Resumo de The Prince Of Fire - RADMILLA GORUP,NADEZDA OBRADOVIC

Having been amazed by the Serbian and Yugoslavian novels I
have read, I was surprised to read in the introduction to The Prince of
Fire that Serbian short stories are considered more notable.

The genre of the short story has a long and important
tradition in Serbian literature. Serbian writers courted this medium before
attempting to master the novel, and consequently the novel developed more slowly
than the short story in Serbian letters.

The quality of the stories in this collection does something
to demonstrate this.

The Prince of Fire contains thirty five stories, arranged by
chronological birth order of their authors. Only a few of the authors were
familiar to me: Danilo Kis, Milorad Pavic, Borislav Pekic, and Svetislav Basara.
Brief biographical notes precede each story, but these unfortunately don''t give
a date for the stories themselves, making it hard to understand the context in
which they were written.

Most of the stories are firmly planted in South Slavic culture and history.
Events from the World Wars feature in many: Jovan Radulovic''s Linea
Grimani, for example, or Mladen Markov''s The Banat Train.
Others go further back, to the medieval period or to folklore and myth: one
example is David Filip''s title piece, about wandering Jewish scholars; another
is the longest story in the collection, Pekic''s Megalos Mastoras and His
Work, 1347 AD, about a master wood-carver in Byzantine Greece during the
Black Death. Details of rural culture are prominent in stories such as Radoslav
Bratic''s A Picture without Father, a child''s perspective on his
father''s death. And several stories are overtly political: Milisav Savic''s The Locksmith was Better links Borges and Tito.

Though a couple of the stories have footnotes explaining historical or
cultural background, in none of them is this necessary. They encompass themes
and ideas that are universal: returning to a childhood house or town, the power
of art, the presence of death, postmodernist experiments with narrative, and so
forth. Most of the stories have something in the way of humor, but this is
irony and sarcasm rather than comedy, as in Basara''s mordant Letter from
Hell.

This brief survey does little justice to the range of The Prince of Fire.

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