Book "Deblokada grada" by Elvedin Nezirović to be promoted on September 13 in Sarajevo

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - The promotion of the book “Deblokada grada” by Elvedin Nezirović, published by the Center for Critical Thinking and the portal Tačno.net, will be held on Thursday, September 13 at 7 PM at the Sarajevo City Library, MAK department, Alipašina 6A.

In addition to the author, the promotion will feature: Drago Bojić, Dino Mustafić, and Senad Pećanin. The moderator will be Nikola Vučić, and Amer Bahtijar will speak on behalf of the publisher.

The book “Deblokada grada” is a collection of texts, essays, and columns that address Mostar, its recent and distant past, culture, and the current socio-political situation.

- It could be said that the common thread of all Nezirović's essays is a kind of 'opting for normality', or - more precisely - a relentless opposition to the normalization of the abnormal. Through a skillful combination of intimate and rational-analytical approaches, a rich collection of horrors characteristic of a 'society in transition' is presented and exposed with concrete examples: from hysterical nationalism, political corruption, partyocracy violence, and the widespread mentality of sycophancy, through intellectual prostitution and the pandemic of conversion, to the cult of identity, the provincial experience of tradition, and cultural barbarism. Finally, is 'transition' anything other than the linking of countless variations of pragmatically manifested immorality into a system? - said prominent Croatian journalist and columnist Viktor Ivančić about the book.

Professor Ivan Šarčević shares a similar opinion.

- Nezirović is a writer who is not scandalized by people's sins and weaknesses, but by the dominant nationalist arrogance that 'we' are always right; by the wickedness of insisting that 'our' evil and crimes are considered heroism and sacredness, by dulled conscience, by the absence of remorse and brazen complacency for irresponsibility towards humans as humans. Nezirović is a writer who does not deny collective suffering.

He understands compassion for the people, but he wants to experience his own suffering and that of his loved ones, as well as the suffering of others, alone - in silence, outside of political abuse, martyrological trumpeting, and the ethnic dehumanization of victims into numbers. He allows himself to be shaken to the core by the responsibility of belonging to his own people, and to those who committed evil in his name (a variation of Vuletić's song 'I killed here too'), as well as by the innocence of another's suffering to inspire him towards a binding, co-responsible humanity - concluded Šarčević.

Elvedin Nezirović was born in 1976 in Mostar. He has so far published two poetry collections, Bezdan and Zvijer iz hotelske sobe, and a collection of short stories, Toliko o tome. He has received several literary awards and recognitions.

His novel Boja zemlje, written based on a family album, was rated by critics as one of the best novels written in the post-war period in the former Yugoslavia.