The Minister

There is nothing easy about being the Minister of Culture of Montenegro, but the next nine days for Valentin Kovačević will be especially difficult. Participating in an artist’s performance, he has accidentally killed her, and now, if Kovačević is to maintain both his position and his sanity, he must successfully navigate the murky corridors of government bureaucracy, cultural customs, and family pressures. The Minister is a mind-bending political noir that reveals the ugly truths about how the promises of democratic change empower corrupt politicians and organized crime syndicates, fan the flames of nationalism, and eradicate the middle class. Sharp, unsettling, and bitingly relevant, it is a portrait of a society where truth is slippery, power is dangerous, and survival demands moral compromise. “Both human beings and society reveal themselves in all their misery and opulence, in disharmony and striving to attain the coveted normalcy and peace.”—European Union Prize for Literature "The stage design evoked associations with a cattle market in garish colors, with dilapidated, worn-out objects aggressive to the eye: buttocks and breasts carved in tree trunks; the celebrated semishapes of Marjorie Strider, not like hanging gallery sculptures of landscape elements but ones forcibly returned to the matter they were torn from; Montenegrin policewomen painted like a stage set; barbed wire; felled trees daubed with aluminum and chrome; emoticons filled with helium; fruit in immaculate cellophane; an Instagram Boomerang video of Sharon Stone with the head of a reptile, crossing her legs again and again; and ear-grating sequences of Jin du Jun that slid obtusely from hidden loudspeakers. The audience was quiet, like the two of us. We sat four yards apart, staring at each other. I held a speargun with a trident harpoon, impossibly taut due to its rubber band. It was pointing at her heart. Then she fired off verses from her tiny lungs. I recognized them as being from Montenegro’s prince-bishop Njegoš. The language of the hero was transformed into the words of the heroine. She combined them with the disquieting melody of a flute. She tried to provoke me, but the performance wasn’t working. All I felt was a deadening boredom. The taut wire gave way with a twang. She was in crescendo, and then a relaxation of her muscles set in, the wire broke, and the harpoon flew at her. I closed my eyes with ease. A scream in the audience and a faint groaning on the stage. Darkness. She was dead." Stefan Bošković was born in 1983 in Podgorica, Montenegro. His works include the short story collection Transparentne životinje (Transparent Animals, 2018) and the novel Šamaranje (Slapping, 2014), which won the 2014 award for the best manuscript novel in Montenegro. In 2016, he received second prize at the Festival of European Short Stories for “Fashion and Friends.” Bošković has also written scripts for a feature film, several short films, a sitcom series, and numerous documentaries. The Minister won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia, and studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. He has lived in Berlin, Germany, since 1991, working as a translator of literature and the humanities from Russian, Macedonian, and all variants of Serbo-Croatian. His major recent translations include Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come and Anomaly, Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una, Miroslav Krleža’s Journey to Russia, Miloš Crnjanski’s Novel of London, and Tatjana Gromača’s Divine Child. A big thank-you to Will Evans, CEO and publisher at Deep Vellum, for his role in garnering funds for this translation.