Milica Vuckovic returns with a novel about borrowed lives

Picture a man standing in a pet shop somewhere in Eastern Europe, delivering a motivational speech about how happy dogs and cats are, and believing not a single sentence of it. His name is Beni, he drives the motorways at night, he smokes too much, and he is the closest thing the new Milica Vuckovic novel has to a hero. Not because he overcomes anything, but because he keeps going at a job that stopped convincing him long ago, and still performs it convincingly enough for everyone except himself.

„Roditelji kucnih ljubimaca” arrives from Laguna after a five-year gap, first in an exclusive online sale from Thursday, July 16 to Wednesday, July 22 on laguna.rs and delfi.rs, then in bookstores from July 23. The novel follows several lives that meet at the same knot: loneliness, exhaustion, and an intimacy that never quite happened.

Vuckovic arrives with a reputation that is hard to walk past. „Smrtni ishod atletskih povreda” was a bestseller and winner of the Vital Award, a book that proved she can hold tension in places where nothing spectacular appears to be happening. A five-year pause, in a publishing culture that rewards annual output, says something in itself about how she treats the work.

Why does Beni feel more familiar than we would like?

The motivational speech in a pet shop is almost too good an image to be merely a detail. It is a scene in which happiness is sold by the unit, in which someone has to insist out loud that the animals are content so the food will move, and in which the only job requirement is that the speaker sounds like he means it. Vuckovic is not simply writing satire about corporate language here, or at least not only that. She is asking what happens to a person who is professionally excellent at something that does not touch him at all.

The motorway is the other half of that image. Beni is permanently in motion and arrives nowhere; the kilometres accumulate, the cities rotate, and none of it becomes a journey. If Eastern Europe is more than geography in this book, it is a space where people work a great deal, believe very little, and where exhaustion turned into the baseline a long time ago. It is no accident that Beni’s trade is the trade of persuasion.

The roles we take on, and what survives them

The title, as usual with Vuckovic, is sharper than it looks on first reading. Pet owners are people who have managed to place care, tenderness and belonging inside a relationship where all of it comes easier, because it demands no negotiation. This is not mockery, it is observation. When families and marriages start splitting at the seams, care does not disappear; it simply finds the channel that hurts less.

According to the publisher’s announcement, the book does this with subtle humour and precise observation of everyday life, a phrase that is easy to write and hard to deliver. In Vuckovic’s hands humour is usually not relief but a tool: it exists so the reader can move closer, not escape. If that holds here, „Roditelji kucnih ljubimaca” will not be a novel about how hard life has become, but about how well we have trained ourselves not to notice.

The risk is real and worth naming: novels built on parallel lives most often fail at the point where the intersection turns into architecture. But the starting position is solid. People worn down by work, by marriages, and by roles they accepted before they understood them.

So how many of your own everyday sentences would you actually stand behind, if someone asked whether you believed them?