vuksa Velickovic has in his latest work, Gužva (“Crowd”).
In this “drama of superficiality,” the acceptance of a dead-end existence
as a kind of liberation is observed and revealed in a very subtle manner.
It is an exaggerated pose, and an acceptance of impending decadence.
Both Eros and Thanatos are banished in Gužva. Young people stylishly and effortlessly float in an oasis of lost souls, revealing the emptiness of adventures that will, for many of them, remain the most tumultuous period of their lives.
Vuksa Velickovic assumes their risks himself, yet skilfully takes one of the last chances to escape. He does so less to liberate himself, but rather to familiarize readers with happening in a milieu where events occur without event, and to explore the compromise with reality that his generation relies upon. Nevertheless, his heroes are future successes, regardless of whether they stay in Belgrade (unmentioned in the book) or go elsewhere. The crowd is almost the same. Therefore, this novel could be located in any city capable of perceiving radical messages through masterly refinements. In today’s crowd, such perception is not only the biggest subversion, but the greatest responsibility as well.
Slobodan Ilic, author of A?
What is the essence of the lifestyle of the young heroes of the novel Gužva (“Crowd” ), which is obviously located in the capital of the undesirable country of Serbia? To inhale the intoxicating breath of crowd (or simply of kicks, depending on circumstances) and then to pass through or surreptitiously sneak out as soon as possible, in order to watch events from the sideline. That sideline offers a safe distance which continually varies between a lyric, but, nevertheless, mocking realist psychological observation on one side and a hallucinating ecstasy of the collective “ritual separateness” on the other.
Hence Vuksa Velickovic’s short novel “Crowd” is at its best when it demonstrates the agility of an entire generation carefully trained in executing such a maneuver. It is a generation that by the concurrence of different, but sometimes quite unfavourable, socio-political circumstances, has become very skilful at maintaining a sophisticated and ambivalent distance. It is a drama of the twofold look without obvious consequences, endlessly balancing between trivial and fantastic, and thus postponing the moment of settling accounts with one’s own life.
But is such a settling of accounts in the world of this double generational at all possible? The psychology and art of the novel’s plot is rooted in this shrewd suspense. This suspense is heightened by the challenging slang that the novel’s protagonists use so suggestively, a masterly use of language which Vuksa Velickovic develops on the level of the leitmotiv in only one sentence. His astute use of the short, fragmentized, Romanesque form is capped off by an unusual finale that contributes one more level of turbulence/inversion to the reader’s “outlook”.
Tatjana Rosic
