First published in 1977, this novel of ideas follows Konrad Rutkowski - professor of medieval history and former Gestapo officer - as he returns to the scene of his war crimes determined to renounce, or perhaps justify, his Nazi past.
This is the final volume in a trilogy of novels - also including The Rise and Fall of Icarus Gubelkian and How to Quiet a Vampire - about the aftermath of World War II, by Borislav Pekic, one of the former Yugoslavia's most important postwar writers. The narrator tells his story from prison, where he is serving time for the murder of a former Nazi official.
Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it Fascism or Communism or capitalism, is always busy rebuilding, and Houses is a book about a man, Arsénie Negovan, who has devoted his life and his dreams to building. Bon vivant, Francophile, visionary, Negovan spent the first half of his life building houses he loved and even named—Juliana, Christina, Agatha—while making his hometown of Belgrade into a modern city to be proud of. The second half of his life, after World War II and the Nazi occupation, he has spent in one of those houses, looked after by his wife and a nurse, in hiding. Houses is set on the final day of his life, when Negovan at last ventures forth to see the world as it is. Negovan is one of the great characters in modern fiction, a man of substance and a deluded fantasist, a beguiling visionary and a monster of selfishness, a charmer no matter what. And perhaps he is right to fear that home is only an illusion in our world, or that only in illusion is there home.