Novel "Billionaire": When shirts become colorful

Novel "Billionaire": When shirts become colorful

There are no customers in the supermarket. Except for me, that entered accidentally, there is an old man, turned back all the time, checking one by one, all the chocolates that were on the shelves. There were many kinds of them, with hazelnuts, with raisins, 100gr, and 500gr. There were lots of small and large pieces of toblerone, chocolates with 60 % of cocoa. The old man speaks in Albanian, although he wears a tie.

He complains to the salesman that the date on all chocolates expired.

General Manager says that those dates are valid for Switzerland, while we count time differently.

Let’s be honest: we (by this “we“ I imply the large majority of people in this country, including those among us that, with reason or without any reason whatsoever, consider ourselves better informed) don’t know almost anything about Albanian and Kosovo literature, but also about Albanian Kosovo reality; the present one, in the actually independent (I mean – independent from Serbia) Kosovo, and the one from the nineties, while Kosovo was “re-integrated into the state legal system of the Republic of Serbia“, mainly as Serbia was sitting in this territory on bayonets, until it fully tore its butt. Paradoxically, we know the least about this recent, very recent reality. Kosovo was “there“, but at the same time very far away, de facto more away than today, when it is no longer “here“. Oddly absurd? Maybe somewhere else it would be.

Veton Surroi’s novel Billionaire (translated by Shkelzen Maliqi; Samizdat B92, Belgrade 2015) landed into the epicenter of our carefully cultivated ignorance, and now we await to see its effect. It would be bad for the novel to be attacked by literary and political marauders and queries, it would be even worse for it to be elegantly ignored by the old and new darlings of the “compact majority”. As this is kind of book that is not a ready-made product for fulfilling the quota of some postmodern, foundation’s version of “spreading brotherhood and unity” but an authentic, powerful novel that we desperately needed, although we were not aware of it, or did not want to know about it.

Billionaire is situated in Pristina, also a bit in the inland of Kosovo, as well as in London and U.S. political exile in wartime of hyperinflation when a single Deutsche Mark was worth a fortune, while with billions of dinars you could buy, let’s say, one egg in the evening.
“Serbiandom” is still at war, blabbering about Karlobag and Virovitica, while on the other hand Kosovo is “peaceful”, but this “peace” has all characteristics of a time bomb, as it is based on something which is unsustainable according to all human and divine laws – see the above mentioned sentence on the butt torn on bayonets.

Taking this book in hands, I feared that I might face with political journalism, if not with propaganda and indoctrination itself, superficially and clumsily wrapped in a cellophane paper of prose (the journalists tend to do this...), but Surroi’s Billionaire is so far away from this as one might be: political-historical context and gloomy, repressive, actually segregationist atmosphere is dominant here, as it is unimaginable to write a novel involving Kosovo and this epoch, without making it political, but his heroes are far from being national-romantic: those are flesh and blood men, driven not only by their beliefs but by their fears, fables, egoism, love and other kind of passions, betrayals, failures.

The undersigned reader was instantly “bought” by this book primarily by its atmosphere, the image of a city and society that we chose not to see, ignoring its existence. Many would find faults with this image, but it is tough to renounce its credibility – in this case, of course, primarily literary one. On the other hand, I am not so confident that Surroi’s writing is in line with Kosovo Albanian general practitioners of patriotism. Instead of patriotic laments and phrasing, Veton Surroi masterfully brings a series of striking images of Pristina of early nineties: a city in which all of a sudden Albanians got fired from their state and public jobs, making this city an esplanade of hundreds of forcefully idle people in search of finding ways to survive. They all wore “civil” white shirts once and now changed to colorful shirts with the help of new masters of smuggling commerce. In such environment, the narrator, who survives after losing the state job by translating information for the Human Rights Center, actually goes through a kind of human, intellectual and moral maturing through political engagement and daily routine, through a tumultuous love affair and decaying marriage, through friendships or comradeship driven by interest with the people from diverse milieu of Kosovo everyday life. Lots of things “revolve” around narrator’s personality, but Billionaire follows several other destinies through parallel or crossed narrative flows. What makes this novel especially readable is Surroi’s ability to combine lyrical and satirical tone, crowning his first novel with honey and pepper in the same time, where it is necessary and where it will perfectly “fit”. Just for example, some pages pertaining to the “forbidden” love, doomed to failure in advance , of the narrator with young Rona, present a showcase how it is written about love nowadays, far from making it vulgar or hyper intellectually ironic, in the same time without falling into sweetness. It should not be forgotten that an exceptional and subtle translation of Skhelzen Maliqi contributes to this impression of exciting revelation.

Apart from being a novel of hidden intimate thoughts in one still deeply patriarchal society, Billionaire is primarily a street novel, even its urban mural, I would say, if such expressions are not devalued with wrong usage... What seems to be “journalistic” in Surroi’s novel is actually his brilliant talent for observation. Here it is, in the end, yet another such image, as I cannot resist it:

“Albanian pensioners that take their pensions in Serbian dinars, don’t buy state bread. They do not want to be seen waiting in the line with the Serbs.

They do not want to be seen by their acquaintances Serbs as they would understand that their situation is so hard that they are forced to buy state bread.
They do not want to be seen by their Albanian acquaintances as they would understand that their state is such hard that they are forced to buy state bread.

Albanian pensioners do not want others to comprehend that they are having hard times, as they would comprehend it themselves“.

Namely, Billionaire is here and there is no excuse now for not knowing. Moreover: our histories are too much intertwined, at least in traumatic sense that would hardly make such novel in Serbia “foreign”, or imported. This novel is in its nature an integral part of our culture, and this fact is exactly something that would make some people nervous.

Billionaire has been published in Serbian by Samizdat B92