Book Review – Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović (translated by Bogdan Rakić and Stephen M. Dickey)

‘Death and the Dervish‘ by Meša Selimović was recommended to me by multiple friends and I finally got to read it.

Ahmed Nuruddin is a dervish in a monastery. He has left his normal life in his village and has embraced a spiritual life. One day he discovers that his brother has been put in prison because he has seen a document that he is not supposed to see. While Ahmed the dervish is wondering what he should do about it, he discovers a fugitive who is running away from the law, who tries to hide within his monastery. Our dervish feels that he is in a delicate situation. He doesn’t want to help the fugitive hide as it will be against the law and it will come back to bite him. He also doesn’t want to help the law catch the fugitive, because then he’ll be racked by guilt. So while our dervish ponders on his moral choices and discovers how morally indecisive and weak he is, events take a life of their own and they move in an unexpected direction. What happens to the dervish and his brother and the fugitive and other people form the rest of the story.

The book can be divided into two clear parts. The first part is low on plot and high on beautiful contemplative passages and insights and philosophy. The second part is high on events and plot and low on philosophy. I loved the first part more. It was like reading Dostoevsky. There were so many beautiful, contemplative passages in the first part and I couldn’t stop highlighting them. Even when the main character goes to meet someone and has a conversation, there is a contemplative passage there rather than a dialogue. The second part of the book moves the events at a rapid pace (rapid when compared to the first part). There is a huge surprise and revelation at the beginning of the second part that I didn’t see coming. I want to go back and check the first part and see whether the narrator has given any clues to it.

The whole story for me, was a beautiful study in faintheartedness and moral indecisiveness and moral cowardice. It made me think a lot. There is an introduction at the beginning of the book by Henry R. Cooper Jr., in which he has described it much better. That introduction is beautiful and insightful and tells us more about Meša Selimović and his most famous book and puts it in the literary and the historical context.

There are only two books by Meša Selimović which are available in English translation, this one, and its sequel ‘The Fortress‘. They are both not easily available, and ‘The Fortress’ is available only as a regular book. No digital edition there. They are both published by Northwestern University Press. I don’t know why the English translations are guarded like an ancient flame and are prevented from reaching a wider audience. This is the case with most classic Balkan writers – Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Danilo Kiš, Irena Vrkljan, Vesna Parun, and now Meša Selimović. I don’t know what secrets the guardians of the flame are exactly guarding here. Why not make these wonderful writers accessible to a larger audience so that more readers can read and enjoy their work and sing their praises? Why, why, why? The world wants to know.

I know that I shouldn’t meddle in affairs that I don’t know anything about and in recent times I did exactly that and I wrote about something and it came back to bite me. But I feel the itch now and it is hard not to scratch and so I’m going to do it again – write about something that is none of my business. So, there is this fascinating passage in the introduction to Selimović’s book. It goes like this.

“In his autobiography, Sjećanja (Memoirs), and his other public pronouncements toward the end of his life Selimović developed with increasing insistence the idea that he was a Serb by nationality, a Bosnian merely by birth. Such self-identification was no idle semantic game in Yugoslavia, as has become painfully clear in the aftermath of that country’s breakup. Notwithstanding the claims of the nationalists, the difference among Serbs, Croats, and Slavic Muslims is neither linguistic, nor ethnic, nor, as religious practice fades, confessional. The essential difference derives from a sense of community: Which set of national myths will an individual choose to celebrate as his or her own? Which group of people will he or she celebrate them with? Despite contemporary appearances, movement among these groups has been appreciable over time, and the boundaries until recently have remained porous. How else could Ivo Andrić, born of Croatian parents, baptized a Roman Catholic, raised and educated in Bosnia, be hailed at his death as Serbia’s greatest writer? How else could Selimović, so closely identified with the Bosnian Muslim milieu, expect acceptance as a Serb? Many have speculated on the motivations underlying both Andrić’s and Selimovic’s adoption of Serbian cultural citizenship, and the unkindest have often posited mean self-interest. In both cases, however, it seems clear that the writers saw Serbdom’s tent to be larger, more inclusive, more varied and inviting than the far smaller tents into which they had been born. In the context of the Slavic-speaking Balkans, the Serbs had the most cosmopolitan culture; the rest were more provincial and (consider the Croatian laureate Miroslav Krleža) even stifling. One way or another, Selimović insisted on his Serbian identity at a time when it was not particularly fashionable (or even politically astute) to do so. Whatever his motive, it seemed particularly important to him to join the ranks of Serbian writers, and to understand his Bosnian Muslim ways as a subset of the larger Serbian cultural heritage.”

It is interesting that Selimović who was born Bosnian, considered himself Serbian at the end of his life. I don’t know why he did that. Today, he is probably celebrated as a great Serbian writer in Serbia and as a great Bosnian writer in Bosnia. I don’t know what he’d say about that if he was around.

Henry Cooper’s observation – “In the context of the Slavic-speaking Balkans, the Serbs had the most cosmopolitan culture; the rest were more provincial and (consider the Croatian laureate Miroslav Krleža) even stifling” – I don’t know whether this was true then in the 1960s. (Did he really call Miroslav Krleža provincial? Really???) It is definitely not true now. No one will call Croatian literature provincial today. Most readers who know anything about the contemporary literature of the region will laugh at that statement. Even an amateur reader like me will.

Well, that is enough controversy for today. I enjoyed reading ‘Death and the Dervish’. The first part was brilliant. I’m glad that after procrastinating for a long time, I finally got around to reading it.

I’m sharing below some of my favourite passages from the book. Hope you like them.

