Monumenta by Lara Haworth is a highly inventive and thoroughly original novel that transports you in a particularly unique way.

Olga has lived in her Belgrade house for over 40 years when she receives a letter to let her know that her home has been requisitioned to make way for a memorial. She summons her adult children back home, is visited by architects and city officials to discuss the monument all while there is a bit of mystery about what events actually took place on the property.

I’m always excited to find a book that sounds very promising, but I haven’t seen it on bookstagram much. One of these books that deserves more readers is Monumenta. I loved the sharp and beautiful writing that made it a quick. The book feels very insightful and entertaining at the same time and is highly recommended.

A very short novel dealing with trauma and memories, as 3 architects visit Olga with their proposals to construct a memorial to remember 'something'.

I read this a few weeks ago and appreciated it at the time, but now I can't really remember much about it.

I regret that I did not finish this book, slim though it is.

It is a story in the vein of satirists like Kafka, an absurdist story about a woman whose apartment is slated to be demolished in order to make way for a monument to a massacre. Which massacre? Nobody is willing to say - or, perhaps more accurately, hadn't said by the time I gave up.

To me this felt like quite an anachronistic work, in a style that I've always had a problem with but which, with classic authors, I could at least relate to the historical context. I just couldn't make myself care with this one.

Monumenta is a novella set in Belgrade, documenting a woman's experience as three architects visit her home to explain how they plan to turn her house into a monument, following the requisition of the house by the city. Quite why the house needs to memorial­ized is never made absolutely clear, and the book isn't really about that anyway. Olga, the owner of the house, is an enigmatic and strange person, who calls on her grown-up children to help her decide then family home's fate. The prose is funny, sometimes running into the graphic and violent. None of the characters seem to operate as you might expect, from Olga's son Danilo who seems to fight his sexuality, to the three architects who all bring a sense of weirdness and bizarre backstory. Hallucinations seem to be a key theme too.I liked it, it felt rich and interesting. Feels like I could read a whole novel about these people.

Thank you to NetGalley and Canongate for this ARC in exchange for an honest review

I was sent a copy of Monumenta by Lara Haworth to read and review by NetGalley. I absolutely loved this book! It was beautifully written with very believable characters and a really original and unique premise. I’m sure I will be reading this novel again and again in the future. Well worth my 5 stars and all the accolades that have been awarded it.

A short yet fascinating read - Haworth asks lots of questions around place and meaning and geography and self. It's a novel that sits - and stays - with you long after reading. Recommended

An interesting short novel that deals with themes of memory, commemoration and time.
It’s not quite magical realism but it’s not quite mundane either, well worth a read.

A startlingly great debut on time, memory and love

If you were able to step outside of four dimensional reality and look at the world, you would be able to look at a place and see all of its moments, its history, its present and its future, time revealed in all of its mess and complexity. In her debut Monumenta, Haworth takes a personal story, a private loss, and turns it into a metaphor for Eastern European history, for a city's communality, for a family's love and loss and hope. By looking at the house at the heart of the book and all that it represents—to the family who've grown up there and are now called back for an unexpected reunion, to the architects charged with turning it into a memorial, to the flights of fancy invented there—Haworth gives each a space to bring the narrative alive, and boy does she do it well.

A short but powerful novel, I was reminded of Leonora Carrington's no-nonsense approach to surrealism, the everyday beside the fantastical, how reality bleeds into dreams and vice versa. I think there's a lot here for readers of history, for those interested in translated fiction (although it isn't that), for readers of humour (and it isn't that either, not exactly), for fans of short stories—enough her to satisfy a legion.

Four and half stars, rounded up to five.

I really enjoyed this little book. I feel there's alot of things happening, and I only got half of it... Grief, loneliness, finding oneself.... and history, of a country and of individuals. Really like the writting style.
Really loved it! Must do a reread soon.

Should the past be memorialised.

Widow Olga Pavic has lived in her Belgrade house for over 40 years. When she receives a letter to say her house has been requisitioned to make way for a memorial to a massacre, she summons her adult children home.

A political novel which is warmly human, quirky and thought-provoking.

I quite liked the first third of this, but I lost interest towards the middle. I don't think it's for me, but there's nothing wrong with it either. The narrative was a bit too detached and hallucigenic for me to follow, but I know some readers like that.

Overall, I'd rate it 2.5 stars because I found it dull, but if you like hallucinogenic lit fiction written in 3rd and 2nd person, you'd probably like it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Canongate for the ARC.

Monumenta by Lara Haworth was a very quick and interesting read. It was very cleverly written it made me a small book but it will have you wanting to read it till the end to find out what happens to Olga home thats full of love and secrets. An enjoyable read.

