Houses

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The essence of the novel, if one dare speak of such a thing, lies in the disparity between a protagonist’s understanding of his situation (and, at least implicitly, himself) and the way things truly are — between illusion and reality: Don Quixote. The eighteenth century articulated this disparity through the novel of education; the nineteenth century through the novel of disillusion. The inherent kinship between the two becomes clear in the very title of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. By the mid-twentieth century, however, that disparity took a quite different form in what could be called the novel of mania, in which the protagonist clings so strongly to his illusion that he never sees through it. La Jalousie and Lolita are only among the first to come to mind.

Substitute apartment buildings for nymphets — as strange as that may sound — and you might get something like Houses, the remarkable work by Borislav Pekić which has previously been published in English as The Houses of Belgrade and whose Serbian title would be rendered as The Pilgrimage of Arsénie Negovan. It’s easy to see why the original title never made the passage into English: It’s odd to think of Arsénie’s life as a pilgrimage, since he does not willingly go in search of anything, preferring to stay home, immured with his illusions.

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