Placebo: The Beauty and Horror of Lies

By Sead Mahmutefendi?

Satirical and grotesque novel: Placebo: The Beauty and Horror of Lies is one of the most successful novels written by Sead Mahmutefendic. This is the novel of one of the most interesting, most controversial and most prolific South Slav writers from the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century. It is a novel about the character of the one Gojko R. , whose meta-fiction and pseudo reality attract readers with its rhythm, dynamics and refined environment.
Constrained with his own frustrations and feelings of solitude and rebellious slavery Gojko R. finds a refuge in fantastic and surreal stories and monologues about his invented successes and triumphs, re-shaping the vision of reality which sharpens up the picture of his life and character.
The message of the novel is: Isnt the laugh, multidimensional and vociferous one of the anthropological panaceas for expensive enjoyments and of the ways of survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Nov 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499091632

Sead Mahmutefendi?

Sead Mahmutefendic was born on 29th May 1949 in Sarajevo. He graduated from faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade in 1973. After obtaining his degree he started teaching and writing. His entire literary work is comprised under the title ‘Devil’s Comedy’. He wrote 24 books, 13 of them novels. His chosen novels are ‘Kelvin’s Zero’ and Fish and One-eyed Jack’. In June 2012 an international symposium about his work took place in Sarajevo under the title ‘Modern heretic apocryphal script about ante-apocalypse.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Sead Mahmutefendić.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014920514

ISBN:      Hardcover     978-1-4990-9162-5

                Softcover       978-1-4990-9161-8

                eBook            978-1-4990-9163-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/18/2014

Xlibris

0-800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

697033

CONTENTS

Chapter 1   Youth

Chapter 2   The Age of Maturity

Chapter 3   Gojko had a Dreary Dream

Chapter 4   Illness

Chapter 5   Death

To Zahar, who spent years translating the Constitution of SFRY to the northeast Parisienne argot and slang. He always had a pile of manuscripts with him, while walking, sitting or sleeping. After the collapse of SFRY, he climbed the Pančevo Bridge and, out of despair for his hard work done in vain, he threw himself into the cold Danube river together with his manuscripts, which refused to float and sank down with their translator instead.

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Youth

1. Boxer

One could never be quite clear about Gojko as to whether he acted the part or was bluffing or, simply, was truly crazy. Was there anything in the world he was not involved in? Simply to say: he was the best in the world, so he was nicknamed The Best!

For example, when in a boxing phase, he could never be seen in Konjic during the day, instead, in the evening, when many walkers filled the pavements and the main street, he suddenly popped up out of nowhere, usually from the direction of the railway station, meaning that he had been off the train just a few moments earlier. Which train? Sarajevo or Mostar? Even God Almighty could not be sure of that.

The first question for him would be if he arrived from the south, meaning Mostar, Jablanica, Čapljina or even Stolac or Dubrovnik? Or he would tell those interested where he had actually spent the whole day. If he finds it more appropriate he will say that he has just arrived from Sarajevo, Zenica or Doboj. Usually, when they ask him why his chin and face are covered with bandages, he would act according to his pre-planned personal scenario and, seemingly surprised, put his finger on the first plaster as if he had already forgotten about it and just remembered, and tell them that, in the afternoon, he happened to find himself among a gang, in a big fight at the Sarajevo or Mostar railway station and, in that mass fight, one of them scratched his face unintentionally with his fingernail, just like a kitten scratches a face with its small claws. He could not control ten of them surrounding him and the small cat somehow sneaked up from behind and that infuriated him so much that he punched famous Drago Maca, who was in front of him preparing to kick the living hell out of him, in the face so fiercely that it changed his appearance forever. I think I killed him on the spot, so I took the first freight train to sneak to Konjic. Others fled like headless chickens.

