Customer Reviews

Pretty Birds: A Novel

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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.

To use the old cliché, this was a book I could not put down. From the first chapter, I found it to be a riveting and captivating story wrapped convincingly in the historical perspective of the siege of Sarajevo. I've heard Scott Simon many times on NPR and even heard him talking about this book when it was published (though for some reason I wasn't compelled to read it at the time), but I never had any idea that he is such a talented writer of fiction. Certainly his own knowledge gained through covering the war helps, but there's more to the book than simply a history lesson.

Simon takes the reader on an intriguing journey through war-ravaged Sarajevo seen primarily through the eyes (and scope) of 17-year-old Irena Zaric. The book is a heart-wrenching narrative about the horrors suffered by the people caught on the wrong side of the conflict (and the wrong side of the river) in Sarajevo, made all the more compelling by a story that lets us into the hearts, minds, and apartments of those who experienced it.

My one and only complaint with the book begins approximately three-quarters of the way into the story. After reading that much, it became apparent that there is a very obvious way for the story to end, so obvious that I found myself silently pleading for the story not to end so predictably. Soon it becomes apparent that there is a second way the story could go, and although it is less obvious than the first, it still seems too predictable. It is the second storyline, more or less, that Simon chose. And although he throws in a few wrinkles (probably because he too realized that it was a bit too predictable), doing so really only ended up diluting an otherwise strong story. If you will permit me a sports metaphor, I felt like Simon fumbled the ball on the one yard line. He was close - so very close - to making this a truly outstanding story, but just didn't quite close the deal.

Still, I don't want that to overshadow what is otherwise an outstanding work of historical fiction - really one of the better fictional books I have read in quite some time. If I could give 4.5 stars rather than 4 I probably would, because it was only the very end of the story that let me down in any way.

Books like this one remind us again that no war is a good war for those who are dying, and perhaps about to die. This is the story of a young woman, a teenager, who is trained as a sniper to kill her countrymen who are also trying to kill her. It is the story of many people who are trying to stay alive and not starve during a conflict that has no rational meaning. We are in the divided city of Sarajevo where Serbs are trying to eradicate Muslims. Irena, a Muslim woman and high school athlete becomes a killer who shoots Serbian killers on the other side of the city.

The strange thing is that the dialogue of the novel's characters is often terribly funny while the theme of the book is terribly sad. The gallows humor is often interrupted by the injection of a sudden, heart stopping horror. Ultimately the book is one of tragedy that makes one think of the daily lives of ordinary people in Iraq today: people who are also trying to keep alive, trying to find enough to eat, and trying to avoid being shot on the streets or in their homes.

This is a war book that deals with the plight of ordinary citizens. It tells of how they adapt to a brutish situation. It also tells how they die, often while doing a small, daily task like standing in line to get a jug filled with water. The events in the book happened 14 years ago, but the things haven't much changed in the world since then.

This is an outstanding book. Put it on your required reading list.

I write my reviews before I read anybody else's. This is the first work, fiction or non-fiction, that I have read about the War in former Yugoslavia. But I feel I have an excellent taste for what the besieged citizens of Sarajevo went through from 1992-1996.

The book has made the war very real. The characters in the novel are well developed. The plot was not predictable; you actually think it is going one way and it ends in another. They could probably make a movie out of it, but they would probably ruin its excellence.

The story is that if Irena, a teenage Bosnian who escapes with her family from the Serbian controlled side of Sarajevo to the Bosnian side, which is a terror stricken enclave supposedly being protected by the United Nations troops.

Pretty Birds refers to Irene and her friends, who get caught up in the war effort in ways they would not have imagined, and it also refers to Pretty Bird, Irena's parrot.

The dialogue and depictions are realistic. The characters and moments memorable. The book flows fast and never bores.

It does only cover the Bosnian side of the siege of Sarajevo. With a small but important exception.

One feels one knows at least a bit of what the besieged residents of Sarajevo endured, and such knowledge makes one's personal problems evaporate into a mist--to use a term from the book.

I have heard first-hand anecdotes of what it was like to live in Sarajevo during the war, and the accounts of the book match those.

I became interested in Pretty Birds , like many of the other reviewers, through my knowledge of Scott Simon as a journalist and the promotional work NPR did for its Weekend Edition host.

