Placebo: The Beauty and Horror of Lies

Satirical and grotesque novel: ’Placebo: The Beauty and Horror of Lies’ is one of the most successful novels written by Sead Mahmutefendic. This is the novel of one of the most interesting, most controversial and most prolific South Slav writers from the end of the XX and the beginning of the XXI century. It is a novel about the character of the one Gojko R. , whose meta-fiction and pseudo reality attract readers with its rhythm, dynamics and refined environment. Constrained with his own frustrations and feelings of solitude and rebellious slavery Gojko R. finds a refuge in fantastic and surreal stories and monologues about his invented successes and triumphs, re-shaping the vision of reality which sharpens up the picture of his life and character. The message of the novel is: ‘Isn’t the laugh, multidimensional and vociferous one of the anthropological panaceas for expensive enjoyments and of the ways of survival.