Ana Brnabić, Serbia and the novel Leeches.

Now with craft beer. Thoughts, Jon?

I saw this article about the Serbian prime minister and remembered a book I once read.

First, the article.

Ana Brnabić: 'I do not want to be branded Serbia's gay PM', by Patrick Wintour (The Guardian)

The 41-year-old who has never been part of a political party has risen from obscurity and is working to change Belgrade’s image

The appointment of Ana Brnabić as Serbia’s prime minister aged 41 was accompanied by the sound of glass ceilings being shattered all around her.

Not only is she the first woman to take on the role, Brnabić is gay and has achieved high office without being a member of a political party.

Giving her first interview to a foreign newspaper after a month in the job, she said: “Serbia is changing and changing fast, and if you will, I am part of that change, but I do not want to be branded ‘Serbia’s gay PM’. The message we need to send is about competence, professionalism and trustworthiness” ...

... She had little hands-on experience of Serbia’s unforgiving politics before becoming prime minister, a role that brings with it an imposing security detail outside her private office in Belgrade. In 2003 the then prime minister, Zoran Đinđić, was assassinated by an organised crime gang.

In her early 20s Brnabić spent six years abroad, mainly in London, from where she watched on TV as Nato planes bombed the defence ministry in Belgrade in 1999. To this day the buildings, over the road from her spartan office block, are a shell, a reminder of Serbia’s loss of Kosovo. They also highlight the dangers facing the Balkans as the west and Russia fight for strategic advantage.

I find this section interesting.

“I don’t think Serbia is that homophobic. I know that is one of the perceptions, and I understand attitudes are different in parts of Serbia. But some journalists were in a village in central Serbia where part of my family come from. They saw a couple of people just drinking beer in front of the local store and they asked them about me, and they replied: ‘Well, listen, in this part of Serbia we grow raspberries, fruit and vegetables, and we do not grow discrimination.’

“We just need to hear these kinds of people as well. The citizens of Serbia have a right not to be portrayed by a loud minority. We can have a culture where we disagree, as long as there is tolerance and no violence. We all have different views and values, but I don’t want to change people’s thinking by law.”

And finally, this.

“Joining the European community of nations is the icing on the cake, but the journey is just as important,” she said.

All of which made me think of the novel Leeches, which I reviewed here in 2011.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Leeches (A Book Review).

My only visit to Yugoslavia came in 1987, and it was an intensely evocative cultural experience for a young pup.

In fact, all those obscure parts of the Balkans (which include Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and the contemporary states succeeding Yugoslavia) I visited that summer seemed just as mysterious, foreboding and vaguely unsettling as previously reputed.

I had a blast.

Speaking in 1980’s geopolitical terms, the position of these nations as socialist buffers between East and West was only part of it. As a sometimes student of European history, I always recall the words of Metternich: “Asia begins at the Landstrasse," the road leading from Vienna eastward, toward Hungary, Romania and eventually Turkey, which during its expansive Ottoman phase controlled much of the Balkans.

Metternich may have been referring exclusively to a physical sense of delineations and differences, but his viewpoint surely also was instinctive – and straight from the gut.

Irish novelist Bram Stoker felt it, too. Although Transylvania lies slightly outside the Balkans in modern day Romania, it is where Dracula reigned. In more recent fiction, it was in the Black Mountains of Montenegro that Sherlock Holmes fathered a son and gumshoe successor, Nero Wolfe, the latter returning to his birthplace in middle age to avenge a restaurateur friend’s death, and assuage author Rex Stout’s conflicted feelings about Communism.

Memories are bizarrely long in the Balkans. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic rose to address a crowd gathered to commemorate Serbia’s defeat against Turkey in a battle fought 500 years before, and used the occasion to make a strident case for Serb pre-eminence in the province of Kosovo.

Did Milosevic release the malignant genie that Marshall Tito kept securely bottled? To western sensibilities, his nationalistic belligerence hastened the demise of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, itself an artful geopolitical creation dating from the post-WWI peace settlement, spawning the horrendous civil war of the 1990’s.

The truth is not so facile, but Americans, insofar as we know or care about modern Serbia, persist in seeing it as somewhat more sinister than other darkly cantankerous locales in Europe, if not exactly as inexplicably dangerous as Rwanda or Somethingstan.