“Although we lived together, we knew little about one another, since we never talked about ourselves, never openly. We only talked about what we had in common. And that was good. Personal matters were too subtle, murky, and vain; we were to keep them to ourselves if we could not suppress them entirely. Our conversations were largely reduced to general, familiar phrases that others had used before us, phrases that were tried and safe, because they protected us from surprises and misunderstandings. A personal tone is poetry, an opportunity for distortion, or arbitrariness, and to leave the realm of general thought is to doubt it. Therefore, we knew each other only according to what was unimportant, or what was identical in each of us. In other words, we did not know each other at all; nor was that necessary. To know each other meant to know what we should not.”

“Later I watched Mullah-Yusuf copy the Koran, outside, in front of the tekke, in the dense shade of a branchy apple tree; he needed even light, without flashes or shadows. I observed his full, rosy hand as it drew in the complex curves of the letters, an endless row of lines across which the eyes of others would roam without even thinking of how long that difficult task had taken, or maybe without even noticing its beauty. I had been surprised the first time I saw this young man’s inimitable skill, but after so long I still marveled at it. The refined curves, ornate loops, the balanced wave of lines, the red and gold beginnings of the verses, the floral designs in the margins—everything was transformed into a beauty that perplexed the beholder, that was even slightly sinful, as it was not a means, but an end into itself, important in and of itself, a dazzling play of colors and forms that diverted attention from what it was supposed to serve. It was even somewhat shameful, as if from those ornamented pages a sensuality emerged, maybe because beauty is in and of itself sensual and sinful, or maybe because I did not see things as I should have.”

“Discontent is like a wild animal, powerless at birth, terrible when it grows stronger.”

“It is hopeless to try to stay pure and free; someone close to you will always make your life miserable.”

“Before, he had talked well, slowly, he had had time for everything, arranging words into harmoniously composed sentences. There had been a certain peace and confidence in his soft, unhurried manner of speaking; it seemed that he was above all things and that he was in control of them. He had believed in the sound and meaning of words. And now this feeble gesture with his hand meant surrender in the face of life, an abandonment of words, which could neither prevent nor explain his misfortune. He shut himself up with this gesture, and hid his confusion before his son, with whom he no longer knew how to speak.”

“I breathed in the fresh May night; it was young and effervescent. I love spring, I thought, I love springtime, it is unwearied and unburdened, it wakes us with a cheerful, lighthearted call to begin anew. It is the deception and hope of each new year; new buds sprout on old trees. I love springtime, I shouted inside myself stubbornly. I forced myself to believe in it; for many years I had hidden springtime from myself, but now I was calling it, offering myself unto it. I touched the blossoms and smooth, new branches of an apple tree at the side of the path; sap rushed in its countless veins. I felt their pulsing, I wished that it would enter me through my fingertips, so that apple blossoms might sprout from my fingers and translucent green leaves from my palms, so that I would become the tender scent of fruit, its silent carelessness. I would carry my blossoming hands before my astonished eyes and extend them to the nourishing rain. I would be rooted in the ground, fed by the sky, renewed by the spring, laid to rest by autumn. How good it would be to begin everything anew. But there could be no new beginning, nor would one be important. We are not aware when new beginnings arrive; we only discover them later when they have already engulfed us, when everything merely continues. Then we believe that everything could have been different, but it could not have, and so we rush into springtime, so as not to think about nonexistent beginnings or unpleasant continuations.”

“Space is our prison, I said, listening to the echoes of my unfamiliar thoughts, thus bringing an unexpected verve into that dead and unnecessary conversation. Space owns us. We own it only as much as our eyes can pass over it. And it wearies us, scares us, challenges us, pursues us. We think that it sees us, but we don’t matter to it; we say that we’ve overcome it, but we only make use of its indifference. The earth isn’t friendly to us; lightning and the waves of the sea aren’t here for us; rather, we exist in them. Man has no true home, he can only wrest one away from those blind powers. And the earth is a foreign domain; it could be a dwelling only for any monsters that might be able to come to grips with its abundant plights. Or else it’s no one’s. Certainly not ours. We haven’t conquered the earth, but only a clod to put our feet on; we haven’t conquered mountains, but only their image in our eyes; we haven’t conquered the sea, but only its resilient firmness and the reflection of its surface. Nothing is ours but illusion, and therefore we hold onto it firmly. We’re not something in the world, but nothing in it; we’re not equal to what’s around us, but different, incompatible with it. In his development, man should strive for the loss of his self-consciousness. The earth is uninhabitable, like the moon, and we only delude ourselves thinking that it’s our true home, since we have no other place to go. The earth is good for those who are irrational or invulnerable. Maybe mankind will find a way out by going back, by becoming sheer strength.”

“My father is strange, he said, if that needs to be said at all, since everyone is strange except colorless and faceless people, who again are strange since they have nothing of their own. In other words, their character is precisely their lack of character. Except every one of us, of course, because we grow so accustomed to ourselves that everything that’s different from us seems strange, so it could be said that whatever is not us is strange. So my father is strange because he thinks that I’m strange, and the other way around, and so on and so forth. There’s no end to our strangeness, and maybe we should consider that in itself strange.”

“I opened the book, picking a passage at random, and came across a tale about Alexander the Great. The emperor, as the story went, received as a gift some wondrous glass dishes. He liked the gifts very much, but smashed them all nonetheless. “Why? Are they not beautiful?” he was asked. “Precisely because of that,” he answered. “They are so beautiful that it would be hard for me to lose them. And with time they would break, one by one. And I would be sorrier than I am now.” The tale was naive but it still astonished me. Its lesson was bitter: one should renounce everything he might ever begin to love, because loss and disappointment are inevitable. We must renounce love in order not to lose it. We must destroy our love so that it will not be destroyed by others. We must renounce every attachment, because of the possibility of regret. This thought is cruelly hopeless. We cannot destroy everything we love; there will always be the possibility that others will destroy it for us.”

