I discovered my talent for literature relatively late and started writing when I was 50. That somehow excited me and got me going, and now I’m digging around in my brain and doing wonderful things. I wrote the first “Fajront in Sarajevo”, I liked it and I was delighted, said Nenad Janković, whose name means almost nothing to the audience.
It is a completely different matter if one says that this was said by the well-known musician Nele Karajlić, who has also been able to boast the “title” of a writer since 2014.
As part of the 15th Bedem Festival, Karajlić presented four books to the audience at the Nikšić Fortress – the aforementioned “Fajront” and three works of “Solunska 28”.
As he said, the musician Nele was a great help to the “hidden” author, as they both shared the rhythm.
“Nele, the musician, helped Nelet, the writer, a lot with this rhythm, because I have 40 years of experience on stage and I know what it means to speed up and what it means to slow down. A good khjiga is like a good concert that starts with a pompous song, then there are two or three hits, and when it comes, you quickly lower it a little and at the end you ‘raise’ it again. Nele, the writer, is grateful to Nele, the musician,” said Karajlić.
He admitted that he had “a problem with himself” because he got bored of things quickly.
“I am a man who does not like travelling, going to the countryside, going for walks and making music. If you tell me there are no concerts, it is as if there are no lessons. I am not a typical rocker, but that is why I “came across” literature, and when I get bored of writing, there is music.”
“Fajront in Sarajevo” is, as he himself said, a kind of “rear-view mirror” for him and the way he sees his own past, but also the past of his hometown, where he grew up, and of the country that no longer exists.
“I decided to write this book because I felt the need, as a participant who was there, to paint a picture of these phenomena that are still talked about so much today. And the greatest phenomenon of our time, the sixties, seventies and eighties of the last century, is the popular culture that emerged from this country. It has outlived the country in which it was born. By popular culture I mean film, music of course, rock’n’roll, literature, sport… All of this has somehow survived, to the extent that the area that used to be called Yugoslavia has remained more or less the same cultural space today. That seed that was sown then somehow brought about changes that nobody could have imagined would happen.”
The book was a great success and gave him the impetus to continue writing because, as he himself emphasized, it was love at first sight and there was no turning back.
“The book was a huge success throughout the former Yugoslavia and that is one of the reasons why I continued writing. But the most important thing is the second project. With the first project, be it a book, an album, a film or a series, you can create a boom, but the second project is something that confirms whether you stay on the scene or were a meteor that lit up the sky with light and disappeared.”
As it turned out, his breakthrough as a writer was not a great success. He then wrote the trilogy “Thessaloniki 28”, for the first book of which he received the “Momo Kapor” Prize, and the last one was published last year.
“After ‘Fajront’, my idea was to write something fictional that would be my world. Every writer is a little god – he creates his own world and in that world he somehow determines when someone is born and when they die. When I arrived in Belgrade in the 1990s, I learned that my great-grandfather had built a house at Solunska 28 in Dorćol and that it had several owners. I never stayed in that house, but it is a testimony to everything that happened in Belgrade.”
The first part, subtitled “About Money and Passions,” tells the story of the house, but also of Belgrade in the period from the beginning of the 20th century to the First World War.
“All three books have a historical background. For the first book, I had to use literature and create a picture of that time on that basis. For the second book, which deals exclusively with World War II and has a subtitle about friendship and betrayal, I had cooperating witnesses – my older relatives who had lived through that period of the occupation of Belgrade. The third book, with the subtitle about sex, drugs and enlightenment, is a story about rock and roll, and I didn’t have to consult anyone. There I was someone who, in my own way, presented the history and explosion of rock music in Yugoslavia, because I was one of those ‘grenades’ who got Yugoslavia back on its feet.”
All three books are also love stories, because as Dr. Karajlić says, there is no good novel or film if it does not contain a love story.
The awards are there, says the author, to encourage communication between the public and literature. “Of course they benefit the author, but they benefit his work more because then the work gets that first recommendation. I don’t think they are decisive for a person’s career because we know that the greatest writers of all time have never won a prize. But awards are also a disservice and they know how to be ‘dangerous’ to shake you up and make you believe that what you did was natural.”
And in his opinion, only alchemy is natural – if it doesn’t work, everything falls apart. Between him and the audience, this alchemy still exists.
The interview with Karajlić was conducted by the writer Gorčin Blagojević.
The year in which music united truth and freedom
In the third book of the trilogy “Thessaloniki”, Karajlić writes about rock’n’roll, and one of the heroines of this work says that there are three key aspects in music: defiance, freedom and justice.
“Rock music emerged after the greatest massacre in human history, World War II. After that war, youth took their lives into their own hands and became a cult. Until then, it was a temporary form until adulthood. Then it got this defiance, and music was a secret password – a language that all young people on the planet understood. When rock music took that form, it realized on its own the social power it has, and youth began to ‘abuse’ it in the sense that through music it controls social, societal and political currents, and through music it ends wars like the Vietnam War. When youth realized its strength, it began to fight for two fundamental ideals – justice and freedom. Justice and freedom could never go together in the history of mankind. The only place in the history of mankind where justice and freedom have come together is rock music.”
( Svetlana Mandic )
