the craft was there, I guess. ( )

From his penthouse high above Belgrade, Arsénie Negovan observes the city through a selection of military-grade binoculars. He’s old but wealthy, a retired architect, and has spent the last two decades in self-imposed quasi-exile in his flat. The only people he interacts with are his wife (much younger than he), his maid, and his lawyer. His wealth derives from an architectural empire of houses and tenants and sub-letters he runs indirectly, corresponding through his lawyer, but mostly by offloading the work onto his wife. When he begins to suspect that his intermediaries may be hiding things from him, Negovan decides to take matters into his own hands. For the first time in decades he leaves his flat and he sets out to revisit the beautiful houses he designed, to see what decades of urban change have done to them.

While Negovan wanders around a Belgrade that is almost-unfamiliar to him he mulls over his usual obsessions and so Pekić has the opportunity to take the reader along on a travelogue through large portions of the 20th century and its national delusions and changes in the zeitgeist. And yes, Negovan does remember the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, Communist protest marches, and underhanded capitalist profiteering, but all he really cares about is how these things affected him and his Demiurg-style relationship with his houses: shortages of building materials, delays in getting to auctions, intransigent family members whose opinions of, say, the Fascists or the placement of a front portal differed from his. He also reminisces extensively about things he said once, as a hired speaker or one-time come-backs -- and while the occasions have long since been forgotten by the other people involved, or the organizations that he addressed may no longer exist, but in Negovan’s shrunken and exiled psyche they loom large.

Houses, or in other translations The houses of Belgrade, is a reliably solid instalment in that subgenre of litfic where an unreliable narrator with delusions about their grandeur looks back upon their life, which then segues into a literary commentary on much of twentieth-century history of a country and its pipe dreams. (See also: Kazuo Ishiguro.) I thought this book was a satisfactory read, but I’m not sure if I’ll remember much in a few years’ time. I do suspect, though, that this novel may have been more comedic than I picked up on: the pettiness of the aforementioned capitalist profiteering and the general siege-mentality when confronted with any kind of governmentally-promoted ideology would slot right into place in black comedies from the Balkans.

Other than its general/generic solidness, I must say that architecture is a very nice medium through which to portray an entire city for the better part of a century. And while writing may not be the preferred medium for architecture, the book’s laser-guided focus on Negovan’s attitudes towards Possessions and Egotism does a lot to offset that. ( )

You can read my review at the New York Journal of Books:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/houses ( )

Excellence in character development and narrative. Humor much appreciated. ( )