A railway worker told a story in a train that he saw a newsstand with big newspaper headlines stating that, in a mass fight at the railway station, a man who was knocked down after receiving a blow in the face from an unidentified attacker got a massive brain haemorrhage and that they tried to stitch him up at the Urgent Medical Clinic, but in vain. One of the railway workers observed that journalists are prone to exaggeration and seize on the worst case scenarios because it sells newspapers. However, the other one could not be puzzled or hushed up and continued with bad news stating that he himself had read the said newspaper and saw among the obituaries that a man with the same name would be buried the next day at one o’clock in Bakije. The newspaper stated that he had passed away tragically and that the funeral would take place at 1:00 p.m. sharp. Five brothers and three sisters with their spouses put their signatures among the eternally bereaved for the never forgotten late mumin.

Was the deceased’s name written with a small or capital letter M? – the railway worker was asked.

What does it have to do with anything now? – asked Kadrija.

Oh, yeah! You bet it does. If it was a capital latter M, than his name was Mumin, however, if it was a small letter m, that means that his family and neighbours considered him a saint, meaning further trouble for you.

What trouble? – asked Gojko.

Trouble, I say! That could cost the boxer his life. That family will proclaim him a walking target. They will not rest until he is killed by one of them.

Gojko was not impressed by these threats at all, on the contrary, they made him feel larger in his own eyes, as he knew that there were no injuries or bruises, not even a scratch, under those bandages, and his heart was therefore not filled with fear of blood vendetta by that phantom family. It did not cross his mind, though, to disillusion malicious promenade walkers by revealing that there will be no blood vendetta at all, nor could it be, as he had spent the whole day in his small room thinking feverishly what to tell those who would ask him in the evening why he had so many bandages on his face and his arm in a cast.

In the process, in response to a panicked expression on their faces, he ordered himself not to forget to make a dismissive right hand gesture indifferently suggesting that all that trouble was pretty thin gruel to him. He solved that with a single accurate and lethal uppercut.

Then, out of great joy, he suddenly started singing:

Step on, Joe,

Step on, Gee,

La-la-la,

La-la-la…

2. The Poet and the Dramatist

I want to write a long poem about the last four seconds of life of a man falling from a lane. That would be literature. A Neo-Futurist poem.

Death is here. A man’s whole life is filled with fear. You are in fear your whole life. You are in fear your whole life wondering if those four seconds will happen to you. We do not believe or think that it will happen to us. Beyond fear is a mask. Love has been forgotten long ago. We mainly consider it a disease.

A Mask and A Board. Who can you talk to about that symbolism?

Poem 1

Nature and a Dead Body

Nature kneeled down,

Praying to God.

A Dead Body is riding a horse on foot.

That is a European poem!

That is World Literature!

That is a timeless phenomenon!!!

It stops time and events!!!!!

I see these big headlines in all newspapers.

Poem 2

Plums

Plum trees growing in a garden

With mushrooms on them.

After cutting down the plums,

the mushrooms died.

Let’s hear the anthological one, The Mask – some voices pleaded.

Just The Mask.

Just The Mask. How modest he is.

The Mask

A board floats on water

A mask is on the board

The board sank and

so did the…….the…..

- Mask! – they all shouted in unison.

- Neither Meša nor Mak can hold a candle to him.

- They cannot be compared to him.

- Thank you very much – said Cele – How sublime it is to be with literature lovers.

Step on, Joe,

Step on Gee,

La-la-la,

La-la-la…

3. The Scientist

This also happened abruptly. He was caught up.

Gojko became so obsessed with astronomy that it was unbearable. Those were some quite new theories. He openly doubted that the Earth is round, but in fact like a rugby-ball, and that the issue of gravitation is so questionable that a catastrophe could happen any moment now.

Those days, he was seen carrying set squares, protractors and a school pair of compasses measuring through the air if a pair of compasses truly makes a circle, which he strongly denied and, when backed into a corner by some geek, he would buy all those handbooks telling himself that he was a bigger fool for allowing himself to be approached by anybody, without having basic knowledge of what he was trying to prove so persistently and stubbornly.

He’s as stubborn as a mule! – he would say loudly with indignation.

The sky – it is the map of God. It can be entered when our mind and our eyes are watching it with utter attention. It can’t be entered by force, as these barbarians here are doing.