---

In his novel Leeches, Serbian writer David Albahari offers a meandering, maddening but ultimately fascinating examination of the prevailing mood in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital city, in 1998.

There was a lull, then. The almost medieval violence of the 90’s had gradually tapered owing to the combatants’ exhaustion and belated international intervention. Yugoslavia was irrevocably shattered, and Serbia, charged with instigation and aggression, was beset with sanctions and isolated from the world.

But because the future of Kosovo remained unresolved, a final act in the tragedy lurked just over the horizon, and worst of all, in 1998, everyone knew it. The scene in Belgrade was one of tension, expectation and feigned normality. Accordingly, to reinforce the claustrophobic anxiety, Albahari’s story unfolds in the form of a continuous, uninterrupted, 309-page-long paragraph. It is a very effective device.

Loitering along the Danube River quay in Belgrade on an entirely unremarkable day in 1998, the nameless narrator, who has no visible means of support save for a topical weekly column he writes for one of several rambunctious local newspapers, suddenly witnesses a man slapping a woman.

Within days, this seemingly trivial episode obsesses the narrator, drawing him into an ever-expanding network of otherwise unconnected events and people, to which he expends much time and energy ascribing order and purpose to what others would see as random chaos.

He meets an eccentric mathematician from school days, and later falls in with the city’s few remaining older Jewish residents, including the daughter of one, for whom his sexual attraction is frustratingly unrequited.

He discovers a mysterious old water well, documented in a strange book with magical pages that seem to change with every reading, a volume filled with Jewish history, Kabalistic theorems and the recipe for an actual Golem, the latter to be called upon to assure deliverance from anti-Semitic persecution.

He suffers a requisite beating at the hands of skinhead-like nationalists as internal ruminations pass from his fevered brain to publication in the newspaper, where they inspire an angry civic reaction.

As the story progresses, and the labyrinth of conspiracy grows ever more complex, the narrator smokes steadily increasing quantities of genuine Balkan countryside marijuana with his only true friend, Marko. They meet often to get high and to lament the passing of the wonderful Serbian stoner era, now lost as the preference of young urbanites to lubricate their souls turned to valium, not ganja.

Every session with his new Jewish friends ends in a staggering brandy drunk, and as the pages turn and the never-ending paragraph trudges ahead, the conspiracies overlap and multiply amid the escalating paranoia and haziness.

The narrator’s newspaper columns grow ever more provocative as he speculates in print as to exactly why the country’s going to shit – and, non-metaphorically, literal defecations constantly turns up on his doorstep, courtesy of the vengeful thugs now stalking him.

---

All the while, the dim outlines of impending dénouement become ever more vivid, because as hindsight informs us, within a year of the novel’s conclusion, Serbia will be bombed by NATO on the pretext of saving the Kosovars from the fate of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Numerous Serbs will be charged with war crimes, to be pursued until the present day, and Milosevic himself will fall just short of emulating Hermann Goering by dying (of heart disease) before the court’s verdict is delivered.

There finally comes a juncture where Marko disappears. It will be another hundred pages before it becomes clear why, because in the end, the conspiracy actually is real, and more extensive than the reader could have imagined. A brutal murder occurs, the fix is in, and the narrator – used and abused by all and sundry – finally realizes he’ll be blamed for it.

He hops the next Budapest Airport shuttle out of the country and into exile. Following the example of Serbia’s history, the shelling soon to follow in 1999 will purge the guilt and prime the next round of anger, but the narrator will be long gone, exiled to an unnamed place, fearing his heart has died.

Maybe it has.

ON THE AVENUES: “Leeches” (A Book Review).

ON THE AVENUES: “Leeches” (A Book Review).

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

My only visit to Yugoslavia came in 1987, and it was an intensely evocative cultural experience for a young pup.

In fact, all those obscure parts of the Balkans (which include Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and the contemporary states succeeding Yugoslavia) I visited that summer seemed just as mysterious, foreboding and vaguely unsettling as previously reputed. I had a blast.

Speaking in 1980’s geopolitical terms, the position of these nations as Socialist buffers between East and West was only part of it. As a sometimes student of European history, I always recall the words of Metternich: “Asia begins at the Landstrasse," the road leading from Vienna eastward, toward Hungary, Romania and eventually Turkey, which during its expansive Ottoman phase controlled much of the Balkans.

