Houses by Borislav Pekic

Houses by Borislav Pekic

Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it Fascism or Communism or capitalism, is always busy rebuilding, and Houses is a book about a man, Ars nie Negovan, who has devoted his life and his dreams to building.

Bon vivant, Francophile, visionary, Negovan spent the first half of his life building houses he loved and even named--Juliana, Christina, Agatha--while making his hometown of Belgrade into a modern city to be proud of. The second half of his life, after World War I and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Houses is set on the final day of his life, when Negovan at last ventures forth to see the world as it is.

Negovan is one of the great characters in modern fiction, a man of substance and a deluded fantasist, a beguiling visionary and a monster of selfishness, a charmer no matter what. And perhaps he is right to fear that home is only an illusion in our world, or that only in illusion is there home.

Borislav Pekic was born in 1930 in Podgorica, Yugoslavia. Arrested in 1948 for terrorism, armed rebellion, and espionage after the theft of a few typewriters and mimeographs, Pekiƒ spent five years in prison, where he began to write. He worked as a screenwriter and editor of a literary journal before publishing his first novel at age thirty-five. Constant trouble with the authorities led him to emigrate to London in the early 1970s. His novels include The Houses of Belgrade (1994) and The Time of Miracles (1994), both published by Northwestern University Press. He died of cancer in 1992 in London.

Stephen M. Dickey is an assistant professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Virginia. He co-translated Mesa Selimoviƒ's Death and the Dervish (Northwestern, 1996).
Bogdan Rakic is a visiting associate professor of Slavic Literature at Indiana University. He co-translated Mesa Selimoviƒ's Death and the Dervish (Northwestern, 1996) and edited In a Foreign Harbor (Slavica, 2000). He is currently working on Borislav Pekiƒ's literary biography.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590179475
ISBN 10	1590179471
Title	Houses
Author	Borislav Pekic
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2016-04-05
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.