Customer Reviews

Sarajevo Blues

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A pearl of insight that should be read and reread by anybody interested in the recent Balkan wars appears on page 115 of "Sarajevo Blues." There we find, in an interview between translator Ammiel Alcalay and author Semezdin Mehmedinovic, the latter's comment that "Bosnian culture is inclusive, it includes the Bosnian Franciscan tradition (of Catholic mysticism), the Muslim Sufi tradition, and the Sephardic Jewish tradition; this is all part of my culture." This sheaf of poetry and prose sketches offers a modern transformation of such transcendental currents. "Sarajevo Blues," as it was called even in the Bosnian version, is legendary in the stricken city of Sarajevo, serving as a local souvenir for those who survived the brutal siege that struck the city beginning in 1992.

One of several disparate and more or less hurried editions, printed on the roughest newsprint and selling in the bookstores of Marshal Tito Street, retails for only three marks, or $1.80 -- a major investment for Sarajevans, who have few jobs and less money.

Mehmedinovic is a Muslim Bosnian living in the United States. Born in 1960, he was no longer young when the Bosnian conflict commenced, but his writing still bears the marks of the youthful American style -- brief but eloquent notes and comments -- that swept the world with the Beat revolution. With considerable effectiveness, Mehmedinovic has synthesized the sentimental traditions and idealistic illusions of the Sarajevans, the horrors of the war and the disillusionment of its victims with an indifferent world.

He writes of the prayerful burial of a Muslim martyred in the fighting: "Sorrow gathers in circles under the eyes; the men pass their open palms across their faces. As the rites continue, I feel the presence of God in everything; when this is over, I will take a pen and make a list of my sins." The one-paragraph text ends, "A cat jumps across the shadow of a minaret."

Elsewhere he describes how Serb terrorists expelled the mental patients from a suburban asylum, driving them into the city: "One of them -- holding the body of a dead sparrow by its claws -- came up to someone walking along King Tomislav Street and said, `You'll be dead too, when my army gets here.' " The combination of poignant and surreal details is characteristic not only of Bosnian war narratives but also of contemporary Bosnian writing in general, a field of literature unknown in the outside world until the war, but featuring great achievements of perception and lyricism.

If the war has had a positive aspect -- aside from the shutdown of old, polluting indus tries, which has allowed fish to reappear in the country's rivers for the first time in decades -- it is the introduction of Bosnian authors to foreign readers. (Recent volumes issued in English include an outstanding work, "Death and the Dervish" by Mesa Selimovic, a Muslim who wrote with great delicacy in the Serbian dialect, and who died in 1982. That book, published in 1996 by Northwestern University Press, describes the dilemma of an 18th century Bosnian Sufi dealing with governmental injustice.)

Mehmedinovic's sharp eye allows him to summarize three years of genocide in a few lines. He describes a Serb woman at an artillery post, whom he watched through binoculars as she sunned herself in a bathing suit. "She lies like that for hours," he writes. "Then she gets up, goes to the rocket launcher, pulls the catch and lets a shell fly at random toward the city." After the explosion, "she goes back, rubbing her body in suntan oil to fully give in to her own state of well-being."

He is devastating in his comments on foreign observers, voyeuristic correspondents and other spectators of Bosnia's torment: "I'm running across an intersection to avoid the bullet of a sniper from the hill when I walk straight into some photographers; they're doing their job, in deep cover. If a bullet hit me they'd get a shot worth so much more than my life that I'm not even sure whom to hate: the Chetnik sniper or these monkeys with Nikons."

Mehmedinovic's book is an incisive answer to the claim by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz. Poetry survived Auschwitz, and poetry has survived the atrocities of Bosnia, but it is a grim genre of verse. As Mehmedinovic says, "When a ten-year-old kid asks if he's a Muslim and after getting a positive answer says, `I don't want to be expelled,' " -- from his home, not his school -- "then you know something horrible has happened to this people."

Sarajevo Blues is poetry and prose of the war in Sarajevo. It is written with the realism that one associates with Ernaux or Duras. As the author says in an interview at the end of the book: "We were completely attuned to the exterior world ... We had a real need for precision, with some belief that if we could put on paper precisely what was in the outside owrld that, in itself, would convey the emotional potential indispensable to poetry."

Thus this book makes its points simply - the cigarette wrapped in a death certificate, the recognition of the enemy in the same sweater that you wear, the pear eaten with the iman of the mosque ... the result is a book that will not permit you to view war in the abstract but rather forces you to look at war in the eyes of individual people who matter.

This is the first book I have read in years that I have been unable to put down. I had to get online with Amazon.com and see if his other works were available. My soul has been reawakened. I subconsciouly forgot what I saw in Bosnia in January of this year. This book has helped me understand what I saw. The translation keeps much of the power that I believe was intended. This is a must read for anyone who cares about what is going on in the Balkins right now.

Deserves the highest praise. Well done. What's it about? Trying to hold onto your sanity while your world/life/existance is being ripped apart.

Want to know what it's like to be stuck in a city under seige? Want to know what it's like to be surrouned by enemy forces with nowhere to run or hide while they shell your town to rubble? Read this (fairly slim) volume then.

Man's inhumanity to man? It's here, baby--and the irony is just this: This sort of thing will keep on happening. We never learn. The sort of savagery depicted in this book is happening even as I write this in various other parts of the world. Never underestimate the cruelty of the human animal.

Sarajevo Blues is a book that contains the writings of Semezdin Mehmedinovic, a Bosnian that lived through the turmoil in Sarajevo in the early 1990?s. The book contains a series of short stories and poems, most less than two pages in length.

This book is a very unique piece of literature. It is not a story of the siege, the fighting, and the dodging of snipers bullets the author experienced. The book does not tell a complete story of the war from beginning to end. I would equate the book to looking at a photo album and trying to piece together the details of a person?s life from the pictures.

The stories seem to be from the perspective of a photographer crossed with a stand-up comedian. By mentioning a comedian, I am not suggesting that the author tells funny tails of a tragic event, but rather the author seems to have unique observational skills that I have seen in comics. He is able to capture a moment in time like a photographer and analyze the ?photo? and observe events that most people would not even realized occurred (much like a stand-up comic). The result is a series of bone-chilling short writings that (to me) showed a side of war that I never thought about. One story discusses the idea that the enemy may wear the same sweater that you do. Another story discusses how casual war has become as the author writes about seeing a woman sunbathing, getting up occasionally to launch an artillery shell into the city, then resume sunbathing, just to repeat the process minutes later. Another, one line poem shows how casual humans take war when a person is called into the house because it is ?grenading outside?. One of my favorite writings, the author discusses the idea of photographers trading in death to make their livelihood.

This book is definitely not for everyone. If you are looking to research in the war in Sarajevo for an academic project, I would look elsewhere unless you have solid research on the topic completed already. I think this book can be compared to cognac. People who can savor its complexity will enjoy this book; to other people, the book will just be brandy. It is an excellent alternative viewpoint on war in general. The author does a splendid job bringing rarely addressed perspectives of war to light.

Another awesome book that will help those of us in the West understand the horrific tragedy that was the Bosnia/Serb/Croation war of 1992-1995. The author grabs your heart from the first line...profoundly moving, even disturbing at times.