Ratko Adamovic

NOVO TOMIC, PROMINENT JOURNALIST OF THE “VECERNJE NOVOSTI?BELGRADE DAILY HELD AN INTERVIEW WITH WRITER RATKO ADAMOVIC CONCERNING HIS TENTH NOVEL WITH AN UNUSUAL TITLE

M A G I C G L A S S

When entering into my latest novel GLASS FORGERS, I went to visit several glass factories, I tried to blow glass. Glass, together with water, is the only matter that has all the attributes of the magic, it is unreal and yet realistic ?you cannot see it, it is transparent, yet it exists.

Ratko Adamovic published with Narodna Knjiga his tenth novel of an unusual title ?Glass Forgers. He surprised his readers, as glass, so far, has never been forged, not even in novels.

However, there is a reason why glass should be forged.

If you forge it - says the author - it cracks and so cracked, just like a wrecked person, it starts talking, confessing.

The title of the book, he explains, is an almost impossible synthesis of everything that is taking place in the book.

-You search for a title, and, somewhere nearby, in endless columns of a metaphoric library in the world of metaphysical and already written, it smiles, lures and calls for you to figure it out and summon it out from the world of impenetrable darkness, just as you call for a new book from the same spaces, trying hard not to harm it while calling for it.

Glass, in fact, is one of the characters in your book, it possesses the wavelength of light, you say, and more - it can talk when shattered. Where from did you get those unusual ideas about glass?

- Due to its wavelength of light, glass is, together with water, the only matter that has all the attributes of the magic, it is unreal and yet realistic ?you cannot see it, it is transparent, yet it exists. Glass is materialistic evidence that magic exists. Just like some magician, glass offers so much to the humans. You are almost blind, you take your glasses and ?you can see again. And, once upon the time, people where begging and praying to their Creators to give them back their eyesight. You are at home, warm and comfortable and one wall is made of glass, you can see the landscape around your house and you are inside, protected; outside rages a storm, and you, inside, behind the glass, feel safe, and yet you can see the world around you to the furthest horizon.

A WRITER AND HIS WEB-SITE

RATKO Adamovic is one of the rare writers who communicate with their readers via web-sites.

-In that regard I am very conservative. I write with a fountain pen (Pelican) and after I type the text on the computer. The idea to release my books on the internet is alien to me. It is a unique feeling when I hold a new book in my hands. A book! Yes, I have a web-site and it is just detailed information about my work. Very efficient, I must say. If there are three to five thousand hits a month (this is how many people open my site each month), and there are, it is quite sufficient. Web-site helps you in global communication to avoid the inexhaustible vanity of a writer, his being self-centered, thus overcoming unpleasant situations when you are forced to write about yourself. Instead, a good web-site successfully does the job.

A RED HOT TEAR DROP

Reading certain pages of your novel one can get an impression that you yourself were casting glass in a glass factory!

-Preparing for this novel I went to visit glass factories. I tried to blow glass. Just imagine, you take a red hot drop of glass, a fistful of magma hanging off the other end of a blow pipe, and a fantastic shape appears, it is almost non-existing, yet so useful. Not to mention lens and so important discovery of the micro-world. It must be that in ancient times, long, long ago, humans were truly human, and therefore they got from their Creator such a magic matter.

The main characters of the novel are artists, not glass smelters or some other craftsmen. There must be a reason for that too.

- A simple person says: a window, a glass, lens and takes it all for granted. An artist is a devotee, an addict forever quizzing over the world that surrounds us. The sculptor in my novel, Petar Dodig, is the one, who shaping glass, transfers to the people this barely credible secret, that fascination with glass, the secret of the wavelength of light.

The most surprising is the fact that there are no negative characters in the novel, and we were taught that such a novel is impossible or almost impossible to write. I am just asking you how difficult it is to do it.

