37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land." --Euripides--, July 21, 2005
This review is from: Pretty Birds: A Novel (Hardcover)
The siege of Sarajevo was the longest in the history of modern warfare, and the worst in Europe since the end of WWII. It lasted from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996.
Irena Zaric is, in many ways, a typical teenager. Irrepressibly energetic, buoyant, funny, loving, she is a star on her high school basketball team, Sarajevo's champions. She wears funky clothes - a gray West German jacket, Esprit jeans, red-and-black Air Jordans, American polo shirts, hecho en Honduras, and sports purple nail polish. Her best friend and teammate, Amela Divacs, blonde and curvaceous, is considered prettier by the local boys, but lithe Irena, with the k .d. lang haircut, is thought to be sexier. She doesn't dwell much on politics, history or culture - she's a jock(!) - there are too many more important things on her mind, like athletics, her friends, acquiring copies of Q Magazine, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan, Princess Di, and the great Croatian player Toni Kukoc. Schoolwork is not a priority, although her teachers are not concerned about her. They know she is intelligent, that her "mind has depth." Of course she loves her parents, brother, (who is in Chicago), and grandmother, but like most teens, she takes them for granted. She adores Pretty Bird, her Timneh African gray parrot, who is an outrageous mimic, able to imitate the sounds of the telephone ringing, the doorbell, the refrigerator opening, the vacuum cleaner, and, best of all, the sound of a basketball hitting the hoop.
The war begins suddenly for Irena, on a warm weekend in March. Students march for peace and are shot for their idealism. Serb police take off their uniforms and badges and become the "paramilitaries," clothed in menacing black. They erect barriers and declare the land beyond, Serb Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serbs, supported by neighboring Serbia and Montenegro, respond to Bosnia-Herzegovina's declaration of independence with armed resistance. They aim to partition the republic along ethnic lines and join Serb-held areas to form a "Greater Serbia." The national army is converted into the Bosnian Serb Army, and Irena's family's apartment, the entire Grbavica block of buildings, is appropriated for Bosnian Serb officers.
Amela is officially knows as a Serb, Irena a Muslim, although her father recently yelled in outrage, "Half (Serb) isn't half enough for them. Yes, them...don't you see? They want 'purity.' My father was a Serb married to a Jew. I married a Muslim whose mother was a Croat. Serb, Croat, Muslim, Jew - what does that make you and your brother? We have no name. And now we have no place." The family decides to go live with Mrs. Zaric, Irena's grandmother and only living grandparent. She lives on the "other side of the river," in what is considered Muslim territory. "The Miljacka River, which used to tie the city together like a ribbon, now divides it like the edge of a serrated knife." On their way over, bombs falling around them, they are brutally attacked, violated and robbed by men dressed in black - Serb thugs. When they arrive, they find grandmother Zaric shot dead. Life only gets worse. Anyone who was alive, anywhere in the world, during the 1990's and able to read, knows just how terrible, (beyond description), life became for the non-Serbian Sarajevans.
Irena's former assistant principal, Dr. Tedic, offers her an innocuous job, ostensibly at the Sarajevo Brewery. There she is trained to be a sniper. Teenage women actually served as snipers for both Bosnian and Serbian forces during the war. Highly disciplined, they performed with excellence, and freed up the men to fight at the front. Irena is trained to aim and shoot at a spot, an object, not a human being. I wonder if that made her work any easier. "I'm kind of a pacifist," she confesses to Tedic. "So am I," he responds, "When the world permits."
Author Scott Simon, host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, has covered ten wars, and has won extensive awards for his reporting, including the Peabody and the Emmy. He writes clear, straightforward prose, at times quite lyrical, and frequently moving. Irena's story, which is her city's story, will haunt you. The characters are three-dimensional, so much so that I felt as if I knew them personally by the end of the novel. The gallows humor is wonderful and there is plenty of suspense. I love Irena's parents, former hippies, their hearts filled with peace and love - still. "Pretty Birds" is compelling, riveting, and ultimately as shattering as the siege itself. My highest recommendations for this extraordinary novel.
"There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land." --Euripides--
JANA
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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So sad, so brutal, so human, July 5, 2005
This review is from: Pretty Birds: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is the first fictionalized account that I have read of the wars of 1991-1995 in the former Yugoslavia. I have consumed nearly every non-fiction work there is on that part of the world and that time period in particular. Much of it is slanted toward one faction or the other, with some seeking to justify the 'self-defence' of the Serbs and others seeking to inspire sympathy for the poor, suffering Bosnians or Croats who were on the receiving end of the violence.
While reading any of these accounts, it is best to remember that tomorrow's trip to the bookstore will deliver a completely different perspective....making it hard to know the truth about anything.
Fortunately, if only in fiction, Scott Simon has captured the true human tragedy of this little piece of history. I lived and worked in Sarajevo beginning at the end of the war and through the early years of reconstruction. My colleagues lived through the scenes that Mr. Simon describes in such horrendous detail, buried loved ones in soccer fields and ate Spam and weevil-infested grain (when they could get it). They have a lot to teach us about what it means to be a human being.
This book will help any reader understand why war....any war....is wrong. Read the book, and think about what you would do in the situations portrayed there. Think about where your soul would be when it was all said and done. Wonder whether you would ever be able to get it back again after witnessing and participating in that kind of mindless animal behavior and purposeful cruelty.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quirky but good, July 26, 2005
This review is from: Pretty Birds: A Novel (Hardcover)
Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon is a quirky piece of writing. Taking place during the Serbian-Bosnian conflict, its characters are coarse but strangely sensitive, tough yet vulnerable, darkly humorous in the midst of savagery. Its main character - I hesitate to say protagonist (more on that below) - is Irena Zaric a seventeen-year-old Muslim girl living in Sarajevo. She's a talented basketball player obsessed with fame, make-up, pop music and clothes. That her metamorphosis from typical teen to talented sniper seems logical is a tribute to Simon's offbeat narrative skills.
The novel - more of a literary reality show - portrays the pressures of urban warfare in a sort of diary fashion. While snipers kill grandmothers and teens in the streets, much is made of normal things: magazines and pop culture, beer and cigarettes, teen sex and family relationships.
The title refers to such a piece of minutiae. Pretty Bird is the Zaric family parrot, a sonic reproducer of whizzing bullets, bomb and mortar explosions, sirens, doorbells, telephones and microwaves. But the bird eventually comes to symbolize the pretty Sarajevan girls, who somehow remain resistant to war's animosities.
Simon, a war correspondent for NPR, draws on his experiences in Sarajevo to demonstrate an eyebrow-raising facility with fictional technique. For the first ten pages we see Irena at work as a sniper, followed by some eighty pages of flashback - an invitation to disaster for most novelists. He also manages to make conversations work between peripheral characters, providing editorial comments on the U.N.'s role there, Western Europe's blasé attitude toward the conflict, even a new twist to the hackneyed "war is hell" adage.
With all that works, what doesn't? Simon's characters certainly bring a new literary reality to the lives of non-combatants. But presenting them in documentary form leaves little room for depth. Irena, his intended protagonist, will leave readers wondering whether her decisions reveal strength or foolhardiness. And this often allows minor characters to upstage her.
Simon does accomplish one grander goal: portraying the absolute loss of purpose in this war. And his strong instinct for what works, for when and how to bend the rules of exposition, bodes well for our next encounter with his fiction.
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