Wandering along the Drina

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'The most valuable gift of all is invention, imagination is yourgreatest wealth. Remember that, Aleksandar, said Grandpa verygravely ..."
Sasa Stanisic's debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone , is an inventive child's perspective on atrocities and bettertimes in the town of Visegrad, in the former Yugoslavia, circa the1990s. Visegrad is the hometown of the author, and a place ofonetime peace among Bosnians, Serbs, Christians and Muslims alongthe Drina, a huge river that features as the metaphoric spine ofthis very meandering story.
The novel begins in 1991 with the unexpected death of AleksandarKrsmanovic's grandfather, Slavko, the man who taught him to loveTito, communism and storytelling, and to believe in magic. Thisdeath is so profound for young Aleksandar, he decides to disavowall endings: "I'm against endings, I'm against things being over.Being finished should be stopped! I am the Comrade-in-Chief ofgoing on and on, I support furthermore and etcetera!"
Yugoslavia will not support furthermore and etcetera, though, andsoon after Aleksandar's grandpa dies, Tito's picture is removedfrom its place of prominence in all of Aleksandar's classrooms.Needless to say, things deteriorate further.
In 1992, Bosnian civilians were routed out, tortured, executed andthrown into the Drina from the ancient bridge that spans its banks.The village of Visegrad was one location for the wholesaleeradication of Bosnian Muslims. Mosques were destroyed; familiesand communities, too. It was then, at the age of 14, that theauthor of this book fled with his family to Germany. Published whenSasa Stanisic was merely 29, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has garnered enormous praise, been short-listed for the equivalentof the Man Booker (Deutscher Buchpreis), won the Reader's Prize(Ingeborg Bachmann competition) and been sold in more than 20countries. This interest is, in part, testament to how eager theworld is to hear this post-Cold War story told.
It is difficult not to see the death of Aleksandar's belovedpatriarch, the giver of magic, of wands and magic hats, as ananalogy not just to the end of Aleksandar's childhood, but also theend of simpler, more peaceful times for Visegrad and, by extension,for Yugoslavia. Soldiers take over the city, and Aleksandar, hisfamily and many other families spend most of their time in therelative safety of a bombed-out apartment building.
Stanisic maintains, to the detriment of the telling, a safedistance. It may be that memoir overtook fiction; there is a sensethat the author either was amply, thankfully (for his sake)shielded from the atrocities we daily read about, or that he couldnot face them head on and so swerved. Certainly, this adds to theprotagonist's whimsy but just as certainly, it creates adisengagement that is difficult for the reader to bridge. This isparticularly strange in a first-person narrative, when theexpectation is that the reader will bear witness alongside thenarrator, only to find that the narrator looked away.
It is difficult not to compare this story to The Painted Bird , Jerzy Kosinski's famous novel of the horrors a child endureswandering through a Second World War zone. There we see what thechild sees, the poignancy being that we understand it, though hehasn't yet the tools to. This happens here, too: "[the soldier]comes out of Amela's apartment, the song on his lips, his shirtunbuttoned. Amela is kneeling down behind him with a veil of wethair over her face." More often than not, though, especially onceAleksandar leaves Visegrad, the action happens off stage.
Aleksandar writes pages of letters to the Muslim girl, Asija, whomhe met in the cellar of the Visegrad building. He sends letters toher unknown address from 1992 until 1999, desperate to connect.Then, Stanisic delivers us a story collection by Aleksandar. Theseshow an enormous amount of raw talent in spite of the fact they addnothing much to this already oddly shaped novel.
The rest of the book roves back to Visegrad, ostensibly so thatAleksandar can seek out Asija, yet the story stops here and therefor surreal war memories. Here is a brilliant recounting of afootball game between warring factions; it is one of the bestthings in the book, though again it has no real narrative placeinside a novel purporting to be told through the eyes of adeveloping child.
There are many wonderful scenes in How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone - such verve, strong prose and intensity of imagination - thatcharm, and would charm more, if only one could gain solid footing.There is the possible argument that if the great dream of communistcohesion dissolves, so too must novels about it dissolve. It wouldbe a great idea conceptually, except this feels more like acollage, a cobbling of material toward novel length, rather than apurposeful narrative disintegration.
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of The Nettle Spinner, is themagazine and fiction editor for Bookninja.com.
A lonely, quiet place
The dead are lonelier than we living can ever be. They can't heareach other through coffins and the earth. And the living go andplant flowers on the graves. The roots grow down into the earth andbreak through the coffins. After a while the coffins are full ofroots and the dead people's hair. Then they can't even talk tothemselves. When I die I'd like to be buried in a mass grave. Iwouldn't be afraid of the dark in a mass grave, and I'd be lonelyonly because of missing my grandson so much, the way I miss GrandpaSlavko now.
From The Way the Soldier
Repairs the Gramophone