LIFE ON THE family farm was never all that easy, but lately, for Helmer Van Wonderen, it has become a bittersweet routine enlivened only by a new development: the slow death of his unpleasant old father.

 

Dad had been a vicious brute in his day, but now, as he waits for death, he is meek, at times even moderately witty, particularly in his obsession with a hooded crow perched in the ash outside his window. Helmer, a candid, world-weary narrator, intent on the truth and possessed of a good memory, is middle-aged and well aware that his life has raced by while he has been milking the cows and counting the sheep. He has had enough, and having carried his father upstairs to Helmer’s old bedroom, is about to make some changes, mainly to the decor.

 

Gerbrand Bakker’s outstanding debut novel, set in the Dutch countryside, is one of those rare works of fiction that everyone should read. It is full of life and truth, all conveyed through a narrative voice that refuses to allow the reader to turn away for a moment.

 

From the opening sentence, “I’ve put Father upstairs”, we are in the presence of a laconic narrator who knows what he is about, not only in what he is doing to the farmhouse but also in how he is planning to tell his story. Helmer is likeable, judging from the way the other characters respond to him, and lonely. He has no reason to love, or even like, his father, while his mother, his old supporter, is long dead, as is his twin brother, Henk, who died, aged 19, in a car crash with his girlfriend, the lovely Riet, who was driving and escaped without a scratch.

 

When Henk died, so did Helmer’s chances of a life away from the farm. Henk, you see, was the farmer; he was his father’s son, his father’s farmhand.

 

Now Helmer is busy, moving father, moving all the old furniture, photographs and pictures, even the grandfather clock, all the family memorabilia. The old man is demanding a doctor, but Helmer refuses to fetch one. Instead he concentrates on the changes, the removal of carpets and the painting of floors. The old man cries out “sheep” and Helmer waits for the paint to dry until fetching the picture his father wants, “the gloomy painting of a flock of black sheep”. Having settled his father upstairs, Helmer gets busy downstairs, painting the walls and ceiling of what had been his parents’ bedroom white – it’s “my room now”.

 

Helmer’s various tasks are painstakingly described: “Dragging a grandfather clock up a staircase is a hellish job. I use rugs, pieces of foam rubber and long, smooth planks. Everything inside the case pings and rattles. The ticking of the clock drove me mad . . .”

 

Helmer has his memories, which together with his ongoing flashback sequences, the visits of the two small boys from the neighbouring farm and an antique map of Denmark (which he buys and begins to memorise), provide some distraction from the nasty business of dealing with his father and his increasingly foul smells.

 

The children are the sons of Ada and her husband. Ada, a plain, kindly woman, is a good deal younger than Helmer, and likes him. Her approach is semi-flirtatious; all the more touching as she has a harelip. Ada wants to see her not-bad-looking bachelor neighbour get something of a life. She is interested in everything he does, and has to see his redecorating and pass judgment on his colour schemes.

 

IN ADDITION TO his graceful, understated prose, Bakker demonstrates throughout this brilliant work two abiding gifts, one for establishing a narrative voice of genius, the other for creating vivid three-dimensional characters who emerge off the page. Ada is one of those characters, and it is possible to feel her helplessness in the face of Helmer’s dilemma. She wants to help him, but there is little she can do. Helmer himself develops into a remarkable study of a passive individual conscious of what has happened to his life.

 

It appears that everything might be about to change with the arrival of a letter. It has come from the past in that it has been written by Riet, the girl who would have been Helmer’s sister-in-law had Henk not died. Riet had been close to the family and had been comforted by Helmer’s mother, but suddenly one day during the week of mourning, his father had finally addressed her: “I want you to go away and never come back.” She leaves and, for more than 30 years, she stays away. But then she sends that letter, and then another.

 

Riet, now the widow of a pig farmer and the mother of two grown daughters and a much younger son, seems as lonely as Helmer. She wants to visit. Helmer tells her that his father is now dead. Riet arrives, still beautiful, and not for a moment does Bakker allow the narrative to slide either into melodrama or fantasy. The action ebbs and flows and the sense of community and the physical setting are subtly established.

 

More and more information is released by Helmer, a man not given to moaning but who is nonetheless aware that had his brother not been killed, he would have continued his university studies and escaped from the farm into a very different life. Instead, he knows he is the last of his line, the end of his family.