“Everyone should be ordered to travel from time to time,” he said, getting fired up. “Or even more: no one should be allowed to stop in one place any longer than necessary. A man isn’t a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. It saps his courage, breaks his confidence. When a man settles down somewhere, he agrees to any and all of its conditions, even the disagreeable ones, and frightens himself with the uncertainty that awaits him. Change to him seems like abandonment, like a loss of an investment: someone else will occupy his domain, and he’ll have to begin again. Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn’t afraid to make new beginnings. If he stays in the same place, he has to put up with things, or take action. If he moves on, he keeps his freedom; he’s ready to change places and the conditions imposed on him. How can he leave, and for where? Don’t smile, I know we don’t have anywhere to go. But we can leave sometimes, creating the illusion of freedom. We pretend to leave, and pretend to change. But we come back again, calmed, consoled by the deception.”

Have you read ‘Death and the Dervish’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – ‘My Heart’ by Semezdin Mehmedinović (translated by Celia Hawkesworth)

I wanted to read Semezdin Mehmedinović’s ‘My Heart‘ for a while now. I loved Mehmedinović’s book, ‘Sarajevo Blues‘ which I read recently, and so I was very excited to read this one.

‘My Heart’ is Semezdin Mehmedinović’s most recent book. The cover says that it is a novel, while reviewers have called it autofiction. To me, it read like a memoir, and so I looked at it as a memoir.

‘My Heart’ has three parts. In the first part, Semezdin feels uncomfortable and his wife calls an ambulance, and the paramedics take him to the hospital and the doctor says that he has had a heart attack. What happens after that is described in that first part. In the second part, in which the events happen a few years later, Semezdin and his son go on a long road trip to spend some time together on father-son bonding. They visit some old places in which they’d lived, and see how it has changed. Semezdin’s son is a photographer and so he gets to watch how his son works, in desolate places where no one is present. In the third part, Semezdin’s wife has a stroke, and now it is his time to take care of her. What happens after that is described in that part.

The title ‘My Heart’, in my opinion, seems to refer to Semezdin’s physical heart. But it also seems to refer to the longing of his heart for his home country of Bosnia and its capital Sarajevo, his love for the Bosnian language in which he continues to write, and the way he feels as an outsider in his adopted country and in his new language, though he has been there for more than twenty years. It also seems to refer to the love he and his wife Sanja have for each other and how they’d survived the tough times they’d been through together, across the years and across continents, and how their hearts still beat for each other after all these years. I think ‘My Heart’ refers to all these things and it is a beautiful title.

I loved ‘My Heart’. Semezdin Mehmedinović’s writing is beautiful and it is an absolute pleasure to read. There are so many beautiful passages in the book that I couldn’t stop highlighting. Celia Hawkesworth brings out the beauty of Semezdin Mehmedinović’s writing in her wonderful translation. There is also a beautiful introduction by Aleksandar Hemon at the beginning of the book, which is a pleasure to read. I loved ‘My Heart’ even more than ‘Sarajevo Blues’, and it is one of my favourite reads of the year.

I’m sharing below some of my favourite passages from the book. Sorry I’ve gone overboard with the quotes 😊🙈

“All my life I have borne the burden of my meaningless name. But I came to terms with that early on, convinced it was after all just a name, that it didn’t matter what a boat was called, just that it could sail, and that we fill the being bearing our name with the glow of our being. It was a consoling thought. It’s only today, in my fifty-sixth year, that I have completely accepted and identified with my name. This is why. The doctor asks her: “What year is this? Which month? Where are we now?” She looks at him and there’s no reply, she has forgotten the year and the month and the place. Then the doctor points at me, sitting beside her bed, “And who is this man?” For a moment she settled her gaze, she appeared to be looking right through me, and I felt a chill run through my whole body. And I thought: She’s forgotten me. But then her face experienced a total transformation, she looked at me as though she had saved me from nonexistence, or as though she had just given birth to me, and with an expression of the purest love she said: “Semezdin, my Semezdin.” And that was the moment when my name filled with meaning. I was her Semezdin. That is my love story, and my whole life.”

“Was I now supposed to act like someone ill? I didn’t want to. No. In Chekhov’s diaries there is a short note, a sketch for a story, about a man who went to the doctor, who examined him and discovered a weakness in his heart. After that the man changed the way he lived, took medicines, and talked obsessively about his weakness; the whole town knew about his heart, and all the town’s doctors (whom he consulted regularly) talked about his illness. He didn’t marry, he stopped drinking, he always walked slowly and breathed with difficulty.
Eleven years later, he traveled to Moscow and went to see a cardiologist. That was how it emerged that his heart was, in fact, in excellent shape. To begin with, he was overjoyed at his health. But it quickly turned out that he was unable to return to a normal way of life, as he was completely adapted to his rhythm of going to bed early, walking slowly, and breathing with difficulty. What’s more, the world became quite tedious for him, now that he could no longer talk about his illness.”

“Someone had just come into the room and greeted Lukas with “How you doin’?” To which he replied: “Dobro.” It was a reflex response in Slovak, a language that at this time was evidently closer to him. The person to whom the old man directed his dobro didn’t understand the word. The old man had been separated from his Slovak language for some seventy years. And now the word came out of him, as it were, unconsciously. But this linguistic muddle had an emotional effect on me. As though now, close to death, the old man was preparing to face death in his own language. When he pronounced his dobro it confirmed for me that I was in a foreign, distant land. That was a most unusual experience of language. Sanja was sitting by my bed, and when she heard the old man say dobro, as though in our shared language, her eyes automatically filled with tears.”

