Reading the City on Water

Writer, critic and university professor Mihajlo Pantić won this year's Belgrade City Literary Award for his book Ovoga Puta o Bolu (This Time, About Pain) published in 2007 by Stubovi Kulture publishers.

By Vanja Savić
Photo by Milan Melka

The short stories of Mihajlo Pantić are an integral part of what is described as the "tradition of ‘Belgrade prose", or as "New Belgrade stories". This is not only because the plot in these stories develops in apartments, concrete entrances, wide well-lit boulevards, dark and forgotten streets and areas on the left bank of the Sava River as it flows into the Danube, but because they portray the individual fates and secrets of New Belgrade residents.

The award-winning collection is called Ovoga Puta o Bolu (This Time, About Pain). The motif of pain dominates each of the book's twelve short stories, but reading each one brings about a catharsis; a cleansing through reading the lines about everyday events in New Belgrade, events that are filled with monotonous meditations and intimate memories.

Pantić's storytelling has "peaked" in this book, and "gone beyond the local confines of time and space", wrote this year's jury in presenting the Belgrade City Literary Award. The jury was presided over by Dragoslav Mihailović, one of the most appreciated Serbian writers and a member of the Serbian Arts and Sciences Academy. Mihailo Pantić received the award at a presentation in the Belgrade City Hall building on April 19, 2008.

This was yet another recognition in your nearly 30-year career; this time a rather special one given that it was presented by the city in which you live…

– I feel that being shown respect by Belgrade, receiving an awarded as one of its residents, is quite a life achievement. This is no exaggeration. Belgrade, like any other large city, like any other big place where one lives by destiny's decree, abounds in controversies. And as such, it is inspiring to write about. Sometimes I feel that I would not have become a writer at all had I not been born here.

To what degree do history and the everyday events in a city – in this case New Belgrade – its architecture, pace of life and geographic position, affect the lives of its residents?

– This is primarily the topic of my writing, as I try to find the answer myself, proceeding from my own case. I have written on several occasions that a tragic as well as joyful life is possible anywhere, including in New Belgrade, but that this is revealed to me with full force and in its entirety because I have been living in New Belgrade practically since my birth. New Belgrade evens out differences, does away with hierarchies, melts away habits, as there are no elites in it nor does life there unfold according to a script that is valid for the old city quarters. New Belgrade is a city put together from several cities, and it is dynamic, airy and luminous. I feel radiantly anonymous in something I consider to be a good thing. These are very good themes to take up in writing. They involve the fates of people like myself, the fates of unheroic heroes of a mundane urbanism. These are no light or simple dramas. This is a life given to us, its madness, wisdom and entirety.

How long was this most recent collection of short stories in the making? And, is this is your eighth book of short stories?

– Four years. That is how long it takes me, under a rule I have inadvertently adopted, to think out what I am going to write about. And that is also how long it takes me to find the motif and justification within myself to write as many thematically connected stories as are needed to put together a collection of short stories.

How high was the level of pain you needed to overcome as a writer to be able to shape each of the stories into the desired form?

– Writing is a form of cleansing, and sometimes of anesthesia. But, one cannot write about pain while one is experiencing it; pain has no form, as an Italian poet said. Pain must pass to a certain degree, or be pushed to deeper reaches in order to be spoken of. The amount of pain has nothing to do with the quality of a story, just as experienced suffering is no guarantee of artistic value. But, it is also true that pain and suffering do inspire storytelling. We do have a need to ease the pain by talking about it. Naturally, in an artistically articulated manner. Like everyone else, I too, suffered pain of this or that kind and had an urge to think it out in a literary way. This constitutes a clear and strong motive to write.

In one of the stories, your narrator leaves new Belgrade and goes on a one-day journey towards some Mediterranean island in search of a story. Does he, in this way at least, manage to escape pain?

– As the old saying goes: "Sail one must, but live, not necessarily". Travel is a good way to move away from ourselves, so we can see ourselves through the eyes of another, see ourselves in a different setting. To travel is also a way to meet ourselves as well as others, to understand the cause of pain and to cleanse ourselves. However, rationalising pain does not reduce pain. Quite the contrary; I would say it leads us towards the even gloomier conclusion that reason cannot erase pain; moreover, sometimes it can even make it grow, especially when we meet the absurd head-on with groundlessly and inadvertently inflicted pain. This is what my character thinks about, and in the process helps me as I think about it. Life is indeed a kind of travel through pain, from one point of pain to another, from a lesser to a greater trauma. And, what is most terrible of all, that is the part we remember most.

