Bulatovic

Only Marxists and Seventh Day Adventists speak about mutual understanding.
-- Miodrag Bulatovic

Last summer N was doing some research at the library and i was browsing about in a compendium of world literature. I was browsing the literature of the former Yugoslavia and then checking with each author to see if the library carried any titles from such. I was routinely discouraged until I came across The War Was Better by Bulatovic. The Montenegran author was comapred to Rabelais and Gunther Grass. I was immediately curious. I read the first two pages and was struck by its nightmarish images of an red-bearded Italian promising rapturous penetration to his pet turtle while hoping to either be killed or escape the coasts of Montenegro as peasants were torching the countryside. I bought a copy off of abebooks that night and stopped reading.

I resumed my quest on Sunday night and have now read nearly 200 pages of this Absurdist calamity. I believe i posted a few weeks back that I had found another novel Hero On A Donkey at thrift store. Googling about the other day I also discovered a story that the Pentagon included the name Gruban Malic on its most wnated war criminal list during the NATO bombardment. How could a fictional character make its way onto such infamous register(before one quips 'by the same pristine godhead that allowed the Chinese embassy in Novi Beograd to be obliterated' - please continue reading - fuckers)? Apparently a Serbian writer living in exile in Budapest told a (not very) undercover CIA agent to be on the lookout for Malic who has "raped all the women of Bosnia." Apparently the trgeting commission or whatever it is called (somehow I fathom something more euphenistic) preferred Clancy to Balkan literature and thus, apprently, this came to pass.