Metternich may have been referring exclusively to a physical sense of delineations and differences, but his viewpoint surely also was instinctive – and straight from the gut.

Irish novelist Bram Stoker felt it, too. Although Transylvania lies slightly outside the Balkans in modern day Romania, it is where Dracula reigned. In more recent fiction, it was in the Black Mountains of Montenegro that Sherlock Holmes fathered a son and gumshoe successor, Nero Wolfe, the latter returning to his birthplace in middle age to avenge a restaurateur friend’s death, and assuage author Rex Stout’s conflicted feelings about Communism.

Memories are bizarrely long in the Balkans. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic rose to address a crowd gathered to commemorate Serbia’s defeat against Turkey in a battle fought 500 years before, and used the occasion to make a strident case for Serb pre-eminence in the province of Kosovo.

Did Milosevic release the malignant genie that Marshall Tito kept securely bottled? To western sensibilities, his nationalistic belligerence hastened the demise of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, itself an artful geopolitical creation dating from the post-WWI peace settlement, spawning the horrendous civil war of the 1990’s.

The truth is not so facile, but Americans, insofar as we know or care about modern Serbia, persist in seeing it as somewhat more sinister than other darkly cantankerous locales in Europe, if not exactly as inexplicably dangerous as Rwanda or Somethingstan.

---

In his novel, “Leeches,” Serbian writer David Albahari offers a meandering, maddening but ultimately fascinating examination of the prevailing mood in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital city, in 1998.

There was a lull, then. The almost medieval violence of the 90’s had gradually tapered owing to the combatants’ exhaustion and belated international intervention. Yugoslavia was irrevocably shattered, and Serbia, charged with instigation and aggression, was beset with sanctions and isolated from the world.

But because the future of Kosovo remained unresolved, a final act in the tragedy lurked just over the horizon, and worst of all, in 1998, everyone knew it. The scene in Belgrade was one of tension, expectation and feigned normality. Accordingly, to reinforce the claustrophobic anxiety, Albahari’s story unfolds in the form of a continuous, uninterrupted, 309-page-long paragraph. It is a very effective device.

Loitering along the Danube River quay in Belgrade on an entirely unremarkable day in 1998, the nameless narrator, who has no visible means of support save for a topical weekly column he writes for one of several rambunctious local newspapers, suddenly witnesses a man slapping a woman.

Within days, this seemingly trivial episode obsesses the narrator, drawing him into an ever-expanding network of otherwise unconnected events and people, to which he expends much time and energy ascribing order and purpose to what others would see as random chaos.

He meets an eccentric mathematician from school days, and later falls in with the city’s few remaining older Jewish residents, including the daughter of one, for whom his sexual attraction is frustratingly unrequited.

He discovers a mysterious old water well, documented in a strange book with magical pages that seem to change with every reading, a volume filled with Jewish history, Kabalistic theorems and the recipe for an actual Golem, the latter to be called upon to assure deliverance from anti-Semitic persecution.

He suffers a requisite beating at the hands of skinhead-like nationalists as internal ruminations pass from his fevered brain to publication in the newspaper, where they inspire an angry civic reaction.

As the story progresses, and the labyrinth of conspiracy grows ever more complex, the narrator smokes steadily increasing quantities of genuine Balkan countryside marijuana with his only true friend, Marko. They meet often to get high and to lament the passing of the wonderful Serbian stoner era, now lost as the preference of young urbanites to lubricate their souls turned to valium, not ganja.

Every session with his new Jewish friends ends in a staggering brandy drunk, and as the pages turn and the never-ending paragraph trudges ahead, the conspiracies overlap and multiply amid the escalating paranoia and haziness.

The narrator’s newspaper columns grow ever more provocative as he speculates in print as to exactly why the country’s going to shit – and, non-metaphorically, literal defecations constantly turns up on his doorstep, courtesy of the vengeful thugs now stalking him.

