Customer Reviews

The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo

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Just to be clear, this is not a graphic novel, as some people are saying. It is graphic non-fiction, or graphic reportage, occupying a gray area somewhere between newsprint, photojournalism, memoir, cartooning, and essay. Sacco's first such book on Bosnia, Safe Area Gorazde, is a classic -- and those who found it compelling will certainly want to read this account of his 2001 return to Sarajevo. Aided by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sacco returned to do followup research and find old friends to see how they were getting along in peacetime. In his attempt to learn more about the siege of Sarajevo and the and its aftermath, he reconnects with an paramilitary veteran who had been his "fixer" on his previous trip in 1995. In war zones and trouble spots throughout the world, fixers are the oil that lubricates the machinery of international journalism. They are the ones who steer journalists to the right translator, hotel, driver, interviewer, clean hooker, alcohol, location, etc. -- for a few hundred in hard currency per day.

Sacco's fixer was Neven, a Bosnian Serb who loves his city and fought in one of the many ad hoc brigades that were assembled by charismatic men in the early days of the war before a real Bosnian army was established.  An outsize character, Neven becomes a kind of lens through which Sacco tries to understand the war's very confusing impact on Sarajevo. The book hopscotches between various stages of the war and the present in a kaleidoscopic jumble of images, confusing nicknames, and impenetrable mix of fact and myth. Through Neven, Sacco tells the fragmentary tale of some of the more prominent warlords (almost all of whom were shady prewar characters), and of their sometimes heroic, sometimes despicable activities during the siege. To a certain extent, they are the subject of the book, populist characters who took it upon themselves to create personal armies to fight the separatist Serbs when there was no central government or army to do so (most of the Yugoslav army supplies were handed over to Serbia following the dissolution of Yugoslavia). Of course, many of these patriotic men were also probably interested in enriching themselves, and as the war dragged on, attempts were made to incorporate them into the regular army and police and things got rather messy. As Sacco recounts, many of the "facts" surrounding various killings, atrocities, and profiteering by the warlords will forever remain obscured by the fog of war, and the need for politicians to wash their hands of those dirty times.

At the same time, what becomes increasingly interesting is the relationship between Sacco and Neven, and the plausibility of Neven's endless stories about what it was like "back then." Neven is a down and out character who owes money all over town, and Sacco clearly feels guilty about walking around with bundles of Deutchmarks, while his fixer is real-life war veteran. The subtle (and not so subtle) assaults on Sacco's wallet become a running theme, and are an interesting window on the less glamorous side of being a foreign correspondent. At the same time, as Sacco spends more and more time in Sarajevo, he meets more and more people who cast doubts on Neven's veracity. He's certainly known all over town, and certainly did fight in the war, but there's also clearly a gulf between his stories and the truth. And as a Serb, he's also somewhat of a pariah in his own home city, his apartment is seized by connected refugees, and a general antipathy for Serbs hover around him.

Ultimately, readers looking for a clear understanding of who was who, and what was what during the war, are going to be frustrated -- and are perhaps missing the whole point. This book is all about the fog of war, the strange mutations of time and place that raise certain men to power and then cast them aside, as well as the guilt and confusion of being an outsider looking in

A darkly violent Fellinesque riff on the Bosnian war, this "graphic novel," by Joe Sacco is a fast read, a noirish examination of the relationship between a parachute journalist and the necessary local 'fixer' who serves as a local contact and makes it possible for the journalist to drop into a foriegn country and get a story. In this case, the local turns out to be a questionable ex-fighter whose war stories are both more and less true than appearances indicate. The fixer, a troubled ex-fighter scorned by his former comrades and spurned because of his ethnic background, is a terrific character, evocative of both the unresolved issues behind the Balkan wars as well as the marginalized citizens anywhere made exiles in their own land.

This book should be read after "Safe Area Gorazde" in order to gain a context of the war (unless you're already knowledgeable about it, which I wasn't).

This one has more psychological depth than "Gorazde". Many of the warlords who defended Sarajevo had criminal backgrounds and after the war the government tried to get rid of them, but they defied the orders. A few of them came to tragic ends.

The "fixer" is a mixed Serb-Muslim guy who was raised as a Serb. The Bosnian fighters questioned his loyalty (apparently some Serbs who were non-separatist got killed indiscriminately in the war). But he's also revealed as often lying.

In the war he was a sniper, often he had to make decisions of whether to kill someone or not, it's like playing god. I learned a lot about what war is like from this and other books by Joe Sacco.

Somewhere in between Tanya Harding and Monica Lewinsky there was this little civil war raging throughout the former Yugoslavia. Joe Sacco is a great journalist in war torn areas and his use of graphic art of story telling is a great way of bringing the humanity to the figures caught in the midst of a maelstrom of chaos and death.

As a companion piece to Safe Area Gorazde: The Special Edition, this depicts the people who held Sarejevo together as the Serbian militias rampaged throughout Bosnia. Neven, a Serb who joins the militias trying to hold things together, tells a harrowing story of heroism and death. The fact that the government needs to hold things together justifies their decision to use whatever means necessary. Most of those means are in the form of career criminals who were mobsters long before the war started. Sacco doesn't flinch from the fact that even though they are heroes in many ways, they are also monsters who use the fact that they are holding Sarejevo together as an excuse to commit all manner of atrocity against the residents.

THe book ends with Sarejevo at an uneasy peace after a long and drawn out battle with the milita members themselves. Much of the story of Sarejevo feels familiar since these kind of things happen whenever the social order breaks down. The fact that we've been worrying about Nineteen Eighty-Four happening all this time should almost shame considering that the truly horrifying stuff isn't what happens during a totalitarian regime but after a totalitarian regime collapses and old grudges come raging out. The government of Sarejevo finally got its own standing army and with its standing army it proceeded to destroy the same militias that it created.

One of the last scenes has Neven throwing up his hands and wondering what it's all for since Serbians are being blamed for most of the atrocities. As a Serbian who risked his life with some very hard cases in order to keep Sarejevo out of the hands of the truly despotic genocidal militias, he feels betrayed by the gross generalization that puts him in the same category with the rest of the people committing atrocities. This kind of group guilt and group suffering is something that is both seductive and destructive and its a particular type of prejudce that Sacco seems to dedicate his entire journalist career to fighting.

Great book and I hope to see more from Sacco in the future of this nature.