Luzitanija - Dejan Atanackovic (Lusitania)

Lusitania, a novel by Dejan Atanackovic, brings together two apparently unrelated subjects of the First World War: the famous British passenger ship and Belgrade’s psychiatric hospital. In May 1915, under strange circumstances, Lusitania is sunk by a torpedo of a German submarine. In October the same year, Belgrade is conquered by the Austrian and German troops. The psychiatric hospital acquires an extraterritorial status, while on its soil an unusual parliamentary republic is formed by hospital’s staff and patients. This is the starting point, around which the novel develops into numerous stories, of searching and disappearing, of madness and progress, of the senselessness of war… By means of skillful storytelling, similar to the narrative methods of magic realism, through an ironic merging of historically accurate and fictitious characters and events, the reader of the novel is guided through miles of diverse settings: hospital corridors, absurd tunnels of the Western Front, Balkan forests, streets of Belgrade, New York, Vienna, all the way to the dreamlike hallways of the Florentine Museum of Natural History. Lusitania offers a rich repertoire of images of bodies, of humans and animals alike, and the structure of the novel is reminiscent of a kind of wunderkammer. The leading thread of the novel is a perpetual dialogue about the relation between reason and madness, the doubt over their presumed contradiction, and the simultaneous defining of human stupidity that appears evident in numerous causes and consequences of the modern era.

Paperback, 213 pages, Latin script, 21 cm.