Suppose you are in a bookstore. You look at the books on the shelves. For example, you see a new edition of a famous and favorite classic and right next to it - a book by an unknown author with a title that is different from the others, plus you like it. Which of those two books will you pull off the shelf and look at first?
This is just one incidental thought regarding Srdjan Kovačević's novel Everything is good, which was recently published by the Autograph Communications Company from Novi Sad. Namely, what is first noticed about (on) the book Everything is good is its appearance, specifically – the cover is bright white without the title of the book and its author, only with a bloody red drop of blood; the title and the name of the author of the book are written in pale small letters in the upper corner of the cover (solid, warm gray color, crossed with horizontal lines) which is a sure way to be remembered; the forzac and the edges of the pages of the book are in tone with that drop on the cover. Regardless of the hard binding and volume, the book is light. The pages are yellowish-white, the whites are cross-hatched like the cover, the chapter titles are written in the same letters as the title on the cover, the text is printed with spacing, each chapter begins on the right-hand side - all this makes it easier to read.
Lazar Slankamenac from Autograph says that, as far as the form of the book is concerned, they wanted to overcome the demand of the current book market "to produce the highest quality book possible for as little money as possible." We didn't have that problem. At the same time, we had at our disposal one, in our opinion, of the best designers in this area - Jovan Trkulja, the owner of the studio 'Peter Gregson'. We wanted to create a form that says "judge the book by its cover" to the potential reader. That's why this book is an art project, it's not there just to be published. We are not a classic publishing company, just like the protagonist of the novel Everything is good, we try to live art."
Everything is good is the first edition of Autograph. Author Srđan Kovačević is a lawyer. Before this, he published a novel Penelope and I (Prometheus) under the pseudonym Odysseus the Hulk. One rainy night, in the studio of the main character of the novel Oskar Keller (painter and docent, obsessively trying to paint a portrait of his deceased sweetheart Zuwena, a white Angolan woman, so that she wouldn't, painted, return to the living), where his friend Damon (poet gently curled eyelashes with a psychiatric diagnosis), his student Marita arrives unannounced, and then Damon's stepfather Teofil Tadin, a politician, arrives unannounced with the police, allegedly looking for stepson because he ran away from the hospital, actually looking for the USB that Damon hid at Oscar's. And that would be more or less the entire plot of this novel.
Everything is good (it's a pity that in the genre of fiction there is no competition for an optimistic title, it would surely win) it is not a novel with an exciting plot, full of twists, plots and denouements. This is an atmospheric novel made of personal reflections and monologues, and of great emotions. In it are love (the kind that was once, when books were written about it, labeled as "love without residue") and friendship, and various important things that these two phenomena give to the one who surrenders to them. Every emotion in the book seems to have been experienced personally, as if it was felt by a real Oskar Keller, not the hero of the novel. It is spoken in cold, precise language, devoid of any pathos. Questions, dilemmas, deliberations, in a word, internal monologues, are film montages, real, almost visible and tangible. The dialogues are built according to the same principle: as if copied from real life (which is why the heroes use words and expressions that are still considered unsuitable for book form), they are fast and specific, without platitudes, they paint the characters. Kovačević writes the book as if he is not present while he is doing it, he does not suggest, impose, show or assert anything. He simply - transmits. As it is, to be experienced and revived according to the free will of the reader.
The actual duration of the novel's action is between "seven hundred and twenty-sixth day after Zuwen's death" and "seven hundred and thirtieth day after her death", and the fictional reaches as far as Oscar Keller's memories of the awakening. That this is happening today is clear from the mentioned USB (the intrigue with the USB is coincidental, the book was written before the Prime Minister recently introduced this device into the daily jargon), and the incidental determination that one scene takes place in the background on election night, from which the opposition is expected to change the twelve-year-old government.
The book begins with a separate part, as if its motto, with a poem Memories are old bones. Damon Tadine. "My good friend, what is love?" Maesto asks Jaime Sabartes in her first verse, and at the end of the book, in the Index, it is learned that Pablo Picasso and his personal secretary are discussing this. Then there is the story of the painter Carlos Kazagemas, who, wanting to kill Germaine, whom he loved, killed himself. "Carlos loved Germaine / Germaine loved Pablo." / Pablo loved art" he writes at the end of the poem. Is that the answer to the question from the first verse? Is the love of art, given its appearance and story, the message of the book and the reason why it was written? To live art?