 

Now the reappearance of Riet plays its part in this examination of the whims of fate. After all, Helmer and Henk were identical twins, so close that it enraged their father, who resented his sons as representing, as Helmer recalls, “a united front” against him. All the old tensions are slowly revisited and powerfully contrasted against the realities of the present – as a former tyrant now lies in bed waiting for death.

 

It seems that Riet may be the one to change Helmer’s life. Her visit inspires much speculation, particularly from Ada. When his father, content with the fact that Riet has been told he is dead, asks about the visit, Helmer decides to improvise, telling the old man: “She came for a job interview.”

 

Nothing is all it seems, and Bakker avoids anything that seems too easy. Darker aspects of the family’s past filter through and a greater sense of the injustices begins to take shape. Beyond the frail body of the old man in the bed is an entire history of cruelty.

 

ALL THE WHILE, in his own quiet if intense way, Helmer explores the privilege and intimacy of being a twin, and the tragedy caused by the death of your other self. Riet sends a messenger, her troubled son, also named Henk (the boy thinks he has been named after one of his father’s old uncles, not after the youth his mother had been going to marry). The dialogue between the narrator and his young visitor, a most reluctant farmhand, is superb.

This is a novel full of sadness and sly humour as well as moments of bright comedy such as when a visitor, a former family workman, asks Ada’s little boys “Are you farmers too?”, only to be corrected: “We’re kids.”

There are shades of Norwegian Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (2003), yet Bakker’s tone is less elegiac, and closer to wry regret and an unusual cohesion. Always busy in the background, as Helmer’s life appears set to change, is the routine: animals must be fed, milk must be collected. Other changes continue to occur, other lives move on, and the seasons come and go in turn.

Not for nothing is this wonderful novel published by Harvill Secker, which has served, and continues to serve, European literature so well by alerting a wider audience to a Dutch literary masterwork of quiet sophistication. The Twin is a narrative you don’t so much read as experience, one you are unlikely to forget because the inspired Gerbrand Bakker has grasped what should be said, and how much more need only be hinted at.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Twin By Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer Harvill Secker, 283pp. £16.99

‘What is the signifiance of the donkeys in your novel?’

With the sigh of an author who’s fielded this and other similar questions many, many times, Gerbrand Bakker gamely replied to his Edinburgh festival inquisitor, ‘If you want the donkeys to be symbolic, that’s fine with me’.

It is with trepidation, therefore, that one approaches the task of reviewing this poignant debut novel, but Bakker’s answer, for all its world-weariness, sums up what the reader can expect from The Twin. Depending on how you read it, it is an evocation of the north European landscape of lowland peaty fields and drainage ditches cowering beneath huge skies; it is the tale of a man forced to live a life he never envisaged for himself in the wake of his twin’s fatal car crash; it is a meditation on familial resentment, lost opportunities and death. The Twin can be all of these things.

Helmer is a gruff man in his fifties. He milks the cows and looks after a few chickens and those donkeys. He also has to care for his elderly and infirm father, for whom he bears an ill-concealed and long-burning resentment: thirty years ago, Helmer’s father forced him to leave his university course when Henk, his twin brother, was killed in a car crash (his fiancee, who was driving, survived).

This has rankled ever since, to the extent that Helmer decides one day to move his father out of his downstairs bedroom into a musty alternative upstairs. Helmer displays a shocking, almost casual, kind of cruelty, ignoring his father’s pleas and even lying to his inquisitive neighbour about the old man’s mental health.

It takes the unexpected reappearance of Henk’s fiancee, Riet, to knock Helmer out of this rut. Banished from the farm forever by the twins’ father after Henk’s death, Riet moved away, married and had a son. Years later, she writes to Helmer, asking if she can visit. He agrees, but lies to her that his father has died. After this visit, she asks if her teenage son (Henk) can come to the farm; she doesn’t know what to do with him and thinks a stint of farmwork might help.

Henk’s brooding, grumpy presence shakes up Helmer and brings about a subtle change in his relationship with his father. For decades Helmer’s method of self-preservation has been to shut himself down by not thinking too much, but Riet’s son stirs in him memories and frustrations. Meanwhile, around him, the cows need milking every day and the seasons inevitably but erratically change.

