BELGRADE by Norris David

Author:Norris, David [Norris, David]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2008-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

We all, more or less, came here with honest intentions. But we were all also, more or less, without means. The temptation was still greater, because we did not know the world around us. We thought that no-one knows us and so it was easier for us to do things of which we would have been ashamed in our town, in our own home.

Miloš is the main character in The Newcomers, arriving from Užice to take a job as a reporter on a Belgrade newspaper. One day he is sent to cover the story of a young woman who has committed suicide but while visiting the house where she lived and researching her story, he meets another young woman, Zorka, and they begin a secret affair. This is the first time that sexual attraction is a motivating factor in the action of a Serbian novel. They meet in parks and public places, confident that a large city promises them anonymity and that they are unlikely to be recognized by a casual passer-by. The sheer mass of the population allows them their clandestine liaisons, in contrast to predominantly village locations in earlier literature.

Miloš has literary ambitions and writes a play that is hugely successful, but in which Zorka recognizes his resistance to the idea of their marriage. As an act of extreme self-sacrifice she commits suicide by throwing herself into the Danube. Miloš decides that Belgrade is an environment too hostile to newcomers, encouraging depravity, dishonesty and the break-up of family values. He feels defeated by the city and wants to return home, to his provincial small town and slower pace of life. At the end of the novel he walks with a friend to the railway station and observes the crowds filling the streets, simply commenting, “The large shop windows of the fashionable Belgrade stores were luxuriously illuminated.” This is a world in which life spills out into the streets, parks and public squares in all the corners of the city. He once regarded this carnival atmosphere as an attractive opportunity, but now sees it as a lonely and alienating experience, a faceless existence. Belgrade takes an active role in determining the limits of human agency. Characters are forced to confront its challenges, adapt to its values, and struggle to understand its multi-accented landscape.

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