THE EXHIBITION

SITUATIONAL LOGIC OF A BUILDING

Miodrag Kajtez’s novel The Exhibition (2015, awarded the National Award Laza Kostić for the book of the year) is an explicit story about the morphology of death.
The characters seem to be as if from the other side of life. On the other hand, the very text of the novel is addictively fun, especially for literary connoisseurs, the humor, although unobtrusive, is often hilarious.

The situational logic of a building, which guards itself from its own entropy by sacrificing its tenants, is at the center of obsessive circles in this novel.
Besides a crime plot, deeply submerged in irony and parody, in entire waves of references to the structure of world literature, exists a story about a few dominant motifs of human fate.

The novel forms a whole with Kajtez’s following novel The Permanent Exhibition (2021). The two novels, besides amassing the attention of readers and literary critic, have become a challenge for creators form other media, primarily theater and film, and by using motifs from both novels, an iconic theater play The image of the Unknown emerged.
Also in the works are a TV mini-series and a movie.

Miodrag Kajtez (1962) is one of the most distinctive Serbian authors of the middle generation. Kajtez introduced completely new and unexpected tones into contemporary Serbian prose,
and is noticed by the critics and “The Serbian Joyce”. His novels The Holy Family, Porn Exercises, Anti- Etherealness, The Permanent Exhibition, styllistically flawless, offer a highly unusual and provocative vision of the world.