Bakker’s paean to the Dutch countryside is beautifully understated, as is his portrayal of the characters. A sense of turmoil bubbling under a skein of stillness applies to Helmer and to the landscape around him (much like Anne Ragde’s Norwegian novel Berlin Poplars, which is also set on an isolated farm). In this respect, the literal translation of the book’s Dutch title It’s Quiet Upstairs (Boven is het stil) seems better able to convey the subdued but beating heart of this quietly profound novel.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

[A] masterpiece. . . . The Hague’s greatest writer, turn-of-the-century Louis Couperus . . . captured the city in a famous novel, Eline Vere. . . . For its roomy, chatty descriptions of life among the moneyed classes, it is a Buddenbrooks avant la lettre; for its restless heroine, trapped by social obligations, it’s a Dutch Madame Bovary. . .  in Ina Rilke’s smart new translation, it anticipates the questions that would become so important for women in the decades to come: no longer content in a purely domestic world, what were they to do with themselves?

The twenty-nine (very) short stories in Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic (Archipelago Books) are set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, and they fill the gaps in the media coverage during that time and in the historical and political accounts that followed. These are tragic, hopeful and funny stories about philosophical, religious, nationalistic, political, historical and practical subjects, such as the difficulty of getting water during war, the joys of findings your favourite bar still standing, the presence of foreign journalists in Sarajevo and the exodus of refugees. Jergovic tells his stories without pretension, sentiment or righteousness, but simply like a stranger with a love for Sarajevo and a firm understanding of its complexity, who tells how he and others lived and died during the war. Sarajevo Marlboro ends with an account of the burning of the Sarajevo University Library, which took twenty-four hours, and the vast number of books all over the city that turned to ash during the war, which reminds the reader of the fragility of books and the privilege of holding this one in your hands.

I almost put Miljenko’s Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro (Archipelago Books) aside when I read this passage from Ammiel Alcalay’s introduction:

One novel or book of poems by a single writer, removed from the cluster of other writers and artists from which it has emerged, unbuttressed by correspondence, biographies, or critical studies—such a work of translation in America too often functions as a means of reinforcing the assumptions behind our uniquely military/industrial/new critical approach to the work of art as an object of contemplation rather than a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history.

“Military/industrial/new critical approach”? Now, I understand that New Criticism (formalism more generally) was guilty of a multitude of sins—primary among them a preference for literature over propaganda and polemics—but to associate it with the military-industrial complex? This is so over-the-top that it convinces me once and for all that such frenetically politicized prattle masquerading as literary commentary really is just plain silly, not worth the attention of anyone who believes that a work of fiction or poetry is under no obligation to be “a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history” or who wonders why calls to arms or cries for justice have to be also labeled “art” for them to be worth doing. Why not a place for political agitation or acts of solidarity and a place for art less grandly defined? And how thoroughly has Alcalay turned formalism on its head! Gone is the idea that a work of literary art, including translated work, has even a shred of formal integrity, that it can be appreciated without resorting to secondary “information.” Now we need “correspondence, biographies, or critical studies” or our reading experience is “unbuttressed.”

I concluded that Miljenko Jergovic could not be held responsible for the inanities of someone chosen by others to write about his book, so, free entirely of external buttresses—including the remainder of Alcalay’s introduction—I did read Sarajevo Marlboro . And I’m certainly glad I did, since it is a very good book, worthy even of being regarded as (gasp) “an object of contemplation.” It certainly does act as a “witness to history”—the seige of Sarajevo during the 1990s—but if we were to take it simply as that we would be willfully ignoring both the quiet artistry of the individual sketches making up the book and the cumulative effect of these sketches as they work to depict an enclosed world struggling to maintain itself against destructive forces (themselves largely kept outside the frame of the book’s portrayed world) threatening to overwhelm it. These forces are not preternatural—the Serb militias are real enough—but by the end of the book one does feel that the Sarajevans are being subjected to a speeded-up version of the distress and ill-fortune life ultimately inflicts on almost everyone.

In calling these pieces “sketches” I don’t mean to suggest they lack something in formal substance compared to a more fully-formed “story.” Most of the sketches in Sarajevo Marlboro are no more than 5-8 pages, and although some of them compress fairly long stretches of time, few take on the characteristics of the “well-made” story. But to do so would actually detract from the overall coherence of the book, which depends upon each of the more modest parts adding up to a powerful whole. This is not to say that individual sketches lack their own kind of force. Most of them present memorable characters Jergovic is able to draw in a minimum of brush strokes but who are also representative of the sorts of people who inhabit a city like Sarajevo, itself a kind of crossroads of cultures. Most focus on ordinary activities—ordinary if you’re living in a city under bombardment—but through understatement and, at times, a kind of grim humor the sketches seem laden with significance.

