The “Spirits,” the fourth book in the saga, represents an exciting literary kaleidoscope of our reality spanning three decades, starting from a period marked by the tragedy depicted by Vladimir Arsenijević in his first bestselling novel “In the Hold” adorned with the Nin Award, which received a cult theatrical adaptation and was translated into twenty languages.

The novel “Spirits” is the final and most extensive of all four parts of the “Cloaca Maxima” tetralogy that Arsenijević wrote over four years. “The manuscript itself is the result of a plan formed back in 1993 when I was working on what would become the novel ‘In the Hold’ expanding it into the envisioned four-book series. I planned to conclude the entire material with an epilogue novel (tentatively titled ‘The Hill’), believing that all wars would end by the time I reached the fourth book in the planned series, and the Narrator would have the opportunity to conclude his narrative from the perspective of a significantly different time, ‘from the top of the hill, where everything is visible.’ I believed that the fourth book would be written from a better future in which all our wars, as well as the hatred that fueled them, were forever ended. But as it turned out…”

Taking the summer of 2020 and the death of the mother as a starting point, this narrative brings to life different temporal threads that have influenced its numerous characters, doing so with an epic momentum and the well-known voice of the Narrator, whom we find in this book as an almost sixty-year-old widower. Tirelessly, dedicated, and precisely, he records his own precious testimony about a past that isn’t really the past, a testimony that, no matter how intimate, thanks to exceptional literary alchemy, concerns all of us in these regions.

You can find the book “Spirits” from Thursday, April 27, in all Delfi bookstores, Laguna reader clubs, the online bookstore delfi.rs, and on the website laguna.rs.