A piano in the mud – Pedja Ristic

A Piano

A Piano in The Mud - a novel

About the book

Pijanino u blatu (Prometheus, 1998) is an autobiographical novel about the retirement of an intellectual from Belgrade in the early 90s. Many years have passed since they left Belgrade. Neither that city, nor the South, nor that friendship is there anymore. They moved, changed, disappeared and drowned… They are looking for their Holy Grail in the White World, but who knows if they will ever receive it? In Beli Grad, perhaps, they were the closest to him… All these years, they are constantly questioning why they left… Was it necessary? Are they better there now, worse, the same? Do their children have a brighter future there now? And what does a brighter future even mean – how is it measured? Were the friends who stayed right? Svetlana, Petar, Mirjana, Bane, Grejs, Mita… our neighbors, relatives, ourselves… middle-aged Belgraders in a whirlwind of emotion, disappointment, disappointed hopes and war conflict left their mark in the stormy 90s in the White World.

Someone is looking for knowledge, others for love, success, money or peace. Forcefully transplanted, they try to take a new root. In one conversation, Petar says, “Now that I’m no longer in my country, I’m like a plant transplanted into a pot – put me in a nice window, where there’s sun and water, and I’ll probably survive. Maybe I’ll even develop into a nice flower. And I might even fail from the first draft or long-term insufficient or too abundant watering.” Their generation is overtaken by senseless, violent death, incurable nostalgia, blind nationalist hatred, glamorous weddings, romantic memories of Ada Ciganlija, Mljet, Bjelašnica… And more: the last drive through Yugoslavia (“Can you imagine that there will soon be a border here ?”); finding a way in the West – some stay but don’t like it – some return, but would rather not… the mother doesn’t have a visa for her daughter’s wedding; A Croat kills an American because of a Serbian woman; Serbian flag draped over the entire wall of a room in America: “We thought we were spreading the truth about Serbia around the world…”; KBC doctors kill a patient by negligence…

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Comments

This book is the story of Belgrade, the story of those who did not decide to be war volunteers, they did not even agree to be touched, so what happens... They left their mark on the world and became entangled in the threads of the pečalba, of some other lives... Maybe this book is an atypical story about a monument that has not yet been erected. That's how it looks to me and I like it.

I just read your book, so moving - which evoked many of my memories... Your gradual start brought me back to the ski slopes of Maribelle, Val d'Isère, Trois Vallées... where, not knowing each other, we were somewhere together. Then, all those common places, our now former, common lands, which we proudly showed to our foreign friends, to the new families of our children every year... Well, then the terrible "happening of nations" happened. And that also happened here in Geneva, where we celebrated our Slavs, noisily, joyfully, singing the song "Od Vardar pa do Triglav", dancing the car "I'm me - Jeremija, my last name is Krstić", paying big punishments because of the noise that brought us the Swiss police... Then all that disappeared, as if Yugoslavia had never existed, most of my friends were oriented towards nationalism... My husband and I immediately withdrew from that society, we were despised by all Serbs, because we have another opinion. (...) Your description of the crossing over Subotica is very close to me, I also stood in those columns, I traveled for hours and days on buses across Hungary, where everything smelled, where people spoke another language, everything was an ordinary world, and I kept silent so that my Montenegrin stutter would not be felt... As I progressed in reading "Pjanino u blatu" (the title is absolutely, in my opinion, appropriate) I also discovered an excellent writer and in the end I found the answer about the author and the characters, in KST , Atelier 212... Thank you for the tears I shed while reading some passages.