Pretty Birds focuses on the plight and growth of a multi ethnic, secular Muslim girl, Irena, who is a high school basketball star. She lives within the Sarejevo slums of the Muslim portion of Sarejevo and faces the shortage of neccesary goods and safety that marks the life of a wartime refugee. Although Pretty Birds is publicized as a story of a heroic female sniper, only a small percentage of the novel portrays her snipeing or her military training. Instead, Simon develops Irena's story through her interactions with her family, other members of Sarejevo's muslim community, and the urban guerilla fighting force for which she works.

Simon writes extensively about the events that occured in Sarejevo during the early nineties, most of which he communicates anecdotally with a narrative voice. However, he never hesitates to somehow involved Irena in each of these events. This is where Simon's lapses as a novelist emerge. He is wonderful at communicating individual events, whether historical or fictional, but has trouble adequately connecting the two. As a result, about three quarters of the way through the novel Pretty Bird's becomes disconnected and Irena becomes a minor character for several chapters.

Simon's work would be much improved with a more cohesive outline and progressive narrative voice. He relies on Irena's unlikely involvement in all the historical events he mentions for the story to progress (her reputation as a h.s. basketball star proceeds in her each case, which again, is not likely in a city with the diversity and size of Sarejevo). Additionally, he repeatedly uses analogies between Irena's wartime duties and her basketball career, which become redundant and overworked. However, his ability to describe the human response to events is remarkable.

It is the story of Irena and Sarejevo both of whom resiliantly retain their humanity, reason, and eclectic identity within the tragedy of an unprovoked war that makes Pretty Birds compelling. Irena is a character that plays her role as a tragic hero perfectly, and Simon does his best work with his conclusion. Pretty Birds ends with a starteling climax that makes the story a must read and especially memorable.

How can a book be at the top of the "early adopter" category but have no customer reviews?!?!

I'm not sure why I am so surprised at how good this is. I'm a Scott Simon fan and thought his Home and Away was perfectly fine, but this book is in another league (sorry) altogether.

It's totally original, and that's worth at least a star. And quite intricate, although you are not aware of that until the end.

I have heard a couple of interviews with him, and he declines to answer any questions regarding the whereabouts or situation of the real-life Irena, which of couse we are most curious to know. I do remember his interviews with her and I hear her voice when reading the book.

I borrowed it from the library and don't really want to return it--I read it twice over a weekend. Maybe I'll spring for an autographed copy through NPR.

I like to think that this has not been widely reviewed yet.

I've seldom read a book in which I wouldn't alter one single word. This is one of those books. Mr. Simon gets it spot-on right. As I read it I did a sort of connect-the-dots thinking of storied he'd filed from his time in Sarajevo. When I'd listen to him I'd think this isn't simply a story for him. He's having a life-altering experience. Pretty Birds is the result of that amazing and terrible time.

This book stands as both a great work of historical fiction and a memorial to those wonderful souls ripped from this world by the hand of tyranny that swept through their lives. Read it and learn. Read it and remember. Read it and laugh as the human spirit struggles to find joy in a joyless slaughter pen. But, most of all, as the popular saying goes, read it and weep.

and brings us this gritty, flinty, barren landscape-of-a-war story with (sometimes) very human people behind those ski masks and the other "masks" worn by snipers and bombers, who, before the war started, were classmates, neighbors, friends.

In some ways, Pretty Birds reminds me of Marjan Satrapi's "Persepolis", (another gritty war story told, this time, in a book filled with nothing but cartoon strips), by the way it portrays the human condition (including humor, wry or dark) and the consciences and all-too-human failings and needs that do not abandon us, whether they are confronted by the sights, smells, and atrocities of war, or are chewing on grass and lawn snails for supper.

The raw wind, the cold, dirt, isolation, -vs- the bits of "real" life as seen thru the pages of popular European/American magazines for teenagers, all bring together the contrasts that beseige those who, now at war, still try to conjure up the relative peace of their former lives.

Very little human emotion was conveyed at the (usually graphic) descriptions of the sight and sound of death -- adding to the all-too-real shell-shock that invades the soul and psyche of those trying to survive in war torn areas.

Irena's legendary prowess as a local basketball star helps her stay alive, but a pretty bird eventually brings about a startling ending, making the reader wonder if Irena's questions to Tedic and Molly about Hell were ever answered in full.