The Sinful Days of Cocky Johnny

The Sinful Days of Cocky Johnny is a novel that, through its freshness and poetic language, takes the reader on an unusual literary journey. The protagonist is in search of his father, whom he long ago, as he says, “lost in the urinals of jazz clubs.” The father is mystical and elusive, at once alluring and frightening — much like Johnny himself, as we come to know him through the novel. Johnny is a modern tragic hero, reminiscent of the protagonists of 19th-century Romantic novels: sharp-witted, vain, arrogant, boastful, and perpetually balanced on the razor’s edge of reality.

His turbulent journey — stretching from Vienna to Gothenburg, Warsaw, Nuremberg, and Belgrade — brims with allusions to the tensions between East and West, the lofty and the base, the dirty and the pure, our downfalls and false triumphs. This tragic hero is, in fact, a personification of Serbia itself: both enfant terrible and mythomaniac, a man who blindly glorifies himself, unaware of his own flaws and unprepared to face reality until the very end of his odyssey.

This striking novel — one that can be read in a single breath — is told through the narrative perspective of its protagonist, offering a sharp critique of reality through the moral structure of his character. Filip Grujić’s literary technique and style recall the unforgettable works of Dragoslav Mihailović.