Inventive novella, like a piece of concept art, but not quite holding together

This is lively, playful, subversive, but somehow, despite the juggling of ideas in an interesting manner, and finding non-linear narrative ways to juggle its concepts, this did not make its way out of ‘hmm, interesting, what this is about’ purely cerebral response, for me. In other words, I didn’t find visceral or emotional engagement, just the experience of unpicking a puzzle.

Olga Pavic. An elderly woman in Belgrade, whose husband died many years ago, whose family is scattered, receives notice that her house is to be requisitioned and bulldozed as the site will be used to commemorate a massacre. Given the geography and history of the region the question is ‘which massacre’?

Short chapters cover the visit by each architect submitting their project to tender, and the somewhat strange reappearance outside memory of strong hallucinations which these ideas of memorialising the past unleashes for Olga, as if the ghosts of those massacres or assassinations, and the displacements of people which have happened before, on the site where Olga now lives, are rising up again with the new impending displacement.

Thanks to Net galley and Canngate publishers for an ARC of Monumenta.

This book was completely quirky, like a fever dream or a vivid nightmare. The writing is so descriptive it is like the reader is present in Olgas House while the story is evolving. Throw in history and great characters and there is the making of a great book. However it ventured just a little too far into the quirky realm for my liking.

A curious but intriguing novella that deals with the strange desire there seems to be to build monuments and statues to increasingly random people and events.

Olga Pavic is a widow who has lived in her home for over 40 years. Her children have flown the nest and her husband, Branko, died seven years previously. Olga expects to remain in her home but is surprised one day to receive a letter from the city council informing her that it is going to be demolished to make way for a monument to remember the massacre. But what massacre? Which one?

Within days Olga meets with 3 architects who all have very definite ideas about which massacre and how the monument should look. Olga decides that a goodbye dinner is in order and calls her children to attend a last party to say farewell to their childhood home.

There are some exceptional touches in this debut fiction. Olga, for example, who hates her name because it reminds her of Pavlov has a wonderful Pavlovian reaction to seeing her name on envelopes. The actual monuments are all slightly insane and the reasons for it are no less so. The characters in the novella are all lightly sketched but all clearly defined.

I found it almost hypnotic and read it in just over an hour. Some novellas try too hard but this really spoke to me. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley and Canongate for the advance review copy.

A bit kafkaesque, a bit absurd, a dusting of magical realism, all in all a novella that sure gives one food for thought!

Books set in Eastern Europe are a big YES PLEASE! Now when they are written by a Western author, I am a bit hesitant, but I'd risk saying the Haworth does justice to the story! She either has a good knowledge of the area or she had good advisers!

Olga lives in a very nice house, in a very posh area, just down the road from the American(meaning USA) embassy. That very much suggest they were part of the political apparatus. Yet now, the house is being repossessed to be used as the location for a monument in the memory of a massacre: the political tableau has changed and it may be time for retributions! The uncertainty surrounding the massacre is also significant: with such a tumultuous history how do you decide which massacre to commemorate, which one is in line with the current political perspective?!

And then we have the architects: Karl showing the West perspective on historical events impacting Serbia's history, Misha who seems to be the darling of the political party, who covets the house himself, but at least understand how things are and work; and then Chara who is very much a product of her personal history but also the currents shaping where she has grown up: she's seen some monuments, tasted some items(btw: Kinder eggs and Cornetto are not Serbian, Doncafe is not a Romanian brand, it is produced in Roumania, but very much an Italian brand, duh!!) that are not even Serbian and now presumably she has "inside knowledge" and pretends that the western voices calling for monuments to be abolished will mean something to someone who always adored the grandeur of monuments...

But obviously the true massacres, those that have a real impact are the personal ones. Those happening in the middle of a family and who shatters lives. How can one recover from one?!

Monumenta is a quick read. Despite its short length, it still manages to depict well-realised, fleshed out characters and surprisingly deep, profound themes of identity, permanence and family. I would love Haworth to expand it into a family saga as the characters, particularly Olga, have so much potential.

Though this book is short, it packs a lot of thought provoking moments within its pages.

Olga Pavics house is being requisitioned to make a monument to a massacre - enter architects, returning family and a sense of mystery and intrigue around what else isn't actually being said about events that have happened in the house.

Thank you to the publisher for allowing me to review an advance copy of this book through Netgalley.

The book primarily follows the life of Olga as she prepares for her house to be turned into a monument. We also see the perspective of the three architects in the running for the winning monument proposal and how their ideas form.

This book was not my usual go-to genre of book but I found the characters compelling and the book a quick and captivating read. The characters are described in vivid detail both in terms of their physical and mental selves.

Overall, I think a lot of the meaning within the book was lost on me (though perhaps that's the whole point) and would have liked if it was a bit longer and more fleshed out.