---

All the while, the dim outlines of impending dénouement become ever more vivid, because as hindsight informs us, within a year of the novel’s conclusion, Serbia will be bombed by NATO on the pretext of saving the Kosovars from the fate of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Numerous Serbs will be charged with war crimes, to be pursued until the present day, and Milosevic himself will fall just short of emulating Hermann Goering by dying (of heart disease) before the court’s verdict is delivered.

There finally comes a juncture where Marko disappears. It will be another hundred pages before it becomes clear why, because in the end, the conspiracy actually is real, and more extensive than the reader could have imagined. A brutal murder occurs, the fix is in, and the narrator – used and abused by all and sundry – finally realizes he’ll be blamed for it.

He hops the next Budapest Airport shuttle out of the country and into exile. Following the example of Serbia’s history, the shelling soon to follow in 1999 will purge the guilt and prime the next round of anger, but the narrator will be long gone, exiled to an unnamed place, fearing his heart has died.

Maybe it has.

A Candidate’s Progress (13): There I go, reading again.

I am struck by the juxtaposition in these passages from two books. Both prefigure war, one a literary treatment of 1990’s Belgrade just before NATO air strikes on Serbia, and the other taken from the pages of pre-Civil War history in the state of Missouri, circa 1861.

The italics are mine.

Out in St. Louis, we visit the Forty-Eighters — reviled as the “Damned Dutch” by the Missouri secessionists — refugees from the failed revolution against the monarchs of the German Confederation, who discovered in the slaveholders “exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress.”
-- Adam Goodheart

Just because I don’t understand something, replied Marko, doesn’t mean that some dark evil force is behind it, a mysterious organization in collusion with the government, army, police or who knows what. Such things, he said, happen only in American movies, in which, by the way, the entire plot is reduced to the struggle of conspirators to strip free and honest American citizens of their right to information, to knowledge that supposedly belongs to them, if for no other reason than that they regularly pay their taxes …
-- David Albahari

It's fascinating that in America on the verge of a bloody nervous breakdown 150 years ago, immigrants handily identify the source of the problem, while more recently, in the fractious and tragic Balkans, an ordinary citizen offhandedly links contemporary American conspiracies not to conniving Byzantine orders of the Illuminati, but to minor irritations spawned by the tax revolt.

Accordingly, it transpires that Umberto Eco and Dan Brown have wasted the bulk of their writing careers. The modern American, in the midst of the Information Age, and yet not unlike Dan Coffey and systematically deprived of crucial information, responds in Pavlovian fashion by refusing to pay his property taxes. He is duly appeased and enfolded within the loving arms of the Pander Bears, and civil society sinks ever more quickly into an unfunded morass that tea baggers barely notice amid shopping trips to Wal-Mart.

It’s enough to make one wish for the halcyon days of genuine big-ticket issues: Civil Rights, Communism vs. Fascism, the social responsibilities of capitalism (are there any?) and whether or not the Yankees should be broken up now or later – anything rather than the institutionalized selfishness symbolized by the “neither taxation nor human progress” clique spewing intemperance within the city limits of New Albany.

Why is it that while I’m a taxpayer like all the rest, the dimensions of conspiracy do not reveal themselves to me? But what actually is clear to me is that the GOP’s historic property tax caps have so far resulted in my taxes, as well as those of my business, increasing. Meanwhile, it’s obvious that someone, somewhere, is being pandered to via commensurate tax decreases, since all levels of local government are strapped and reduced to begging for scraps from St. Daniels and the Clere Channel fluffers.

Given that so much as mentioning the Local Option Income Tax (LOIT) aloud has become tantamount locally confessing to atheism, animal abuse and book reading – or all three – the only truly heroic utterance I’ve heard to date on the 2011 primary campaign trail came from Suellen Wilkinson.

In essence, at last Friday’s IUS campaign discussion, she refused to duck and cover, openly referred to the taboo concept of LOIT, and brazenly noted that all options should be on the table for consideration when it comes to funding local government and supporting the concept of a civil society.

In doing so, Suellen did something exceedingly rare hereabouts: Not only did she refrain from pandering to taxpayers, but as a taxpayer, she refused to pander to herself. To quote John Gonder, it was “a profile in courage”, and I agree.

Whether any of it matters in the materialist world of today is anyone’s guess, but at least it won't be long until Elector Day. On Tuesday, March 3, Drink and vote early, and often.