If all that such sketches did was to announce, over and over again, that “war is hell” or “injustice reigns,” in my opinion they really wouldn’t be worth reading. I’m pretty sure I already know that these things are true, as well as that the Bosnian war was particularly senseless. Perhaps there are some readers who will settle for the canned interpretation of a book likeSarajevo Marlboro as a literary “indictment” of war or of the political powers that engage in it or fail to stop it, but they will be ignoring the way Jergovic portrays a multifarious array of human beings discovering their own hidden reserves of dignity and endurance at the same time he portrays the most ruinous expressions of human nature. They’ll be overlooking the way he chooses just the right aesthetically restrained means of creating a fictionalized Sarajevo whose plight we can appreciate not because it seems exotically terrifying but because it seems recognizably human. In short, they would be missing out on a work of literary art that can also be an “act of solidarity” only because it’s first of all very skillfully made.

If you struggle with the moral questions raised by the disastrous political commitments of certain otherwise stimulating or even essential writers, then ponder this anecdote. It goes back to the years 1992-95, when Sarajevo was besieged by Serbian paramilitaries and the Serbian-controlled Yugoslavian Army, and when civilians—dashing through the streets for water or food—were being killed daily by snipers hiding in the surrounding high hills. The Russian novelist Edward Limonov (who is the author of the best-selling It’s Me, Eddie, among other books, and who had become pro-Serbian with respect to the Balkan War and ultranationalist with respect to his homeland) arrived at an army outpost on the Trebevic mountain flanking the town, then was filmed as he shot machine-gun rounds down at scurrying Sarajevo inhabitants.

This may be old news to you: the event was featured in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1992 BBC documentary “Serbian Epics,” and the footage was later used as prosecution evidence at the trial, in The Hague, of the Serbian ethnic cleanser Radovan Karadzic, whom Limonov had befriended. Mea culpa: like most European and American writers—Juan Goytisolo and Susan Sontag are conspicuous exceptions—to whom the Balkan War, however close geographically, was at best a very distant concern, I was unaware of much of this until I arrived in Sarajevo for a prolonged stay last spring.

A decade has passed since the Dayton Agreement (of 21 November 1995) brought a still-fragile end to the Balkan War, yet memories of this gruesome anecdote involving Limonov have not faded. It was spontaneously recounted to me on three different occasions by Sarajevans, none of them writers, who were trying to convey what the treacherous siege was like. The specter of a novelist aiming at men and women lugging jerricans epitomizes, for such survivors, the widespread calculated cruelty and murder that marked the war and changed probably forever a town famous for its centuries-long, more or less peaceful, cohabitation of Muslims, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews.

Indeed, the square (Trg Oslobodenja) where I drafted parts of this letter while sitting on a bench near the bust of the too little-known novelist Mesa Selimovic (the author of the deep-probing, Sarajevo-set, psychological novels Death and the Dervish [1966] and The Fortress [1970]), is flanked by the large Serbian Orthodox Church; if you pass by the many outdoor chess players and cross the square, then turn right, the Catholic cathedral stands just a little off Ferhadija, the pedestrian shopping street; continue on your way down Ferhadija, and you soon arrive at the great Gazi-Husrev-Begova mosque; and a few yards more, to the left up a narrow passageway, is the old synagogue, now a museum devoted to the history of the local Jewish population, most of whom were exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War. Within a few minutes’ walking distance from there is the bridge near which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914—the event that sparked the First World War. Under that bridge flows the muddy, reddish Miljacka river, an incessant symbol of earth mixed with copious blood.

One of my interlocutors, named Igor, insisted on driving me up a winding road to the spot from which Limonov had fired his rounds. It is an overlook not far from the former bobsled run of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and the slope descending from there down to the town is still specked with thousands of antipersonnel mines. Signs warn hikers to stop. “No walking anymore in these lovely mountains, let alone skiing and sledding,” Igor pointed out, adding that his own adolescence had been nipped in the bud and that he himself had taken up arms to defend his hometown. The offspring of a mixed Croatian-Serbian marriage, he was not alone among non-Muslims in deciding to remain and side with his fellow Sarajevans, the majority of whom are of Muslim origin. “It was only during the war,” he related, “that we learned to listen to first names ethnically—sometimes with disastrous consequences. Up to then, I never paid any attention. We are all Slavs and speak the same language.”

