On 3 March 1992, after a referendum for independence from
Yugoslavia, held on 29 February and 1 March 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina
declared independence. A vast majority of the Serbs boycotted the referendum
and the Bosnian Serbs, whose strategic goal was to create a new Bosnian Serb
State of Republika Sprpska, encircled Sarajevo with a siege force of 13,000
stationed in the surrounding hills.
The City of Sarajevo was under siege from 5 April 1992 to 29
February 1996, making it the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.
During this period the city was assaulted by artillery, mortars, tanks, rocket
launchers, aircraft bombs and sniper rifles. The city was officially blockaded
from 2 May 1992 and it is estimated that during the four years between 9,502-14,011
people were killed.
Alma Lazarevska is a graduate of the University of Sarajevo,
a Bosnian writer and celebrated in her homeland, winning the “Best Book” award
from the Society of Writers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for this collection of
six short stories, “Death in the Museum of Modern Art”. All of the stories set
during the siege and in Sarajevo.
Our collection opens with “Dafna Pehfogl Crosses the Bridge
between There and Here”, the story of Dafna who has been cursed since birth.
And literally since birth, her mother having a crooked tooth from clenching her
jaw during childbirth, and the maid was distracted by the screams, burning the
last half a kilo of coffee she was roasting at the time. Dafna needs to cross a
bridge out of the besieged city, to simply be reunited with her family.
The second short story is “Greetings from the Besieged City”
where our narrator is attempting to conjure up a happy story about postcards
from the coast. A tale where she chases the endings of children’s stories to
avoid an explanation of death, even though there is death all around them:
She was sent to a hospital on the
edge of the city, somewhere I never had reason to go. It is only when a city
becomes besieged city that you acquire a burning wish to reach its edges. Then
you are drawn by a strong desire to step over the ring imposed on you by force.
Then you gradually realise that there are always rings around you, albeit
invisible and not always imposed malevolently. You cross them on those quite
ordinary journeys the aim of which is a summer holiday or distance that may
easily be attained by the simple purchase of a ticket. And all that interests
you then is that edge of the town where such journeys start. Not remotely the
one where sorrowful hospitals are built, in dead-end streets.
This story also contains a fellow literature student who
wanted Anna Karenina to have a happy ending. This short story contains
postcards, two redheads and a pink balloon! Is there still beauty in a besieged
city?
Although you live in a besieged
city on which dozens of people may die in one day from the blow of a single
ball of fire, you still find it difficult to start to accustom your boy to the
fact of death. Which reading matter can you use for that? Although, when you
compare the two planes, it becomes senseless. Out boy knows that a friend of
his was killed a few months ago. A fragment of the red-hot metal that is let
loose when the ball of fire bursts went through the very centre of his brain.
The child’s brain spilled onto the asphalt, before it had become familiar with
the fact of death. And here we are, still protecting our boy from the fact that
the hero of a book has died.
Onto our third short story, “The Secret of Kaspar Hauser”
which takes place over breakfast in an apartment opposite the hospital and the
main question is “why is their bedroom on the north side of the apartment”.
There is no answer, what is the secret of Kaspar Hauser”? the sentence is
interrupted by a colon “as though anticipating a list” but there is no answer,
there is nothing there, no questions, no full stops....nothing
“Thirst in Number Nine” is set in housing block number nine,
where our narrator has recently moved and tells us the tale of the residents
without actually meeting them. She can tell from the sounds behind the doors,
the smells from kitchens, and the one blue eye peeping through one of the spy
holes in one of the doors. The residents
do meet, eventually, in the cellar whilst under a siege.
Our fifth tale is “How we Killed the Sailor”:
That’s what he did when I pointed
out that he was spreading the margarine too tickly on his slices of bread; when
i remarked that he had given away almost the entire contents of the package of
humanitarian supplies that the inhabitants of the besieged city occasionally receive.
All he’d left us was a little packet of green mints. I once told him they
reminded me of my grandmother who had died long ago – my mother’s blue-eyed
mother who was never hungry. It’s true that we still has the cardboard packing.
It burns well, but we won’t use it. The inscription on it and the list of
contents may one day feed some future story.
The myth for this one is that if you light a cigarette with
a candle a sailor will die, so the dilemma is keeping matches to light candles
(made from balls of wax from already melted candles) or using the scare matches
to light the cigarette and saving a sailor’s life.
Finally we finish up with the title story, “Death in the
Museum of Modern Art”, the title coming from an exercise by the New York Museum
of Modern Art who has written to Sarajevo residents and asked them “How would
you like to die?” the answers to appear in a publication with photos.
This whole collection is made up of short staccato sentences
and paragraphs as islands. Quickly jumping from one description, one thought to
the next. The writing is rapid fire but at times it is mere fragments of a
whole, at other times even cryptic, you as a reader feel under siege. You are
living in the besieged city, so much so you thoughts have been transformed.
The whole collection is deeply layered with metaphor:
On sunny days, the street
reminded one of transparent sea shallows in which the spine of slender fish
flashes, like a silver exclamation mark.
Occasionally ambulances sped
along the street. The sirens rent the
silence. Then the piercing sound subsided and silence closed in again like
water over the drowned.
A sunset does not damage even the
fish swimming under the point where the sun falls into the sea. There, beyond
the ring that is holding the besieged city in its grip stands a man with eyes
the colour of which vile frogs could spawn.
Like the taut, transparent bubble
that appears when you cut into fresh fish.
This is an important collection of stories, the tales from a
part of the world that we rarely see literature translated, taking place during
an important time in world history. This year we had Hassan Blasim’s “The Iraqi
Christ” taking out the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize with Judge Boyd Tonkin
saying, “a decade after the Western invasion and occupation of Iraq, that
country’s writers are exploring the brutal and chaotic aftermath of war and tyranny
with ever-growing confidence.” Similarly
in this work of short stories, we have Alma Lazarevska using “fearless candour
and rule-busting artistry”, slightly surreal, slightly cryptic but with the
siege of Sarajevo always bubbling in the background.
Thanks to Istros Books for the preview copy, along with “A
Handful of Sand by Mirenko Koscec and Marija Knezevic’s “Ekaterini” I can say
their selection of Balkan works are ones that you should be keeping an eye on.
2 comments:
While reading your review, I was reminded of The Iraqi Christ - it does sound as if there are some parallels between the two collections. Your review also reminds me that I should read 'A Handful of Sand' as I have a copy here.
There are similarities between the two works, this is a little less surreal, and all of these are set in Sarajevo (not in various countries). I prefer the subtleties of this work a little more but the magic realism of Iraqi Christ appealed to me more too. This is a worthwhile collection. I do know that 'A Handful of Sand' was entered for the IFFP, but of course not making the longlist. It is definitely better than at least three that did.
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