Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Book title: Der schwarze Obelisk (The Black Obelisk)
Narrator: Vesna Jaćimović [Vesna Yatchimovich]
Duration: 15 hours and 51 minutes
No. of pages in black print: 2349
Publisher: Nova knjiga plus [Norva khniga pluess], Nova knjiga [Norva khniga]
Place and year of publishing: Belgrade, Podgorica 2017
About the book:
Der schwarze Obelisk (The Black Obelisk) is a cult classic about the traumatic and turbulent period in Germany following the First World War.
Ludwig, a hardened veteran of the Great War, now works in a stonemasonry shop that produces and sells gravestones. His occupation is telling: in the years following the war, everyone is buying monuments. Ludwig wants something more from life; making money from other people’s deaths and collective misery troubles him. A self-proclaimed poet, Ludwig begins to sense the growing tension in his homeland. Inflation has brought a new and unprecedented brutality to social relations.
When he falls in love with the beautiful but troubled Isabelle, Ludwig hopes that he has finally found his own soul, through which he will earn salvation. For Ludwig, salvation means precisely this: being freed from the obsessive need to find meaning in a war-ravaged world.
But in every person’s life, there comes a moment when they must choose life, despite the fatal mechanism of history that is once again beginning to set its deadly machinery in motion.