Reviews

Here you can read reviews of the works by Bert Stein:

 

About the work “3 minutes and 53 seconds” by Bert Stein, they said:

I believe in the book – and it is a masterpiece! The book is very good and needs to be translated into English. There is a huge global potential to be in NY Times or The New Yorker’s collection. 3’53” has stories for 10 books. Many are emotionally minded whether you are American, Chinese, or Greek. Unique life story. I guess you’re not even aware that you’ve collected all the possible scenarios for a movie in one.
(Vladimir Karer, friend, programmer and associate)

What a great book! Real refreshment (in the most beautiful sense of the word) of Macedonian literature. I wanted to read it, but only now I did it. With great pleasure! Skopje is chatting about the book for months!
(Olivera Kjorveziroska, writer and literary critic)

I read the book in one breath. Bravo, you wrote a great book! I enjoyed every “song”. And now I’m barely waiting to buy the new book.
(Ksenia Chochkova, culture manager and translator)

A good book, simple, emotional … it made me cry in several moments. Easily identifiable […] The concept is excellent. Music through time and personal confession in the context of local and global developments. It’s no wonder that the novel got shortlisted for the novel of the year.
(Branimir Stankovic, linguist)

The book 3’53” is small only according to the format:) I swallowed it in one bite… and somehow I recognized myself in the half of the pages. The format and the style is great and I kid you not like many who surely did, I’m telling you honestly.
(Petar Mladenovski, a friend, musician, a host of a popular radio show and frontman of the band Superhiks)

I am writing to tell you a great THANKS for your new book 3-53, which I read in one breath. For a long time, I wasn’t shaken like this, it was like I was reading my own history in Skopje, through the futility of the city, useless hanging around, hopelessness, etc., through everything we went through in the 90s, of course, listening to a bunch of nice music changed our life and kept us alive. It is also one of the points of the books, and generally with the arts, to capture the spirit of the time in which you died / lived, and you perfectly nailed it. I am especially pleased that you have managed to create a cultural map of the city through the places we went, to stay in written form for centuries to come. I would write a lot more about my impressions, but I don want to bore you. And in the end, I want to say that some small part of me envies that you, and not me, managed to write a book like this, which, if I’m in your place (although I know it’s cooler), instead of Bert Stein, I would sign it with a full name and surname!!!
(Igor Andgjelkov, friend, writer and film critic)

Good morning, my great writer, whose book I did not read in 3’53”, but in ONE BREATH, because of your unique gift of narration … potent, easy to the ear and the stomach, yet with the weight of nectar and ambrosia, so nutritious for our hungry soul, eager and thirsty for touching the moment in eternity! BRAVO Bert Stein! Bravo! You live the Apollonian through the Dionysus, which with the word touches the unspoken, and the ubiquitous.
(Dr Marija Arsovska, a friend and analytical psychiatrist)

I recommend. I rejoiced while I was reading, and I read it in one bite!
(Gjoko Zdraveski, writer)

Bert Stein, I wish you many more successful works. I recommend the current, 3’53” to everyone else!
(Aleksandar Ivanovski, friend)

The novel ‘3 Minutes and 53 Seconds’, published under the pseudonym Bert Stein, is also the second novel by Branko Prlja (1977). As the author himself points out, 3 minutes and 53 seconds is the average duration of a modern song from the Google search engine, so much time it would take an average reader to read one of the 21 sections of this book that is named after a famous song from the period from 1984 to 2004. The inter-textual and intermediate features of this postmodernist conceptual work will undoubtedly provide a wide reception not only among literary scholars but also among the wider readers’ public, and the innovative style of Bert Stein’s (Branko Prlja’s) narrative testifies also to some new literary-cultural aspirations of contemporary Macedonian literature as a whole”- pointed out, among other things, in the elaboration of the jury commission for the novels of the other two finalists.
(Jury Committee, for the finalist of the Novel of the Year Award, 2015)

brankoprlja