Now, after the war, Igor sometimes finds himself painfully stigmatized—depending on whom he is talking to—for being neither “purely” Serbian nor Croatian nor Muslim. In one of the moving short stories of Sarajevo Marlboro (1994), Miljenko Jergovic (1966-), recalling the war, similarly notes that as time went by the Muslims and the Croats began to listen to the firebrands among their leaders. They began to look askance at each other and then to set fire to one another’s houses. Each community went its own way—some escaping to Zenica, others from Zenica to neighboring towns. They dug trenches for several weeks and then the chaos began. Wherever you went there was blood and shooting. . . We battled over each field, over plots of land to which none had given a second thought until then.

From Trebevic mountain, Igor and I had “an excellent view of the hills around Sarajevo, which are dotted with white Turkish tombstones,” as Jergovic also states with bitter irony. Resembling so many small Arlington cemeteries (each similarly impressive in its stark row-by-row accounting of slaughter), well over a dozen Muslim graveyards sprouted up on every hillside during the war. Some ancient graveyards adjoining modest neighborhood mosques likewise became overcrowded with white, turban-crowned, pillar-like stones.

And this sight continued to bring back all the horror and hubris of the Limonov incident. It was, moreover, all the more tangible for me in that I had run into and chatted with the Russian novelist a few times during the 1980s, when we were both living in Paris. We had writer-friends in common. His act has kept me thinking about writers’ oft-troubled relationship to reality, and by this I do not mean reality as it is aimed at merely through the sights of crafted language. A cynical French novelist once speculated that “perhaps in the final reckoning . . . the goal of this coup d’Ètat, with all its consequences, was simply to offer attractive scenes enticing talented men of letters to write about them.”

Gustave Flaubert knew well how human conflict and suffering can allure writers (independently of any sympathy for the victims), sometimes politically deluding them in the process. His remark is quoted by the dissident Serbian novelist Vidosav Stevanovic (1942-) in his memoir Voleurs de leur propre libertÈ, which became available in French in 2003. Living in political exile in Paris since 1992, Stevanovic takes the Frenchman’s comment literally in order to raise the question of how aesthetics relate to ethics. “Ethics nonetheless still concerns [writers],” cautions Stevanovic, “who use aesthetics as an excuse for hiding their head in the sand and refusing to participate, to accept responsibility.”

This is a classic call for political concern and direct writerly commitment. A democrat and a long-standing adversary of Balkan nationalisms, the novelist had returned to his homeland during the crucial period, mid-December 1996 to mid-July 1997, in order to take part in the growing opposition movement against Slobodan Milosevic. It seemed then that Serbia could become more democratic. Stevanovic’s memoir recounts the failure of this movement, and castigates the intellectuals who eventually exchanged their ideals for political privileges. His chronologically intricate novel, Abel et Lise, which was also translated into French in 2003, similarly evokes the personal destruction caused by the rise of nationalist sentiment, in this case as it tragically affects the now separate lives of two former lovers, an Albanian man and a Serbian woman.

In Stevanovic, the political dichotomies are clear-cut (however literarily engaging), but let me return to Flaubert’s more psychological observation about the motivations of some writers attracted to war and suffering. Several of Jergovic’s stories in Sarajevo Marlboro scrutinize authorial or journalistic inspiration per se, raising the additional question of how events are consequently construed from various vantage points. The lesson formulated both by him and by another compelling Bosnian writer, Aleksandar Hemon (1964-)—much of whose formally sophisticated collection The Question of Bruno (2000), written in English, concerns the dilemma of a young Sarajevo writer who finds himself in Chicago on a scholarship when the war breaks out in his hometown—is that even well-meaning outside observers are inevitably trapped into viewing events according to their ideas about how such events should be viewed. Both Hemon and Jergovic are interested in the phenomenology of violence, hatred, and survival, as well as in how such phenomena are perceived, especially by writer-eyewitnesses, writers-newly-arrived-on-the-scene, and writers-in-exile. More generally, they overturn the too simplistic Western understanding of the Balkan War as an irrational ethnic and nationalistic confrontation.

The two short-story writers are not alone in espousing this viewpoint. As quoted by Ammiel Alcalay in his preface to Sarajevo Marlboro, the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek, for example, posits that in former Yugoslavia, we are lost not because of our primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened language of Europe, but because we pay in flesh the price of being the stuff the Other’s dreams are made of . . . Far from being the Other of Europe, former Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse . . . Against today’s journalistic commonplace about the Balkans as the madhouse of thriving nationalisms where rational rules of behavior are suspended, one must point out again and again that the moves of every political agent in former Yugoslavia, reprehensible as they may be, are totally rational within the goals they want to attain—the only exception, the only truly irrational factor in it, is the gaze of the West, babbling about archaic ethnic passions.