“And I remembered a short film called The Room. There was a long scene of bathing in it. A body with water pouring over it. This is the story : A young man walks down the street as the light is fading, and through the open window of a room, above him, he hears the sound of a piano. And he stops. Then he sees the silhouette of the girl who was playing the piano. But the reason he stops is not only the music he heard or only the girl whose silhouette he saw. He doesn’t know where the attraction comes from, he doesn’t know the reason for his stopping, but he is aware of a strong magnetic pull from that room, sensed through the open window. And years pass. He leaves that town and lives all over the world, then as an old man he returns. He buys an apartment and lives out his last years in it. After bathing, he leaves his room and hears the siren of an ambulance stopping in front of his building. It is night. And then he becomes conscious of everything. The room where he now finds himself is the room he had once seen, as a young man, while the sound of a piano reached him through the open window. And why had he felt such a strong attraction? The young man could not have known what the old man knew now: what he had seen then was his room, the one in which, when the time came, he would die.”

“Last Thursday I went for a routine six-month checkup at the doctor’s. I would like to free myself from the medication I have been taking for nearly five years now, which makes me tired and slows me down. I want to speed up, to run, because I want to get back into my life. The doctor, a young Sikh with a pale mauve turban, said: “No, no. The medication is to prevent a heart attack.” I know, I say, but I would like to free myself of its side effects, and I’ll worry about a heart attack in a different way. He assures me that the side effects of this medication are innocuous in comparison to its positive effects on my organism. I ask: “And, in fact, what are its real side effects?” He says there are several, but none of them kill you. “For instance?” “Well, say, memory loss.” “Does that mean I could forget everything?” “Yes, but forgetting doesn’t kill you,” says the cardiologist. I ask: “If I forget everything, my whole life, if I can’t recognize my child’s face, if I forget my own name, isn’t that the same as dying?”

“We like to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the world, life, and man. But we ought to ask ourselves again and constantly: Why fill our lives with such effort and torment, when we know that we will be here only once and when we have such a brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world?”

“Escape is possible only as an individual act. Only an individual can escape. To escape as a group, even if into a desert, ends with one form or other of the problematic structuring of life in a human community. Manson himself asserted that even the smallest community tends toward a totalitarian structure and eventually ends in massacre. Zabriskie Point shows that escape is impossible, or that you can escape only alone, and only on the condition that you are not attached to other people, or possessions.”

“My wishes weren’t big, but still none of them came to anything. I longed for a small window from which one could see blue water. I imagined that in my fifties I would live a peaceful life, with time freed up just for writing. I wanted a small shady café where I would meet with friends on a Saturday or Sunday morning to gossip about our past. But I ended up as a prisoner on a vast continent, alone, without people to talk to. A foreigner. And I have grown accustomed to this solitude, I have accepted it as payback for the sins I have committed in my life. And in exchange for my unfulfilled wishes.”

“My world is in my language, and I’ve never begun to write in the language of the country where I’m now living. To be truly accepted, to transform myself from a foreigner into a local, a precondition is restructuring into the new language. And that’s fine. I have chosen to remain a foreigner. Once, some ten years ago, after the translation of my second book came out, an American poet explained to me, in a restaurant in Iowa, that all my problems would be solved as soon as I started writing in English. She said, very seriously, that I should just make a rough translation of my poems, she’d sort out the language, and then I could publish them as originals. She literally suggested that. I said that I didn’t have any problems that needed solving. I thanked her and explained that this one language in which I wrote was enough for me, and I wouldn’t want to change it. But, following my explanation, her eyes filled with tears. To be honest, her offer had offended me, but the fact that she ended up crying completely disconcerted me. I didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t understand the real reason for her tears. Perhaps she hadn’t expected my reaction, and now her offer had been shown to be discourteous, but perhaps she was really sad to see in me a stranger who couldn’t be helped? She looked at me as though she had just found out that I had a disease from which I would soon die.”

“About ten years ago, when he was in college, Harun went to the Slavic department to take a foreign-language exam. The foreign language in this case was his mother tongue, but from an American perspective there was no room for doubt, the local language was English and every other language was foreign. The examiner, Michael Heim, met him in his book-filled office. Harun introduced himself and asked about the possibility of taking an exam. The professor suggested that he take the exam immediately, if he felt ready. And then he went to a shelf and took down a book from which Harun was to read, to confirm his knowledge of his own language. Professor Heim put the book down on the table in front of the student and suggested that he read from the page to which he’d opened at random. And so it was. Harun began to read the text, trying to hide his smile. The professor noticed his student’s unusual behavior, interrupted his reading, and asked: “The character in the story has the same name as you?” And Harun said: “Yes, but that’s because this story is about me, I am the character in the story.” His response astonished Professor Heim, he took the book from his hand, looked at the open page, then back at the student: “All these years, I have read a lot of books in this room, but this is the first time that I have spoken in real life to a character from a story.” The book was Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović.”

Have you read Semezdin Mehmedinović’s ‘My Heart’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović (Translated by Ammiel Alcalay)

I’ve wanted to read Semezdin Mehmedinović’s ‘Sarajevo Blues‘ for a long time now. I finally read it today.

‘Sarajevo Blues‘ is a collection of short prose pieces and poems set in Bosnia in the ’90s during the war. It was one of the first books from Bosnia to come out in English at that time. It was highly acclaimed when it first came out, and its fame has grown steadily ever since. The prose pieces and poems in the book are insightful and moving and haunting and heartbreaking. Reading anything about Bosnia from that period makes me sad and this made me sad too. There is a wonderful introduction by the translator Ammiel Alcalay at the beginning of the book which is very informative and insightful. I loved Alcalay’s introduction to Miljenko Jergović’s ‘Sarajevo Marlboro‘ and I loved his introduction here too. He writes beautiful essays which are such a pleasure to read. I discovered that there is a whole volume of his essays which has been published. I want to read that! There is also a beautiful interview at the end of the book with the author in which he discusses different things including Bosnian literature and the events of that time.

I’m sharing below some of my favourite passages from the book.

