The Red Cockerel by Miodrag Bulatovic (1959)

I wasn't prepared for quite how affecting this book would be. Surrealism is usually 'blah' emotionally - it doesn't reach far. But the surrealism in this is only a portion of the mixture: it occasionally intrudes to bend and twist events into other shapes, but doesn't dominate the whole proceeding. The author is Montenegrin, and the story takes place in the north of Montenegro, nearby to the town of Bijelo Polje. It involves a small landscape including a farm and its owner, a wedding being celebrated raucously on that farm, a road that passes by it on which two tramps are walking and resting, and a Muslim cemetery nearby where two gravediggers are preparing to bury a woman. There is a folkloric underfeel to these situations, but this is overlaid with very physical heat, dust, self-loathing, misery, plaintiveness and dreaming. Ilja, the farm owner, is struggling with a massive turnaround in his attitudes as he passes from unreasoning violent abusiveness to some sort of caring. This is exemplified in his treatment of Muharem, a young crippled farm-worker, who is struggling himself with the idea of becoming a man in his compromised physical state. The wedding, which goes on in greater or lesser bursts of unruly dancing, unruly drunkenness, unruly music, unruly ugly mob-like behaviour all through the piece, grips Muharem's attention as the bride is Ivanka, by whom he is fascinated. She is big, sweaty in the blazing heat, and voluptuous. The bridegroom Kajica is tiny, frightened by her, not at all sure he wants this manhood thing which challenges out of her like a beam. He's constantly on the run from various guests trying to get him to take his wife. The conversation of the passing tramps and the drunk gravediggers highlights other angles of humanity, as they interact with these characters and each other. Over them all hovers Muharem's red cockerel, a symbol of either one's personal spirit, or the soul of people's hopes and dreams, or those perhaps of the nation. The cockerel is put through hell and high water (as is his master) as wedding guests try to catch it to eat it, people try to convince Muharem to give it up, he goes wandering with it, he loses it, burning, up into the sky. So this book is symbolist too - and I'm sure there are elements here which I've only barely understood. It's also a work of art, which is impressive and fascinating in its poetic looseness and contrary force.