I loved this book, and cannot recommend it highly enough. I received a copy as a gift from a Serbian Goodreads friend. I had not heard of the author before – but will now keep an eye open for more of his books in English translation.
This is not a book to rush – rather one to savour. I would start each day with a ration of 2 – 3 short chapters (each a couple of pages long) to get myself in the right mood for beginning work, and was rather upset when the book – and my ritual – came to an end. That was over a week ago now. Every time I sat down to write a review, I would pick up the book – and start reading it again! The review would have to wait.
The idea of the book is summed up in the chapter called “Belgrade is the World”: “Belgrade is in all those Belgraders who still cannot or dare not come back. … Belgrade is not in Belgrade, as Belgrade, actually, is not a city – it is a metaphor, a way of life, an angle of looking at things”.
Momo Kapor captures the spirit of Belgrade: its inhabitants and their unique characteristics (individuals and general types), the smells, the habits, the dichotomies – in short all the things that you might associate with Belgraders, if you lived there – but to which outsiders and tourists would likely be oblivious.
There is one chapter (“Belgrade in Half an Hour”) which might – at a stretch – be a short tourist guide, as the author takes a visitor along Kralja Petra street, from the Sava to the Danube, past buildings from different eras, and of different civilisations, all of which have left their mark on Belgrade: “I see this modest street as a true lesson in tolerance and friendship”. It is also a very short history of Belgrade in four and a half pages.
Throughout there is culinary thread with chapters on Cabbage, Roast Lamb, Winter Feasts, Pastries, Fish Chowder… It starts with the all-pervasive smell of pickled cabbage (“Cabbage is a must! Indispensable for sarma with spare ribs, for the sautéed sauerkraut called podvark, for pasta squares with sautéed cabbage …”) – onto tripe, pigs trotters (two dishes that I love, but find almost impossible to get in London), Srpska Salat, then the Turkish, French and Viennese pastry shops. There are several recipes. I fully intend to try making the vanilla cookies, but will probably give Isa the Unlucky’s fish chowder a miss.
There are chapters on the grumbling old men with their nagging wives, the bold and beautiful modern women who have thrown off the shackles of their mothers, the eccentrics, the Belgraders living elsewhere in the world, who come home to visit, the markets and the Kevas.
“Kevas are elderly and somewhat fat women of small stature … who carry on their shoulders not only the entire household, but also the family, life and the world…”. They seem like a cross between a Dobby house elf (“only very rarely are they given presents”) and a repository of traditional and wholesome Serbian cuisine, that is fast disappearing.
And there is so much more! As well as the excellent prose, the author has illustrated the book with his own line drawings. I particularly like the drawings of the old people, with their character stamped onto their faces.
The book pulls together five decades of Momo Kapor’s writings on Belgrade – a city that has undoubtably changed a lot over that period. Because there are no dates attached to each chapter, it is sometimes difficult for me – as a foreigner – to workout the timeline and background politics. Thus, the book appears timeless and all times at once.
I will never now get to go to Belgrade – and in some ways I am glad. It could never live up to the picture that I now have in my mind of the magical Belgrade, thanks to Momo Kapor.
Thank you so much George, for such a wonderful gem of a book.