“After he finished taking pictures of the Library, Kemal Hadžić was wounded by a piece of shrapnel on his way home. It’s hard to avoid a tendency towards mysticism during war: the first thing I thought of is that his wound was a warning…At the same time, plunging into the world is its own art form: what else did this photographer do as he circled the burning library, looking for a perfect angle or enough light, catching the water of the Miljacka with a wide angle lens? What else if not to fulfill that passionate artistic desire of distilling wild beauty from the spectacle of death, of approaching it from the other side? The artist’s need to venture into the unknown is risky, but it is precisely upon this impulse that the power of art is based. Maybe the shrapnel was a punishment for that heretical impulse.”

“Everyone in Sarajevo, accustomed to death, lives through so many transcendental experiences that they have already become initiates of some deviant form of Buddhism. If the agression lasts another month or so, many of them will believe that a chestnut falling on Wilson’s Promenade carries more weight than a grenade.”

“I’m running across an intersection to avoid the bullet of a sniper from the hill when I walk straight into some photographers: they’re doing their job, in deep cover. If a bullet hit me they’d get a shot worth so much more than my life that I’m not even sure whom to hate: the Chetnik sniper or these monkeys with Nikons. For the Chetniks I’m just a simple target but these others only confirm my utter helplessness and even want to take advantage of it. In Sarajevo, death is a job for all of them. Life has been narrowed down completely, reduced to gestures. It’s almost touching to see the comic motion of a man covering his head with a newspaper as he runs across this same street, scared of a sniper’s bullet.”

Have you read ‘Sarajevo Blues‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić (Translated by Coral Petkovich)

Our unnamed narrator gets up from bed one day. He says that he has been lying on bed for the past nine months. And his wife has left him. And it is his fault. He proceeds to tell us the story. When the doorbell rings. A woman is standing outside. She wants his help in finding her father. Before long we are hurled into a world, where the narrator’s city has changed beyond recognition in the last nine months, and the story looks real before the narrator starts seeing people from his dreams in the real world and things turn increasingly surreal and then some mythical, magical creatures appear. What happens after that and whether the narrator is able to help in finding the woman’s father forms the rest of the story.

This is the surface level story. Of course, this is not all there is to it, and there is more to it than meets the eye. The nine months that the narrator spends in bed are the worst, most violent nine months in Bosnia in the ’90s, and when we realize that, the whole story takes on a totally different meaning and we see everything in new light. The monsters in the story are real-world people who did monstrous things, and the disappearances of family members is what most families went through. A reader who reads this book in Bosnian or Croatian or Serbian will catch all this on the first read and will be able to appreciate the metaphors of the story with a deeper resonance. But for an outsider like me, it took a while to figure things out.

Selvedin Avdić’s prose is beautiful and is filled with humour and is a pleasure to read. There are many footnotes in the book which were fascinating. The book has a foreword by Nick Lezard, who reviews books for ‘The Guardian’, which is very interesting.

I’ll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

“Then I thought that some music might help, recalling how it can easily change the atmosphere of any room. Do an experiment, if you don’t believe me. In a completely empty room, play different types of music and you will see how the shadows shift, the air stirs, the nuances of light change, as the room adjusts itself to the music, like the scene changing from act to act in the theatre. There is no such thing as complete silence. It does not exist. At least not in this world, maybe in outer space or in the bowels of the earth, where it’s only cold and dark.”

“Allah created this world so that it would be pleasing to an intelligent seven-year-old boy. That is what Ahmed said to me when I left his office. I think the thing that He made best was the morning. How I used to love the morning! I loved to drink coffee with Anđela and to make arrangements for the day, while morning was coming into the room. I loved every one of our conversations. I loved the little movements of her fingers around the cup. The scents, the clock ticking, the news on the radio…my whole body would relax. I could be alone with her for days, with her and the child in that little room. I used to tell her even prison would not be hard for me if we were together. Because, as the proverb says, if the household is never spiteful, the house is never too small. Mornings are now completely senseless. I imagine that they are still beautiful, but I can no longer notice.”

Have you read ‘Seven Terrors’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Death in the Museum of Modern Art by Alma Lazarevska

Alma Lazarevska’s ‘Death in the Museum of Modern Art‘ is a collection of short stories. It has six stories. They are all set during the siege of Sarajevo, though the stories don’t mention the city by name. Most of the stories are narrated in the first person, and the narrator seems to be a literary version of the author.

I loved most of the stories in the collection. In most of the stories the narrator describes everyday scenes in her life and how they change suddenly after the siege starts and the first shells start falling in the city, and things like sugar, matches, bread and even water become hard to get. Alma Lazarevska’s prose is soft and gentle and reading the narrator telling her story is like listening to our favourite aunt sharing her experiences while sipping a cup of hot tea, while we are sitting in front of the fire in winter listening to her. I loved listening to Alma Lazarevska’s voice through the voice of the narrator. At some point, I stopped thinking about the story (the stories were beautiful, poetic, and haunting) but just continued reading for the narrator’s gentle and wise voice. Someone said this about Alma Lazarevska’s books – “There are books about which one talks and there are books with which one talks—Alma Lazarevska’s book is of the latter kind.” I felt exactly that, when I read this book.

I loved Alma Lazarevska’s ‘Death in the Museum of Modern Art‘. Her work is hard to come by in English translation. There are one or two stories by her in online literary journals. None of her other works have been translated. She has a slim backlist – just one more short story collection, a novel and a collection of essays. Hope they get translated into English. I wish she had written more. There is an interview with her online in which she talks about how she started writing, her literary influences, her favourite writers, her city of Sarajevo, about Bosnian literature and other things. When we read the interview, we feel that we are in the presence of a gentle soul. There was one particular thing she said in the interview, which went like this –

“In my tongue Ivo Andrić is the undisputed master of language. The precision and the beauty of Andrić’s language are fascinating. In a biographical note for my English-language publisher I pointed out that I was born on the 9th of March, the same day as Bobby Fischer. To use chess terminology, I would like to be at least a pawn in a language in which Andrić is the king.”

