Goran Marković: Beograjski trio (The Belgrade Trio)

Beograjski trio (The Belgrade Trio), written by acclaimed Serbian filmmaker and engaged intellectual Goran Marković, is an intriguing, genre-ambivalent text. It opens with the author's statement about it being some kind of archival material that has accompanied him on his travels for more than twenty-five years.

The work blends archival documentation — records, reports, diplomatic correspondence, official notes, extracts from diaries, letters, police and military documents, encrypted spy messages — with fiction.

The story takes place in Yugoslavia just after World War II, following the Tito-Stalin split. The main protagonist, Lawrence George Durrell, the notorious writer and cultural attaché, appears in Belgrade, sent by the UK to the Yugoslav capital as a spy. Lawrence Durrell is also known as the author of The Alexandria Quartet, a series of four novels. He is tasked with locating the remnants of the royalist movement in Serbia. During his assignment, Durrell (whose fiancée Eve accompanies him to Belgrade) falls madly in love with Vera, his Serbo-Croatian teacher. When her husband Bor Tankosić, loyal to Stalin, is arrested and sent to the re-education camp on Goli Otok, Vera refuses to change her surname and renounce Bor. As a result, she winds up in the internment camp for women on Sveti Grgur isle. Durrell devises an audacious plan to rescue Vera and her husband.