Miljenko Jergovic

This collection of stories or vignettes is divided into two sections. The first part appears semi-autobiographical and provides impressions from a precocious childhood. Raised primarily by his mother and maternal grandparents, he shuttled between the coast and Sarajevo. Themes include the tension between innocence and knowing, and the lingering impact and divisiveness of World War II. The second part is a series of stories that take place in the aftermath of the Bosnian War and destruction of Sarajevo. Most of the stories are about displacement and the loss of home. The two parts bookend the war, which is not addressed directly.

I found this a hard book to enjoy, particularly the first half. The child protagonist is an unbelievable intellectual from birth, and the vignettes are not always chronological, making it difficult to know what he knew when. The second part is a more traditional collection of short stories around a central theme. The author is also a poet, and that is obvious from his writing, which is a pastiche of impressions.… (more)

Gently stroke your books, dear stranger, and remember they are dust.

My biomom sent me this book in 1999, probably. No doubt it was read in a heady flurry. I have flipped through it again in recent years, but my initial opinion on that first reading still stands: it establishes the horror of civil war in an antecedent-consequence format, rife with foreshadowing and leitmotifs. There was discussion just now - this night - about our myriad relatives cast about across all maps by the mad logic of binned history.… (more)

I read about half a dozen of these stories, but I found the affectless narration (like Camus' Mersault) a bit off-putting. I think one of the things I like in the fiction I read is a sense that the writer really understands human nature, human emotions and reactions. I know that the deadpan tone is supposed to be saying all sorts of things about the numbing effect of the war, and it did work well sometimes, for example in a story in which the disengaged narrator is deeply grieved by the death of a small cactus which he'd moved down to the cellar so that it wouldn't be damaged in any bombing. But repeated over every story it didn't do much for me. I would much more recommend Balkan Express by Slavenka Drakulic which is angry and bewildered and seems much more real, somehow.… (more)