I’m sure that Flaubert would have understood Zizek’s point about passionate or violent behavior actually concealing a devastating, rigorous, Machiavellian logic—applied by outside, sometimes initially opaque and undesignated sources—that one must pinpoint and define if one is to make some sense of the reality transpiring before one’s eyes. Such is the gist of Jergovic’s story “The Letter,” in which the narrator finds a missive that has been sent to a man in Sarajevo who, before receiving it, was killed by a sniper while he was standing in his doorway smoking a cigarette. It turns out that the letter has been written by an African who had originally come from a nonaligned country and had settled in Sarajevo during the years (between 1948 and 1980) when Yugoslavia, ruled by Marshal Tito, was itself a nonaligned communist nation. In his letter to his Bosnian friend, the African explains why he has fled the city and details how hard it is for the foreigners, where he is now living in exile, to understand the war. Significantly and tragically, the letter cannot be answered; it is in the writer’s hands, in all possible senses of the expression.

“The Gravedigger” likewise stages an encounter between the writer-narrator and an American journalist. “I understand that he is researching the subject for his article,” pointedly explains the writer (who has become a gravedigger), “except he can’t write the piece because he already knows what it’s going to say.” This, too, is a caveat for any well-intentioned writer desiring to probe behind the epiphenomenona of reality. Even more incisively, a story about one Slobodan, who is an idiot, describes how one of the first CNN bulletins from Sarajevo contained footage of the retarded man wandering aimlessly through the city as dozens of shells exploded on all sides. “The camera followed him for about seventy yards,” adds Jergovic, no doubt because the journalists were expecting to capture the moment when the Serb onslaught destroyed an innocent life in Sarajevo. Slobodan very casually sauntered over to the cameraman and gave him a warm smile. . . . He didn’t stop. He just went on his way as the shells continued to fall. That night the reporter, with some disappointment, informed viewers that there were insanely brave people living in Sarajevo.

While I was exploring the streets and back streets, I thus often thought of the different ways in which writers have responded to, or spurned, objective reality. I thought of how reality has been variously defined by writers and philosophers alike. In Sarajevo, it is certainly hard not to be overwhelmed by the brute (and brutal) factuality of nearly everything in sight. War scars are omnipresent: bomb-devastated edifices that have not yet been razed and replaced; weeds and even trees that have sprouted up through shattered concrete; the half-destroyed helicopter, tank, and sundry artillery vehicles that are rusting behind the Historical Museum and next to the National Museum with its stunning Bogomil gravestones and excellent wild animal, bird, and insect collections; countless shell-dented walls and bullet-pelted balconies (sometimes with blooming flowers in a pot or two); numerous smoke-blackened, windowless apartments in buildings also containing attractively curtained flats that have been repaired. In the small shops of the Bascarsi Muslim quarter in the old town, not far from the phosphorus-bombed National Library (everything was lost), you can buy artillery shells of all shapes and sizes that have been transformed into vases, pen holders, and ashtrays. Dire contrasts such as these pop up at every corner.

As for the human realities of the Balkan War, two remarkable collections of short prose by the Bosnian Velibor Colic (1964-) focus—like Hemon and Jergovic’s stories—on the kinds of telltale detail that, if you prefer keeping your emotions intact, you had better avoid. Written on the spot during the fighting and available in French, Les Bosniaques (1993) and Chronique des oubliÈs (1994) recall both the short-prose interludes of Hemingway’s In Our Time and Daniel Zimmermann’s terse eyewitness accounts of Algerian War scenes (Nouvelles de la zone interdite). One also thinks of Marcel Cohen’s volumes of short prose reports on all sorts of disturbing contemporary phenomena. Like Cohen, Colic’s concise texts record extremely grim facts, without proffering the slightest moral judgment. For this reason, the images are all the more harrowing:

The guards of the Doboj concentration camp dragged Jozo the prisoner by the balls to the toilet of the former Federal Army barracks, now transformed into a prison. When he was finally able to prop himself back up, he saw the Serbian emblem (the four C’s) drawn on a mirror with human shit. The guards forced him to lick it off.