Sometimes, like in the story Ukraj Vatre (The End of Fire), you give the narration the form of a dairy, and elsewhere, as in the story Tri (Three), you poke fun with a know-it-all narrator. You continually change the manner in which you tell a story. Do contemporary Serbian writers subscribe to the idea that you should describe everything to the reader, make it clear as day?

– Contemporary prose differs from traditional prose. This difference sometimes invites difficulties among those readers unwilling to change their reading habits. As a young writer, I experimented more with form, but the outcome of this experiment was not something to be desired. Sometimes someone would take a fancy to it, but there it would end. Then I began to write more solidly-based and concretely-structured stories, striving in the process to imbue them with real life, or at least something credible. This is when readers began to respond, to identify themselves with the stories. If there is a goal to be achieved in writing, it is precisely that the words you utter must indeed ring true to someone else; someone must accept the thoughts thus uttered as their own. However, I never stopped experimenting. Each new story I write, I write as if it were my first, as if I had never written a single word. Don't ask me where I got this from; this is what simply is and that's the way it has to be.

People read less and less. New media have taken over the role of art in creating mass culture and shaping thought. Is there still a place for the written word, or has everything been reduced to watching movies with a happy ending?

– Fortunately, readers are still there. Somehow, they survive because that which one gains from literature one cannot get in any other way. The new media are eating away our time, but reading continues to be one of the most serene and sensible activities of man.

How much of the autobiographical is there in your stories? How important is your own life experience with respect to your writing, and how important is life experience in writing in general?

– Each writer is a different story. Someone writes to articulate his or her experience, to compare and share it with someone like himself or someone close to himself, to express to others what he thinks is essential. Some write to escape everyday routine, to overcome it, to become someone in a community, to re-affirm and realise themselves. I write because I can't come up with anything else, so I write to instill my own life with meaning, to free myself. In this, my experience certainly has a place. In fact, the older I get the more meaningful it becomes for me. I could say that in my stories I re-invent what I have experienced in one way or another. I endow it with new form, directly or indirectly connected to what I had actually experienced. Experience is important because one must start from somewhere. The end is uncertain anyway, and writing is for me genuine as long as it continues to surprise me.

In "This Time, About Pain" you cite a verse by Milan Mladenović: "You are all my pain". Is this a coincidence?

– Of course not. There are no coincidences in literature. An asset of a good story or poem is precisely its being able to connect remote concepts and thus shape a vision of life. Everything is connected in one way or another. This pithy verse of Milan's contains some of the things I write about in the book. For instance, that love can sometimes be a source of pain that entirely overwhelms a person. The greater the love, the greater the pain. This is a horrible truth. People of my generation played in the band Ekaterina Velika (Catherine The Great) and this music is close to me. I took a sentence uttered by Margita Stefanović as a motto for the Novobeogradske Priče (Stories from New Belgrade).

In human relations, the greatest fear is the "fear of abandonment" and the strongest feeling is the "desire to belong". Does this come from loneliness or from something else? In the latest collection, you have added another feature to your work — awareness of the depletion of human beings. Also, you wrote that only "unattainable love is lasting". Is there, then, any love at all in the world?

– If there were no love in the world, it would be invented. That is because only in love does one exist to the fullness of one's being, bereft of all vanity. The pain of the absence of love gnaws at us and wears us out; it makes us what we have no desire to be – unhappy and unknown unto ourselves. Love means existing through another and with another. Love chases away loneliness. And the wish to belong to someone, to love and be loved, is the most natural of all of man's desires.

Mihajlo Pantić was born in Belgrade in 1957. Apart from several books of critical studies, essays and anthologies, he has published the following collections of short tories: Hronika Sobe (The Chronicle of the Room - 1984) – the Sedam Sekretara SKOJ-a Award, Vonder u Berlinu (Wonder in Berlin -1987), Pesnici, Pisci i Ostala Menažerija (Poets, Writers and the Rest of the Menagerie -1992), Ne Mogu Da Se Setim Jedne Rečenice (I Can't Seem To Remember a Sentence -1993), the 2000 Oktoih publishing house award, Novobeogradske Priče (The ‘New Belgrade' Stories -1994), the Borba daily Book of the Year Award, Sedmi Dan Košave (The Seventh Day of Košava), the 1999 Branko Ćopić Award, Jutro Posle – Izabrane i Nove Priče (The Morning After – Selected and New Stories - 2001), Ako Je To Ljubav (If This Be Love), the Andrić Award, the Karolj Sirmai Award, the 2003 Zlatni Bestseler Award, Sve Priče Mihajla Pantića I-IV (All Short Stories of Mihajlo Pantić - 2007), Ovoga Puta o Bolu (Of Pain This Time), the 2008 Belgrade City Literary Award. His short stories have been translated into some twenty odd world languages and entered into Serbian and world anthologies.