Petar Pješivac: Belgrade Promotion of the New Novel “When the War is Over”

Love story between Melbourne and Moscow together with the story about refugees is presented to readers in a form of “found manuscript”. The narrator in a role of manuscript editor reveals to us a complex story about the destruction of identity, ontology of love and the quest for sanctuary in another being. The main narrative stream of the novel is created by the omnipresent Voice, personalized in the main character’s illnes – the cancer of  lobe which, together with the trauma of refugee identity in his consciousness,  leads to multiplication and production of new worlds and new realities. Placed outside of the frame of reality and disherison of everyday life, this paralel workd of the psychosimulacrum becomes the place of the essential revelations.

In this complicated game of conscious and subconscious voices and mysterious and untill the end of the novel insoluble happenings, this book can be read as a multigenre “mixture”: it is both psychological and love novel, the exciting thriller with glimpses of crime story, but also philosophical discussion about position of the artist, the corrosion of indentity and it’s transformations under the pressure of common sense.

This is linguistically completely unusual story with metamorphosis which lead from the poetisation of text, through condensed metaphhoricity, to hazy and often semantically foggy narrations. It is inviting the spirng, beloved woman, “dead poets” and life Fate. The metaphor of “spiderwebs” in this novel perhaps implicitly indicates that the true happiness or the essence of every Being perhaps can’t be experienced and comprehended in the limits of given reality.