Customer Reviews

Sarajevo Marlboro

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When Jergovic's book Sarajevo Marlboro was published in Croatia I thought here it is, another so called writer who wants to make money out of people's tragedy. But then, I met him and has been surprised. Man like him just can't be one of those nationalist writers in which books every second word is the name of his country. He thinks and he has great talents with words. Sarajevo Marlboro is mosaic made of two-three pages stories that point directly to your heart. Jergovic understand perfectly well what is going on in his city, to his fellow citizens and though he can't do anything to stop the history, he can remeber it - in his own voice. And that is the beauty of Sarajevo Marlboro.

Literally dozens upon dozens of books have been written on the war in Bosnia and the break-up of Yugoslavia by journalists, scholars, diplomats, politicians, etc. both from the former Yugoslavia itself and abroad. However, hardly any of them shed as much light on the war in Bosnia (and, by extension, the recent tragic events throughout former Yugoslavia) as this slim volume. Jergovic has made an art-form of capturing so much feeling, passion and depth in such incredibly short stories. "Sarajevo Marlboro" can definitely be ranked among the great world literature of the last few decades. This is an outstanding book - read it by all means.

Jergovic has written a book full of life, full of laugh and despair. No one else like Bosnians - with this I mean anyone living a true life of a person in Bosnia - can make jokes on their own sad history and present. Some stories in this book are by far the best short stories I have read in my life and I recommend this book to everyone, especially to politicians who allowed that this humor almost disappears. Bravo Miljenko!

It is hard not to go back to "Sarajevo Marlboro" and re-read different short stories multiple times. It's one of those books that I make sure to have on my bookcase no matter where in the world I live at that moment. It is powerful yet simple in its wisdom and it will make you both laugh and cry. Quite simply, it is a beautifully thought-out and written story of a city which spirit never died during the tragic years of the war conflict.

This debut collection of stories from journalist Jergovic was first published a decade ago in his native Croatia (he has since written nine more books). Then in his mid-20s, he lived in besieged Sarajevo for the bulk of the war, reporting and chronicling the human suffering he witnessed. These twenty-nine stories are drawn from his experiences, and yet are not the standard-issue thinly veiled reportage than so much wartime fiction ends up as. Rather, these are brief character studies and snapshots into daily life, lives where the war has changed everything, and yet must continue. Each is only a few pages, moving quickly to the point, and then ending. Fatalism runs heavily throughout the book, as do the obvious themes of displacement, confusion, anxiety, and occasional absurdity. Although each is distinct and precise, these brief snapshots do tend to blur together into a larger picture when read as an ensemble. The collection is probably best approached as something to dip into once a week, and then contemplate. Otherwise, the stories of suffering and surviving tend to cancel each other out and their impact is greatly diminished.

The strident introduction by Ammiel Alcalay rather oddly asserts that translated works such as this can provide only an out of context and fragmentary taste of a culture and place, and that to really "get" a book like this, you need to posses all kinds of background context such as the social and political history of Yugoslavia as well as an understanding of the relationship between performance spaces, art galleries, visual artist, musicians, and filmmakers, and so forth. It's a bizarre way to introduce a bookóby stating that the reader has no hope of empathy. And this is after bemoaning how books that do get translated in the West are those that reinforce prevailing Western prejudices about a culture! It is true that the reader without any knowledge whatsoever of the war in Bosnia will read the stories differently than an expert in Yugoslav history and all the cultures thereof. But I'm not sure that the "naive" reader won't actually get more out of the stories and be affected more significantly.

. . . perhaps great literature. And what is literature? I don't have ready at hand a comprehensive definition, but my off-the-cuff answer would be something to the effect of stories (narratives) that portray the human condition in its complexities, with compassion and with humor - because literature, as with all art, should help see us (both individually and as a species) through this life, towards which end I believe compassion and humor of some sort are essential. But concrete examples are probably more useful than abstract definitions, and SARAJEVO MARLBORO would be one of the principal works of fiction from my recent reading that I would offer as an example of literature.

It is a collection of 29 stories written about life in Sarajevo and Bosnia, mostly during the first years of the Siege of Sarajevo. The first published book by Miljenko Jergovic, it originally was published in Croatia in 1994. Neither fighting nor politics feature prominently in these stories. Instead, they deal with the effects of the war on ordinary people who are trying to go about the business of life, an endeavor complicated inordinately in unpredictably random ways once enveloped by War. Since the setting is Sarajevo, most of the people in these stories are Bosnians, who of course are besieged by Serbs. But SARAJEVO MARLBORO does not side with the Bosnians, or the Serbs, or the Croats, or with the Catholics, the Orthodox, or the Muslims. A pox on all their houses.

Instead it sides with Jela, an old woman who every day trudged to market in order to fetch the humanitarian aid and water until one day a shell exploded ten yards away from her, blowing her arm off. With Elena and Zlaja, of different religious backgrounds and different "nationalities", who despite their odd compatibility cannot live together safe and secure in either Sarajevo or Zagreb. With the gravedigger, who while digging the grave for a man killed by a sniper walking down a road, is interviewed by an American journalist who is dumfounded when the gravedigger does not automatically spew out ethnic hostilities but instead talks about walking through life happily or unhappily ("You end up happy or you don't - and that's all.").

