Sadvertising: Stories From the Margins of Creativity by Ennis Ćehić
“As she sips on her pressed apple tea, and watches me disappear in the crowd near Sebilj, she thinks how, in the end, all hearts break and all lives end. As it plaits implicit meanings through her mind, Ina wonders if she would rather have her heart broken and her life ended through the pursuit of her innermost dream, or, like the woman in my story, only realise it when it was too late.”
The debut collection of short fiction from Ennis Ćehić takes its starting point from his wide-ranging career as an advertising copywriter, brand strategist and creative director - and follows this point into a weird, surreal and utterly inventive metaverse of the advertising world.
While the book is pitched as a short story collection, I was delighted to discover that most of the stories are, in fact, closer to flash fiction, with many only two-three pages long. What at first glance seems like an ambitiously packed selection of fifty stories becomes something much more devourable.
In Ćehić’s world, copywriters, art directors and advertising professionals are tormented artistic souls, ensnared by the need to pursue this career path for financial means and devoted to spending their time “on other people’s dreams.” All the while, constantly yearning to return to their own creative pursuits.
In Crossover, Chief Creative Officer Mauricio does his best thinking while walking. He’s well-known for suddenly taking leave to go for a walk to follow some thread of an idea. Until the day he goes for a walk and disappears without a trace for three years. When he does return, he claims to have discovered “pocket universes, quantum tunnelling and eternal chaotic inflations”. A tongue-in-cheek poke at how walking for creative thinking is held high in the industry or a testimony to the power of walking? Neither answer is clear:
“I saw another reality, he continued… Minutes there became years over here, but I knew immediately that the state of mind I reached was the activation - the key.”
As might be anticipated in a collection centred around the same core subject matter, there are some strong themes that group many of these stories. Collaborationist, Side Hustle, Final Frontier, Click here, and Meetings are all short flashes unpicking some of the common irritations of working in the industry - all delivered with a finesse that left a grin on my face more than once.
The characters in Sadvertising tend to be millennial city-dwellers, as much consumers as they are the purveyors of consumption - they attend high-profile and elitist arts events, wear designer clothes and maintain up-to-date technology in their work and home lives. As much as they are slightly caricaturist, they’re also believable, especially when Ćehić delivers them into their own micro existential crisis or surrealist scenario. In Versuchskaninchen, a man with bladder issues is studying for his PhD in Germany, “looking for lost historical uses of the urinating figure in art. You know, those sculptures and paintings of little children that piss into fountains?”
In a bar, he’s left puzzled by a digital advertising screen above the urinal of a little man dressed in a Spartan military uniform, who bangs on the screen for his attention. Back at the bar, he’s joined by a woman who flirts with him until he needs to again attend to the urinal. The screen flashes with his own personal details and confirms, “Du bist ein match, Rainer.” He awakes to find himself in a white room, dressed in a Spartan uniform, looking out onto the urinal. The woman takes her leave from the bar to another room in order to observe him through hidden cameras.
We don’t know what he’s a match for, but a small amount of clarity is found in the translation of Versuchskaninchen: guinea pig.
In Meta Ennis: Part 1, Meta Ennis: Part 2 and Meta Ennis; Part 3, Ćehić self-consciously plays with the creative notion that all fiction is autobiographical in some way. In Part 1, Ina, an art director, reflects on the artistic dreams she’s failed to pursue. Like Ćehić, Ina is a Bosnian migrant who fled the war as a young child with her mother. She meets a man (presumably the author, using first-person ‘I’) in a cafe, and he shares a story from his past about a woman who spent her life devoted to her work, imparting the vital message, “Never choose security over art, especially if your art comes from a need.”
Ina frees herself from “the burden of work” and commits to her art. We learn that, in the future, her art will “wash away the pain the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina still feel from the war they experienced in the 1990s.”
In Part 2, meta-Ennis is pursued by a sophisticated piece of AI advertising that stalks him, observing him behind the mass of data it collects from his digital coming and goings. I won’t give too much away on this one, but the ending was very unexpected and spectacularly intelligent. Part 3 brings the meta full circle as Ćehić is in dialogue with his third-person avatar, openly reflecting on the notion of creativity and autobiographic entwinement:
“I don’t think it bothers you that everybody mines their autobiographies today. What bothers you is mining yours and finding nothing.”
In a collection of fifty stories, there are bound to be one or two duds - and I did find this - but overall, Sadvertising is an utterly unique reading experience. Whether you work in advertising or not, this is an astute reflection of the ways consumerism, capitalism and the entire notion of branding are at crosshairs - and collaboration - with art and creativity. Superbly blending technological surrealism with mythical elements, this is as slick and smart as they come.
But we might have already expected such word wizardry from a creative advertising copywriter.
Many thanks to Penguin for an advance review copy. Read our interview with Ennis here.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
