The Minister – Stefan Bošković

Opis

The Minister by Montenegrin writer Stefan Bošković is a dark, surreal, and sharply political novel that turns an absurd accident into a disturbing journey through the machinery of power. At the center is Valentin Kovačević, the Minister of Culture of Montenegro, whose life changes dramatically when he accidentally kills an artist while participating in her performance. What follows are nine increasingly difficult days in which he must navigate the tangled worlds of government bureaucracy, cultural politics, family expectations, and personal survival.

Rather than unfolding as a conventional political thriller, The Minister operates as a mind-bending political noir, constantly shifting between the grotesque, the comic, and the disturbing. Kovačević is not simply trying to escape the consequences of one disastrous event. He is trying to preserve his political position and hold on to his sense of reality while discovering just how deeply power, institutions, and personal interests are intertwined.

The novel’s central incident takes place during an elaborate performance filled with unsettling and absurd images: barbed wire, fallen trees covered in metal, artificial fruit, helium-filled emoticons, distorted digital imagery, and references to Montenegrin cultural history. The accidental death of the performer becomes the trigger for a much larger exploration of the systems surrounding Kovačević and the society in which he operates.

Bošković uses this bizarre situation to examine the darker consequences of political and social transformation. Corruption, organized crime, nationalism, political opportunism, and the weakening of the middle class emerge as interconnected forces. The novel questions what happens when promises of democratic change fail to produce the expected freedoms and instead create new opportunities for those already positioned to exploit the system.

One of the novel’s most striking themes is the instability of truth. Nothing remains entirely straightforward: institutions are opaque, political language is slippery, and personal motives are difficult to separate from public responsibilities. Kovačević must constantly decide how much compromise is necessary simply to survive. As the pressure increases, the distinction between the political absurdity around him and his own increasingly unstable perception of events becomes harder to maintain.

This gives The Minister its distinctive atmosphere. The novel is unsettling without being solemn, and grotesque without abandoning humor. Bošković draws on the conventions of crime fiction, political satire, and psychological absurdism to create a world in which bureaucracy can be as threatening as violence and where public roles conceal private fears and contradictions.

At the same time, the book offers a broader portrait of contemporary Montenegro and the post-socialist Balkans, exploring how political institutions, cultural identity, family relationships, and economic interests collide in a rapidly changing society. National identity and cultural heritage are not presented as neutral concepts; they become part of the struggle over who has the authority to define the present.

The novel received the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, recognizing Bošković’s distinctive literary voice and the novel’s engagement with contemporary European realities.

Stefan Bošković was born in Podgorica, Montenegro, in 1983. His work includes the short-story collection Transparentne životinje (Transparent Animals) and the novel Šamaranje (Slapping), which won an award for the best unpublished novel manuscript in Montenegro in 2014. He has also received recognition at European short-story festivals and has written scripts for feature and short films, television series, and documentaries.

The English translation by Will Firth brings Bošković’s novel to an international readership. Firth, an Australian-born literary translator based in Berlin, works from Russian, Macedonian, and the various forms of Serbo-Croatian and has translated numerous major authors from the region, including Andrej Nikolaidis, Faruk Šehić, Miroslav Krleža, Miloš Crnjanski, and Tatjana Gromača.

The Minister is a strong choice for readers interested in political fiction, noir, contemporary Balkan literature, Montenegrin literature, political satire, corruption, nationalism, organized crime, and darkly surreal novels about power. It is a provocative story about what happens when political survival demands increasingly uncomfortable compromises—and when reality itself becomes difficult to trust.