If Pekić had written this Atlantida, he would have done it with tenderness for characters who are both ridiculous and dignified, with impatience for political theater, and with a sly belief that literature’s job is to make the reader complicit in the island’s survival. The city does not surrender its secrets; it trades them, in fragments and footnotes, for company.
M.’s first encounters are luminous and absurd. The hotel clerk quotes laws back to him as if reciting recipes. A librarian offers to lend him memory instead of books. A café owner sells coffee that allows patrons to remember their happiest lie. Conversation here is a currency with fluctuating value: some phrases buy influence for a season, others are worthless except as charm.
The characters are sharp, slightly exasperated, alive. An aging general runs a museum of failed revolutions; a young poet scans the horizon for words like a sentry; an archivist with ink-stained fingers hides a stack of forbidden pamphlets beneath a cat-eared atlas. Romance arrives as a practical hazard: a diplomatic affair between the director of statistics and a woman who repairs sundials. Their love is an argument conducted in footnotes.
They said Atlantis was a story for the sea to keep. Borislav Pekić, with his slow, skeptical fire, would have taken that old myth and stripped the varnish off until you could see its ribs — the places humans build meaning, and the places they surrender it.
In the aftermath, M. folds his notebook and realizes his appetite for certainty has been tempered. He writes a short, crooked chronicle: not a definitive history, but a mosaic of voices, a ledger of small betrayals and braver reconciliations. He leaves with no more answers than he arrived with, but with a lighter luggage of certainties.