This is the kind of thing that a contemporary writer will rarely say. Alma Lazarevska’s humility is inspiring and her love for Ivo Andrić’s prose is infectious.

I’ll leave you with two of my favourite passages from the book.

From ‘The Secret of Kasper Hauser‘

“But, life was still order that had not yet begun to disintegrate. It lay in drawers with folded white bed linen and little bags of dried lavender. It was still all-of-a-piece, even if it was sometimes disrupted in the morning by the disagreeable sound of the alarm-clock. On one such morning the north-facing room acquired a new secret. I woke up before dawn in order to take an antibiotic. Replacing the bottle from which I had tipped a red and yellow tablet onto my hand, I caught sight of a bright, swaying blot that I had never seen in this room before. It was trembling on the spine of the large book I had been reading the previous evening. That is how I discovered that in the early morning a little ray of sunlight manages to penetrate into the room that faces north…We wake up too late or else that rare ray of sunlight penetrates into our room too early…The green book with silver letters was lying over there, and on its spine was that trembling blot of light I had seen once before. If I was quick and quiet, perhaps I’d catch it. I know that light is not sensitive to touch or sound. But still, I edged towards it as though it were a live butterfly. I lowered my hand onto the spine of the green book and now the blot was trembling on the back of my hand, like a transparent, asymmetric butterfly.”

From ‘How We Killed the Sailor‘

“The room had lost its box-shape. The light of the thin candle didn’t reach its corners. It created a dim, uneven oval that shifted lazily if an unexpected current of air happened to touch its tiny wick. There was a transparent, trembling film over us. The few objects that were bathed in dim light, and the two of us, made up the inside of a giant amoeba. We were its organs, pulsating in the same rhythm, but not touching.”

I loved Alma Lazarevska’s short story collection. Hope more of her work gets translated into English. I’d love to read them.

You can find Marina Sofia’s review of the book here.

Have you read ‘Death in the Museum of Modern Art‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – This Could Have Been a Simple Story By Ajla Terzić

I loved John Cox’s translation of Biljana Jovanović’s book, especially his introductory essay on Yugoslavian / Serbian literature and on Jovanović’s work. So I did some research on which other books he has translated and that is how I discovered Ajla Terzić’s ‘This Could Have Been a Simple Story’. Ajla Terzić is a Bosnian writer and this book was originally published in Bosnian.

Esma works in an organization which helps people. She is single. She doesn’t have any near family – her dad moved away when she was young, and her mom has passed. She has an aunt and uncle and cousins and they invite her home during festival times. Once her office sends her to Vienna for a seminar. She meets a woman in the train compartment and sparks fly. But later the woman disappears. After a couple of days, this woman, called Roza, calls up Esma and they meet again. The sparks become a fire. And that is the end of life, as Esma knows it. What happens after that forms the rest of the story.

‘This Could Have Been a Simple Story‘ is a beautiful lesbian love story. The first meeting, the attraction, the love, and the relationship between Esma and Roza is beautifully depicted. The kind of resistance that these two have to put up, and the battles they have to fight, especially when facing opposition from their friends, family members and loved ones, has been portrayed in the story in a nuanced way. In the last chapter of the book, Esma is at the edge of the precipice (a metaphorical precipice, of course), and we can feel the author Ajla Terzić literally pause her pen over paper, and contemplate on what to do next, and we readers realize that the fate of our heroine Esma, and our own happiness lies in the author’s hands, and we wait with bated breath to find out what happens next. Does Esma take the risk and jump off the precipice and take the plunge? Or does she step back to the safety of her previous life before all this happened? You have to read the story to find out.

It was nice to discover a new Bosnian author in Ajla Terzić. There is a beautiful introduction at the beginning of the story, in which the translator John Cox introduces us to Bosnian literature and Ajla Terzić’s work. It is vintage John Cox. John Cox is odd among translators, because he is a Balkan historian. So his knowledge of Balkan and Bosnian history, culture, literature and language is deep and that is clearly visible in the introductory essay and in the footnotes throughout the book.

John Cox says this in his introduction – “She (Ajla Terzić) herself sees no need to stress this, but you are about to read the first novel by a Bosnian woman that has appeared in English translation.” If this is true, then this book breaks new ground and this translation is pioneering. And the fact that the first book by a Bosnian woman to be translated into English is a lesbian love story – that makes it even better.

One of the central things in the book is the way music is embedded throughout the story. This would be easily perceptible to a Bosnian reader, but to an outsider like myself, it would be impossible to see. For this reason, the introduction is invaluable. The main character Esma’s name, the title of the book, and the titles of all the chapters are taken from the songs of the famous Yugoslav band Bijelo Dugme, and John Cox explains the connection between the band and the author and the book. One of my favourite musical discoveries from the book was a Bosnian music form called Sevdalinka, which expresses unrequited longing through music. I went and listened to a recording of it. It was beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking. (Do search for ‘U Stambolu na Bosforu’ by Daphne Kritharas, in YouTube, if you’d like to listen.)

I enjoyed reading ‘This Could Have Been a Simple Story‘. I can’t wait to read more books by Ajla Terzić.

Have you read ‘This Could Have Been a Simple Story’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović

I discovered ‘Sarajevo Marlboro‘ by Miljenko Jergović recently. I have never heard of Miljenko Jergović before and so I was excited to read this.

‘Sarajevo Marlboro‘ is a collection of 29 stories. Nearly all the stories are set in the ’90s during the war in Bosnia. Some of the stories are about how the war impacts the life of normal people. Other stories are just about normal people and their beautiful, charming, imperfect lives, with the war playing only a minor role in the story.