No direct transition can link this despicable scene and Chinese Letter, a novel by the Serbian writer Svetislav Basara (1953-), yet the book provided an unexpected coda to my Sarajevo sojourn. Published in Serbian in 1984 and in English in 2005 (Dalkey Archive Press), the novel is unrelated to the Balkan War. But from the very first sentence, with its evocation of jarred identities (“My name is Fritz. Yesterday I had a different name.”) and with the author’s tense first allusions to a 100-page statement that he has been ordered to write by two unnamed, threatening men, a grim political tragedy seems to loom on the horizon. Chinese Letter is informed by the communist ethos of Eastern Europe and, more specifically, by the increasing tensions, following the death of Tito in 1980, among politically manipulated ethnic populations in a Yugoslavia already falling apart. Yet this historical and political background does not sufficiently describe the unsettling ambience of the book. There are echoes of Kafka and Beckett, but also of Stephen King and Agatha Christie. Major philosophical concerns are raised when “something happens,” and the question too of what the writer should do with whatever he thinks an “event” or “incident” means.

These questions alone were sufficiently pertinent to what I had seen and learned in Sarajevo. Indeed, Basara ominously (and sometimes jocularly) tells various stories and conjures up quite a lot of disturbing trivia, all the while reflecting on the logic underlying everyday life. It is impossible to sum up his at once capricious and hyperlogical narration, which constantly moves from the routines and common facts of the quotidian to something opaque and undefined and threatening. As I was reworking my notes for this Letter, long after I had returned home to France, two sentences from Chinese Letter kept haunting me. Let me quote both as tentative summaries of my Sarajevan experiences. The first points to the problem of determining the rational connections among what one sees, how one lives, and what one writes. “On paper everything has its direction, its logic,” claims Basara, “but in reality everything that happens except for this logic is unclear.” The second quotation concerns a girl without an arm: “What is this girl going to do,” asks the author, “in [a] world in which even two hands aren’t enough to cover your face with?”

Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of twenty-nine stories set in and around the besieged Bosnian capital during the 1991-95 Yugoslav war, marks the American debut of a writer who deserves as enthusiastic an audience in the United States as he enjoys in Europe. A Croat by birth who grew up in Sarajevo and spent much of the war there, Jergovic builds his stories around the daily itineraries of the Muslims, Croats, and Serbs whose coexistence was so tragically problematized by the conflict. In a vibrant, understated prose that has been handsomely rendered into English by Stela Tomasevic, Jergovic brings a powerful cocktail of irony, humour, and detachment to the daunting task of crafting stories asserting the potency of lives that continue to improbably unfurl against a backdrop of bullets and explosions or resonate after they are cut brutally short. Along the way, a wide range of experience is probed. In “Mr. Ivo” a gentleman from Dubrovnik , who has a well on his property, fastidiously, charmingly, indefatigably ensures that all of his neighbors have access to it during water shortages. In “A Diagnosis” a man who sees his family killed with an electric saw by Serb forces becomes the subject of maddeningly disconnected “therapeutic” experiments. In “The Photograph” a woman looping inexorably into insanity tries desperately to conjure up a sense-making narrative to cling to in the wake of her husband’s death. All of the stories are short; all of them move quickly toward the ever-shifting heart of the matter: the modalities of living in the middle of so much death. Jergovic’s great gift is in illuminating the harrowing simplicity and complexity of doing so. As Ammiel Alcalay writes in his eloquent introduction, “Jergovic has molded a writing of the quotidian, a writing of everyday history whose details interrogate myths and lacerate the heart.”

“Stick to what you know” is fine advice for the peacetime writer, but what counsel for the victim of war, when all he knows is dead or gone or buried under a pile of rubble?

If you’re Bosnian author Miljenko Jergovic, you follow the rules by rewriting them. The 29 very short stories in his Sarajevo Marlboro (newly translated and available for the second time in English) are grim, beautiful ruminations on how the familiarities of life can, in the instant a bomb drops, become unrecognizable. In Jergovic’s Bosnia, even the most meaningless of objects – a dilapidated Volkswagen, a kitchen hotpot – take on monumental significance, for they are the remains of the day. When the days are one long absence and the nights even longer, tangibility is a comfort not easily come by.