- Eh, what nonsense we were thought by all sorts of those inarticulate, gone astray and lost in interpretations! Take for example Roland Barthes, the spokesman of all those nebulous theories on interpretations of texts, who harmed so many authors by preaching to the “ideal reader?that, after all, authors are of no significance ... god help us! And thereafter he would go to bed to greatly enjoy reading “Count of Monte Cristo? Be ware of those who set rules. Only few create, the majority follows and interprets.

In your novel you introduced some well known personalities under their full names, for instance, academician Srejovic. Are other characters of Glass Forgers based on real personalities?

- Yes. Milica Kos, the character in my novel, is based on a real person, a music editor of Radio Belgrade. The story about Petre Lungu is a realistic, true story of real Petre Lungu. The life of that man with its incredible turns has overridden anything that real life can offer and as such I incorporated it in my novel.

Between the idea of persecution and the idea of flight you seem to have chosen the latter. Escape not only from death, but also sometimes from love as well. Has the pursuit grown so huge?

-Somebody out there, in cosmic laboratories, crushed by boredom of eternal existence, coming down on earth and helping apes to become human (what a deceit for poor primates) has established the institution of a persecutor and a fugitive on which the civilization is based. Superior, supernatural intelligence laughs away drinking hot tea heated up on some far away suns, while we, here, for ever hunt, run and bleed and die many times before our actual deaths.

HE CRITICIZES ONLY FOREIGNERS

The writer of Glass Forgers has been known to the public for quite a long time as an excellent critic. But he “criticizes?only foreign writers.

- For many years nobody or almost nobody here was writing about foreign books. Many extraordinary books were being published and our critics were writing only about our local production. I started to draw attention, to write about translated books, and on a suggestion of my friends I prepared a book of essays, although I did not plan to. Some of the essays from the book were translated and published in French and British literary magazines. Fortunately, in recent years, there are more and more people writing about foreign books. However, I believe the time has come when foreign books should be judged sharper and more rigorously. As, I keep asking myself why, for instance, say Coetzee, a Nobel prize winner, such a great celebrity and yet sometimes so blank, thin and boring; Naipaul, another Nobelist boring in his detailed documentary presentations, Cunnigham who only rewrites tasteless socio-realistic reality, or my favorite Eccho in whose books there is always more than half of unnecessary confusion ?yet, they are always only praised and awarded. We must not, like provincials, a priori overestimate everything that is coming from the “big world? The world is big everywhere were those who live in it are aware of that fact.

THE WAY OF A NOVEL

Your literary way is the way of a novel. It has one unusual progression: a book of stories followed by a novel, stories again followed by three novels, and then novellas followed by four novels. You made a pause to “take a breath?with essays The Gardens of Spirits, which was followed by the novels School of Night and Glass Forgers. One can get the impression that those, so called “light?forms might have been groundwork for your novels.

-It is all part of the one same way. There are certain books already written in spaces beyond our reach waiting for every writer ?they should just rewrite it and publish it. When you become aware that you own a ticket which grants you access into the catacombs of the world of ideas, it is already too late. That one who has let you in, naturally, does not let you roam around as you like it through the celestial colonnades of imagination. The course of my books, which you are talking about, is not a part of a thought-out plan. In the literary world the rational is only a poor subtenant, garrulous and most often comic like Rationalism itself.

Glass Forgers attracted some unexpected readers - glaziers!

- This is the most pleasant surprise I got out of this novel. The glass factory in Pancevo ordered 50 books to give to their business associates and glaziers. They told me, a few days ago, that they have started to call themselves –glass forgers- among themselves. I heard that people of Starcevo have found out that the action of the novel takes place in that old village of Stracevo (*an archeological locality dating from stone ages) which has become so dear to my heart since when I had started to visit it while preparing for the novel. A book has its own way and its own time beyond any prediction. I am trying to imagine the expression of Joyce’s face, whose publishing of an integral copy of Ulysses was being denied for 30 years, if he could be told today that Ulysses was pronounced the novel of the century. But, frankly, only Joyce knew then, what it would be like today.