Some of my favourite stories from the book were these –

Theft – a story about two neighbours which involves apples. The last passage in the story was heartbreaking and made me cry.

Beetle – it is about a man’s love for his Volkswagen Beetle car.

The Gravedigger – a beautiful story about a gravedigger, which is also related to the title of the book.

The Condor – hilarious dark comedy.

The Gardener – it is about a gardener, but it really isn’t, because it is about a lot of other things and it is so hard to describe.

The Letter – a letter is the main character in the story.

The Library – a heartbreaking story about the Sarajevo library

This is just a random list. I loved all the stories in the book. Nearly every story had beautiful passages in it. As I continued reading the stories, I realized that Miljenko Jergović was no ordinary writer. His prose was beautiful, his observations were perceptive, his insights were amazing, the humour was cool. He is probably one of the greatest literary talents to have come out of Bosnia in recent decades. His stories were such a pleasure to read. I was happy to discover that he has got a nice backlist. I can’t wait to read more of his work.

The book has a beautiful introduction called ‘Everyday History‘ by Ammiel Alcalay. The first passage of this introduction was brilliant. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I am sharing it below.

“The circuitous routes traveled by literary texts across various borders, checkpoints, blockades and holding pens should finally, once and for all, lay to rest the romantic notion that such texts announce themselves and arrive simply by virtue of their inherent qualities as literature. Nothing could be farther from the truth: like any commodity, literary texts gain access through channels and furrows that are prepared by other means. Fashion, chance encounters, fortuitous circumstances, surrogate functions, political alliances and cataclysmic events such as war or genocide are much more certain and constant catalysts than judgment based on actual literary history or cultural importance. The texts that manage to sneak through the policing of our monolingual borders still only provide a mere taste – fragmented, out of context – of what such works might represent in their own cultures, languages, as well as historical and political contexts. One novel or book of poems by a single writer, removed from the cluster of other writers and artists from which it has emerged, unbuttressed by correspondence, biographies or critical studies – such a work of translation…too often functions as a means of reinforcing the assumptions behind our uniquely military/industrial/new critical approach to the work of art as an object of contemplation rather than a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history. The writer remains an individual, chosen by authorities as representative of a period or style, rather than one of many emerging from a densely textured and pluralistic scene.”

I loved ‘Sarajevo Marlboro‘. It is one of my favourite books of the year. I can’t wait to explore more of Miljenko Jergović’s work.

I’ll leave you with two of my favourite passages from the book.

From ‘The Letter‘

“Everything I had was left behind, and represents, at least in my imagination, the price of fear. And my home, my books, fridge, video, furniture, the feeling that I have to save up for the future . . . These days I spend money more freely than ever, because I don’t have enough of a stake in this new city to buy anything of value. Just a microwave. Since I’ve got money I eat in expensive restaurants. I leave the change. I don’t even bother to count the smaller notes. I feel like a monk, without any possessions, but with a wealth of choices. I could be somewhere very different in just a moment. Or I could be nowhere, in a world of pure dreams, faith or fatalism. It really doesn’t matter.”

From ‘The Condor‘

“Izet was what they call an eglen-effendi, or brilliant talker. He could talk non-stop from dusk to dawn. One story flowed into another, one event turned into the next. Often he’d use the day’s events to begin a story that would range across whole centuries and finally return to the price of meat or some gossip about a fellow called Hido…There was no end to Izet’s stories, just as there’s no end to time, the past or the future. But they were never dull and they usually had a message or a moral and were seldom erratic : a tiny thread of narrative kept you holding on to the story, and forced you to listen, even if it meant that you had to go hungry or without drink, or that your life as a whole became a tense silence in which things only mattered if they could be described by a storyteller.”

Have you read ‘Sarajevo Marlboro‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – The Moment by Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar

I discovered ‘The Moment‘ by Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar serendipitously while looking for something else.

Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar is a Bosnian writer who has written novels, short stories, poems and plays. ‘The Moment‘ is a collection of her short stories.

There are ten stories in ‘The Moment‘. The first story ‘Memento Mori‘ is nearly one-fourth the length of the book. It is set in the ’90s during the war in Bosnia. It is a sad, heartbreaking story with a surprising ending written in what can only be described as serene and tranquil prose. The surprises continue in the rest of the book. Nearly all the stories have surprise endings, and most of the time they are unexpected. ‘Dzevad of Sokolica‘ is a story about the beautiful friendship between a fifty year old man and a ten year old girl. It has a sad ending, which seems to be Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar’s favourite kind of ending, but the ending was so unexpectedly surprising that I didn’t see that coming. It also put the rest of the story in context and made me think. ‘Pigeon‘ has the feel of an Edgar Allan Poe story. ‘The Vase‘ is about a mother and her son. ‘Mother‘ is about a man who accidentally discovers a dark secret about his family which changes him as a person. I enjoyed reading all the stories in the book and I loved the surprise endings. My favourites were ‘Memento Mori‘ (because it was atmospheric, dark and heartbreaking) and ‘Dzevad of Sokolica‘ (because of its depiction of a beautiful friendship and the surprising ending). I want to read more of Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar’s stories. Hope they get translated into English.

I read this for ‘Women in Translation Month‘ which celebrates translated literature by women writers during the whole of August.

Have you read Nura Bazdulj-Hubijar’s book? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipović

I discovered ‘Zlata’s Diary‘ by Zlata Filipović recently and read it today.

