TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Arceuil (novel excerpt) by Aleksandar Bečanović Translated fromMontenegrin by Will Firth

Do not be angry, my dear friend, I beg you, but you have such a unique talent for dissecting my words that I no longer recognize the idea I wanted to give them.

—Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil de Sade to her husband, October 1777

PROLOGUE

Consolation, be it bitter or cordial, is always in books.

Particularly in those that areclosed just before sleepand left at the head of the bed when reason decides to submit to the elemental powers. It was a late winter’s night. The tract girded by heavy, stone walls was cold, and the pages he had read now mingled with memory, real and imagined—pages read with occasional procrastination, ritual slowness, and the suspense that comes because the lines will last a little longer: satisfaction closely follows the text because the end can come prematurely. The pages he had read hovered before his eyes even in the dark like a memorial and a warning: letters changed into pictures, sentences into fantasies, and paragraphs—with delay—into an inversion of life. 87