The stories range from four to ten pages. The writing is informal and straightforward; Jergovic has a distinctive voice. His perspective is unusual, slightly askew, maybe even slightly twisted. A thin veil of absurd mystery cloaks everything. There is much humor, often sardonic in nature. There also is frequent philosophizing. ("Humans live out of curiosity. That's the best and most honest way. Anything else is just a false way of courting other people's tears.") I was reminded more than once of both Kafka and Borges. That is not to predict that fifty years from now Jergovic will be as highly regarded as Kafka and Borges are now, but, judging from SARAJEVO MARLBORO (the first book of his that I have read), it is possible.

P.S.: My advice is to skip the rather pretentious introduction by Ammiel Alcalay.

P.P.S.: "Sarajevo Marlboro" is a brand of cigarettes developed by Philip Morris to suit the taste of Bosnian smokers. (In other words, Marlboros are not fungible.) Sarajevo Marlboros come up in the course of the gravedigger's attempt to explain to the American journalist how things are in Bosnia, but his effort was doomed to futility. The journalist would have been better served by reading this book.

Behind the storyteller in this fine collection of short stories is a journalist intent on portraying a time and place (Sarajevo during the 1990s Balkan War) and the people living there, dying, or fleeing. Instead of the drama that journalistic war coverage tends to bring to the subject, Jergovic speaks from another perspective. He has the sensibility of one for whom mortars, refugees, death and injury, living in a cellar, lack of running water and electricity, and loss of everything of value have become routine. It is an achievement to retain a kind of sanity that allows one to carry on yet another day in hell as hope of rescue fades.

Under the calm, resigned, matter-of-fact surface of these stories there is a deep sorrow and rage. Also an appreciation for all that is temporal and fleeting though taken for granted until it disappears. A story devoted to the burning of libraries is an occasion for encouraging the reader to cherish books (including the one the reader is holding as he/she reads this) for they are dust. Another story, devoted to the loss of faith, tells of a woman who clings to the belief that her husband killed in action was not in love with another woman. Faith is more important than love, the author argues. It is an untruth we tell ourselves to protect us from the lies of others.

Other stories depict the emotional disconnect that occurs for those who have lost loved ones or have witnessed horrible atrocities. A man whose family has been slaughtered is taken for psychological testing to a hospital in Prague, where he likens himself to one being avenged for the same murders - and is promptly declared insane. Meanwhile, descriptions of forced resettlements are portrayed as dark comedies, husband and wife disagreeing over what to take and what to leave behind - the family Bible or a novel by Ivo Andric. Choose!

Most thoughtful and poignant is a long, undelivered letter (because the person it's addressed to is dead) written by a student far from his own home in Africa, who brings his perspective, as another kind of displaced person, to what is happening in Bosnia. "I left without saying goodbye," he begins, and in those words is the sad acceptance of loss that exists in all these stories, a lost friendship, a lost city, a lost country. If Jergovic has a "message," it is this one that crosses language and cultural boundaries. Seize the day; everything else is dust.

This is an excellent book and makes a great gift for those interested in the Balkans and/or short stories. Jergovic takes the reader into the life of regular people during the Balkan wars and instead of focusing on the destruction, focuses on life; making his stories both powerful and informative.

Buy this book! You won't regret it.

He writes about the unseen face of war, the people and the casualties of such a war. An excellent book, with a whirlwind of emotions.

I like books about all different countries, but books about countries during wartime many times either are filled with all the gore and no character development and the rest are obviously written by either someone who is trying to protect the reader from any wartime reality, or he/she has no idea of the devastation of a war-zone.
Sarajevo Marlboro however is one of those that I believe has the perfect amount of character development, but also the author allows the characters to analyze the wartime situation with truth and real feelings. To be honest I don't know a lot about the situation in Sarajevo in the mid 90's, and I don't know much about it now, but I felt that I got a glimpse of accurate social history through Sarajevo Marlboro.

Miljenko Jergovic creates 29 short stories during the time of war (Serbs, Croats and Muslims). The humans, real citizens, they were the focus, humanity was centre stage and war was exploding all around them as they lived on, or did not. I was captivated because I admired their strength, determination and perseverance. It is through them Jergovic depicts the scene and the gruesome tale of war. Weather you believe in war, or don't it is happening currently and has been going on all over for generations and generations. This for me was the human side, the side that often lies hidden under death tolls and arguments as to if there really should be a war or not. The portrayal of humanity, from so many different perspectives is demonstrated in Sarajevo Marlboro. Since the author chose to jump from this life to that, and this family to that you feel like you are allowed in, and become part of them for the time when Jergovic is telling their story, they engulf you, you care about them you fear for them, you grieve for them, and you hope for a better future for those who have now become your friends.

For me personally the way Jergovic chose to write these stories made the book, if he would have tried to encapsulate the entire picture of devastation in one shot, or the horror of war in just one image there would have been no way that a person who had not been there would be able to tolerate reading the gruesomeness of the truth. Because he chose to drop the reader in on 29 different families, 29 different situations, and 29 different glimpses of the war it felt broken up enough to allow the terror to enter in bit by bit. All the stories together form a whole, they are a complete and gruesome picture of war, but in the eyes of the people there is also so much hope, and life that it is somehow made more bearable. I saw their determination to live, and dreams of a different future.

Here is a little excerpt from the inside cover about the author Miljenko Jergovic:

"Croatian by birth, Jergovic spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. A dazzling storyteller, he brings a profoundly human, razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city's young Muslims, Croats, Serbs with a subterranean humor and profoundly personal vision. Their offbeat lives and daily dramas in the foreground, the killing zone in the background."

I loved this book, and can't wait to get another one of Miljenko Jergovic's titles in my hands. I am captivated by his writing style and the heart that is is obvious that he has for his people.