Zlata is a eleven year old girl living in Sarajevo. It is the year 1991. It is a normal year. Zlata goes to school, plays with friends, celebrates birthdays, plays the piano, catches up with her grandparents who live nearby, goes on holiday trips with her family. She writes about all this in her diary. Then one day news arrives that there is war in a nearby town. And after that rumours spread. Then one day the rumours arrive that Sarajevo is going to be shelled on a particular day. People who believe in the rumours start leaving the city. Smart people, wise people like Zlata’s parents, are sad that people are believing in rumours and misinformation. Sarajevo is a peaceful city and they believe that things will continue to be peaceful there. Unfortunately, the rumour-believers turn out to be right. The shelling happens and all hell breaks loose. Zlata continues recording all these happenings in her diary, which she calls Mimmy. So everyday, she has a conversation with Mimmy. For nearly two years, we get a firsthand account of what happened in Sarajevo during those terrible, war-torn years, as we see the daily happenings, the small happy ones and the big sad ones through the eyes of a eleven year old (and later twelve year old and thirteen year old). Our heart goes out to Zlata, as she wonders why there is a meaningless war going on, and why grownups who are supposed to be making rational decisions and doing better, keep the fires of war and hate burning.

‘Zlata’s Diary‘ takes us into the everyday life of a Bosnian family, and then before we know it, we are transported into a war-torn zone, which is scary as we can almost hear the shells exploding in the front of our streets, and the fear and dread creeping into our hearts. It is a powerful book. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed reading it – it was scary and heartbreaking – but I am glad I read it.

I am sharing a couple of my favourite passages from the book below.

From the entry on Thursday, 19 November 1992

“I keep wanting to explain these stupid politics to myself, because it seems to me that politics caused this war, making it our everyday reality. War has crossed out the day and replaced it with horror, and now horrors are unfolding instead of days. It looks to me as though these politics mean Serbs, Croats and Muslims. But they are all people. They are all the same. They all look like people, there’s no difference. They all have arms, legs and heads, they walk and talk, but now there’s ‘something’ that wants to make them different. Among my girlfriends, among our friends, in our family, there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims. It’s a mixed group and I never knew who was a Serb, a Croat or a Muslim. Now politics has started meddling around. It has put an ‘S’ on Serbs, an ‘M’ on Muslims and a ‘C’ on Croats, it wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all – the pencil of war which spells only misery and death. Why is politics making us unhappy, separating us, when we ourselves know who is good and who isn’t? We mix with the good, not with the bad. And among the good there are Serbs and Croats and Muslims, just as there are among the bad. I simply don’t understand it. Of course, I’m ‘young’, and politics are conducted by ‘grown-ups’. But I think we ‘young’ would do it better. We certainly wouldn’t have chosen war. The ‘kids’ really are playing, which is why us kids are not playing, we are living in fear, we are suffering, we are not enjoying the sun and flowers, we are not enjoying our childhood. WE ARE CRYING.”

From the entry on Monday, 15 March 1993

“And spring is around the corner. The second spring of the war. I know from the calendar, but I don’t see it. I can’t see it because I can’t feel it…There are no trees to blossom and no birds, because the war has destroyed them as well. There is no sound of birds twittering in springtime. There aren’t even any pigeons – the symbol of Sarajevo. No noisy children, no games. Even the children no longer seem like children. They’ve had their childhood taken away from them, and without that they can’t be children. It’s as if Sarajevo is slowly dying, disappearing. Life is disappearing. So how can I feel spring, when spring is something that awakens life, and here there is no life, here everything seems to have died.”

I read this for Women in Translation Month which is celebrated during the whole of August.

Have you read ‘Zlata’s Diary‘? What do you think about it?

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Two Bosnian Children’s Stories

I read two stories by Bosnian women writers yesterday and today for ‘Women in Translation Month‘, which is celebrated throughout August. I think these are the first Bosnian writers I’ve ever read. Both the stories were written for children.

Story 1 : The Poet from Unknowntown by Aleksandra Čvorović

The first story I read was ‘The Poet from Unknowntown‘ by Aleksandra Čvorović. Aleksandra Čvorović is a Bosnian writer who writes mostly poetry and stories for children. This one is a story for children. There is a poet in a small town who composes poems spontaneously and sets them to music and sings them. The people of the town love him. One day the poet sees a doll that the town toymaker has made and falls in love with it. He wants the doll to come to life. But to do this you need magic. And if you invoke magic, there is a price to pay. What happens after that forms the rest of the story. The last passage from the story is very beautiful and it goes like this –

“This is a story about the curse of beauty, and about transient, magic moments of love. I dedicate it to the people who give themselves up in order to grasp elusive fantasises. Happiness is an enchantress who slips from the hands of those wishing to hold her tightly. She roams about and favours only the free souls, the uninhibited pulses of real artists.”

I enjoyed reading this story, and I’d love to read more stories by Aleksandra Čvorović.

Story 2 : When Ivona Wants and Wants by Ljubica Ostojić

The second story I read was ‘When Ivona Wants and Wants‘ by Ljubica Ostojić. Ljubica Ostojić was a Bosnian writer who mostly wrote poems, plays, scripts for dramas and stories for children. This is a children’s story. In this story, the main character Ivona is a charming stubborn girl. The first passage of the story describes her perfectly.

“Ivona knows what she doesn’t want. She doesn’t want to eat spinach, put on the blue dress, wear pigtails, or sleep when she’s not in the mood. She doesn’t want to say “sorry” or “forgive me” when she has done something wrong. No! She’d rather be punished. Ivona’s like that. Which bothers mum, dad, the teacher of the older group in the kindergarten, everyone actually. But, when Ivona wants something? Then, she wants it, wants it, wants it. And the problems begin.”

One day, Ivona wants a dog as a pet. Her parents say ‘No’. From Ivona’s perspective, of course, this is not the end of the story, but the beginning. For her, ‘No’, is the beginning of a negotiation 😊 What Ivona does next forms the rest of the story.

I enjoyed reading Ivona’s story. Ivana is such a charming character and Ljubica Ostojić’s writing is very beautiful to read. From the first passage, the story is charming and grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go. I loved it. I want to read more of Ljubica Ostojić’s stories.

So, these are the first two stories I read in August. What are you reading?

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