Borislav Pekic's The Houses of Belgrade, first published in 1970, draws a parallel between the unrest culminating in the Belgrade student riots of 1968 and that at two earlier points in the history of Yugoslavia: the riots which immediately preceded Germany's attack on Belgrade in the spring of 1941 and the turmoil of Serbia's entry into World War I. Pekic relates his tale through the character of Arsenie Negovan, one of the prime builders of houses in Belgrade.

Although Arsenie is dying, losing his sanity as his life seeps away, his narrative is sustained by his intellectual and aesthetic vision, by his love of buildings and his passionate obsession with the houses of Belgrade. Through this metaphor of the gradual decline of a builder's mind, Pekic gives us a compelling look at the unspoken fear of loss and destruction in a chronically disrupted urban society.