THE UNDERWORLDS

THE UNDERWORLDS - Zvonimir Kostić

THE UNDERWORLDS has two narrative flows. In the first one we are following a frustrated young man, who is working as a corrector in a third-rate magazine, his love problems, then those with his mother (with whom he is living), his views on life and the events. (He is looking for a better job but cannot deal with the all-powerful communist bureaucracy: he is looking for a way to get a flat – but that is only possible if he agrees on fictitious marriage with seventy-year old landlord, who is dying from cancer, etc.) The second narrative flow follows events below the Earth’s surface, which are happening in unknown future , after the Big Flames, pioneering the possession of the underworlds, the war for Unification of Tunnels, and the creation of totalitarian (anti)utopia in those regions. The events become dramatic when the heroes (characters) in the Tunnels are beginning to experience the events which they cannot explain.

Two narrative flows are meeting and unweave at the end of the book. And while the real life of the main character, a young man in the totalitarian society above ground is moving in negative direction (we see that he is losing his mind), his antipode – a young character of the underworld manages to save himself, as well as a group of “numbers”, closest to him.

The novel with its numerous narrative procedures characteristic for modern literature reveals the exceptional talent of the author. It is one of the best novels ever written in this genre in this part of the world. As a work it is closer to the world of Kierkegaard, Gogol, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Camus, Celine – whose tradition it tries to follow – than to those of Arthur Clark, Stanislaw Lem and Ursula Leguin.