Three Minutes and Fifty-Three Seconds (Macedonian Literature) - Softcover

Prlja, Branko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628973501 ISBN 13: 9781628973501

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

Synopsis

A bildungsroman in 21 songs and collages, 3 Minutes and 53 Seconds follows the life of an unnamed hero from 1984 to 2004 as he moves from boyhood to early fatherhood.

Uprooted from his home in Sarajevo following his parents’ divorce, the hero is thrust into a new life in Skopje, where he grows up amid the unfolding political and social drama of the collapse of Yugoslavia. The story is an intimate account of rupture and displacement, but also, ultimately, resilience. The title refers to the average length of a hit song, and the time it takes to read each chapter. Arranging the formative moments in the hero’s life around songs of the period, Branko Prlja captures the zeitgeist of the time. With a playlist from the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s that ranges from heavy metal to punk rock, from grunge and drum ’n’ bass to trip hop and pop music, these are the tracks that left their mark on a whole generation―not just in the Balkans, but worldwide.

About this title

About the Authors

Prose writer, graphic designer, and eco-activist Branko Prlja (penname Bert Stein) was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1977. He has lived in Skopje since 1990. He is a member of DPM (Macedonian Writers Association) and ZNM (Association of Journalists of Macedonia), and has published numerous works of fiction.

Paul Filev is a literary translator from Macedonian and Spanish to English. His translations include the novels Alma Mahler by Sasho Dimoski (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), Blue Label by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, and the anthology Contemporary Macedonian Fiction (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019. He lives in Melbourne.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

That winter the temperature dropped below -20°C, but it didn’t prevent my dad from taking me skiing on Mount Jahorina.

The song “Where the Streets Have No Name,” which was playing on the old cassette player of our green 1982 Lada Riva, sounded as if it was coming from afar. The rhythmic sound of the guitar mixed with the hum of the car going up the mountain road as the snow-covered evergreen trees sped past. My dad deliberately jerked the steering wheel left and right, causing the car to skid and spin toward the shoulders of the road covered with huge deposits of snow, while we nearly split our sides laughing. I was happy.

The next song that came on was “Don’t You (Forget about Me)” by Simple Minds, but forgetting was something inevitable and life went on. Fast-forward to 2001 and once again, for the first time in ten years, I was in my old homeland. My aunt was waiting for me at the bus station. She was still quite plump and she still couldn’t stop talking, apart from when she took a deep drag on one of the Filter 57 cigarettes that always dangled from the corner of her mouth. The green packaging and the small red dragon on the cigarette pack―as a kid I used to think the dragon was a little frog―irresistibly reminded me of a swamp surrounded by the cloud of smoke in which my aunt was always enveloped.

Had I known that that would be the last time I ever saw her, maybe I would have told her how much she meant to me. Even when she sewed brightly colored patches over the holes in my deliberately torn jeans. I never wore them again after that. Yes, maybe I would have told her that I loved her even when she urged me to hang out with the “nerds,” whom I found unbelievably boring and avoided like the plague.

In 1987, the kids on my street were mostly hard cases rather than nerds. “Want to make some trouble?” asked one of those hard cases who today no longer exist, having been killed by a Serb mortar shell fired out of sheer Balkan spite on the first day of Sarajevo’s liberation. Fittingly, we called him Beljo (Trouble). He was the embodiment of a street life that was hard, but fair, governed by unwritten laws and rules that every kid obeyed.

“Now,” Hare cried, and with all our might we tossed lumps of dirt mixed with berries that splattered the white-haired man’s balcony with red dye. It was our revenge on him for breaking our sled because he said we made too much racket out the front of his apartment. Nobody wrote the natural laws of street life, but all the kids respected them in order to maintain the peaceful equilibrium among the residents.

In 2001 my streets had no name. They had different names that to me were unfamiliar. The people around me were unfamiliar too, apart from my girlfriend, who firmly gripped my hand. “Why are your hands so cold?” she asked, but she already knew the answer to that. From the moment she embarked on this uncertain journey with me, she knew that my heart was clenched so tight that it no longer pumped heat into my body.

“I dreamed of those streets every night for years, but they were realer in my dreams than in reality,” I later told her, after we left a city no longer mine and my streets that had no name were far behind us. Maybe it’s better to leave them back there. Before that, we genuinely believed that we were moving forward. But we also knew how to laugh at our own expense. In the ’80s, we compared the one-time success of our “Brotherhood and Unity” project with the then reality. A perfect expression of that comparison was A Better Life, the Yugoslav TV series. My grandad didn’t want to watch it because he felt it insulted the Yugoslavia for which he had taken bullets, lost relatives, and languished in prison on Goli Otok island. And maybe it was out of similar pique that he preferred to watch Dynasty, the American TV series which, no matter how remote it was from the lives of ordinary Yugoslavs, still offered some sort of appeal, probably suggestive of what in the coming decades was to become our dream too: the Pan-American dream.

But other than the dizzying effect of the opening credits of Dynasty, we kids got nothing out of those TV series. We were interested in wild, untamed, endless play. We were boisterous, full of energy, and we needed an outlet.

When Guns ’n’ Roses entered our lives something resonated within us. The times were about to erupt. People didn’t know what the future held, but they still believed in the preservation of the old ways. My cousin was part of the in-between generation. “Turn that racket off!” he yelled, bursting into his room once, when I was visiting him, and turned off the tape at the best part of “Welcome to the Jungle,” just as the snarling menace of the song enters your world and fills the whole of space with soaring guitars, smoke and fire, guns and roses . . .

“Listen to something better,” he told me, putting on another cassette. And as the room filled with the sound of Idoli, a New Wave band from Belgrade, which I found totally boring and too commercial, I went into another room, and there I continued to dream of my idols. I took out a pen from the rucksack that I brought with me on weekends whenever I stayed over at my aunt’s place, and started to draw the band’s skull and crossbones logo on my skin.

My appetite for destruction was overwhelming.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1628973501
• ISBN 13: 9781628973501
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112