In “Cactus,” a house plant given to a man during peacetime becomes a symbol of tenacity and perseverance, even when the man must move himself (and his obstinate plant) into a dank cellar following a particularly harrowing aerial bombardment. When the cactus finally dies, “the tip pointing downward as if the sun was pointing under the ground,” something in the man dies as well:

Nowadays, in conversation, whenever somebody raises a topic that I find upsetting, I have a sense of this tiny red light automatically switching on inside me, not unlike the one you press to remove the background noise on a tape. And after that, I don’t feel anything. But when I think about that cactus, the light refuses to come on, and nothing else helps … I get sad just thinking about the way a cactus dies, like the boy in Goethe’s poem. It’s not important, mind you, except as a warning to avoid detail in life. That’s all.

No blind hysteria or overwrought characters are to be found in this remarkable collection. With a natural sense of stopping point and courage to spare, Jergovic has the mien of the rare author whose gift is so innate he need only conquer a few demons and steady his hands enough to write it all down.

How do we judge literature in translation? Particularly when ignorant not only of the original language, but also of the literary and cultural history surrounding the creation of the work in question, most readers of translation are at a loss. In Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short stories by Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergovic, the reader’s sense of loss slides away from issues of translation, and into an appreciation for the Bosnian mediation between the languages of life and death.

Reading Ammiel Alcalay’s introduction to Sarajevo Marlboro orients us through immediate contact with that loss. On the first page, we are told “The texts that manage to sneak through our monolingual borders still only provide a mere taste—fragmented, out of context—of what such works might represent in their own cultures, languages, historical and political contexts.” But this loss extends further than the cliché of being “lost in translation.” Alcalay lets us know the futility of trying to make up for lost time, too: “Following the publication of Sarajevo Marlboro in 1994, Jergovic has published nine books, while never ceasing to be an acute observer and critic of Croatian political and cultural life.”

Jergovic’s examination of Croatian life at times extends into an awareness of the gap between the foreigner’s translated gaze and the native reality. In “The Letter,” the narrator opens a letter that explains how “Foreign reporters began talking about ‘the hundred-year hatred’ and incomprehensible tribal conflicts, and the Bosnians became less and less interested in convincing them otherwise.” Or in the central story “Gravedigger,” a character explains to an American reporter that “he can’t write the piece because he already knows what it’s going to say.” Then, opening a pack of cigarettes with no label—because there are no printing presses in Yugoslavia—the narrator knows the reporter will not understand his excitement: “Whatever I say, he’ll just think, ‘Look at these mad people! They turn cigarette wrappers inside out, then tear them apart to see what cigarettes they’ve bought. If you want my opinion, the people here are just like their pack of cigarettes: everything is back to front—what they say and what they think and what they do.’” But the secret, unavailable to the American journalist, is that the cigarettes are the old style Sarajevo Marlboros. A different taste from American Marlboros, they present a quality unique to Yugoslavia. They are, in fact, a translated cigarette, known by the same name but with a distinct and evasive identity.

The disconnection between the reality and idealized world of Bosnia pervades nearly all of Jergovic’s quick stories. In almost every example someone or something dies—even, in “Beetle,” a car—and at times the book reads like a eulogy for people’s ability to deal with death, rather than for the dead themselves. In war stories that almost never mention the soldiers, focusing instead on the civilians who bear the emotional brunt of the war, we find that the true loss is perhaps an ability to comprehend our world. “Declension” opens with Jergovic’s signature understatement, and the inability to concentrate on the horror:

Hypnotized by the rhythm, the young boy had been declining the Latin word terra for the last fifteen minutes. He gently swayed in the middle of the room, happy and vacant, and just as handsome as a Buddhist monk.

His stepfather was chain-smoking cigarettes and rewinding the videotape of a massacre he had filmed in central Bosnia. The speeded-up images of suffering and tears played on your nerves, dispelling the memory of emotion. He had to think of a commentary in a hurry in order to dispatch the report to the United States the next day. Briefly he thought it would be a good idea just to record the sound of the boy declining terra, terra, terram, terre…and blood.

In “Beard,” Dinka, returning from identifying the body of Juraj, her dead husband, remembers Dejan, a long-bearded Muslim who had interspersed promises to rescue Juraj with threats to kill him. But, “still trying to comprehend that her Juraj was no more, and that nothing was left of him except a hollow skull,” she cannot focus on her husband’s absence. Instead, “All she could think was, ‘How on earth does [Dejan] wash that beard—does he shampoo it or does he just wash his face in the morning like everybody else?”

Of all the characters who cannot bear too much reality, the character of the city of Sarajevo is cracked the deepest. A city which should have replaced New York as world capital has been torn through, its citizens mired in a confused hatred. In “Bosnian Hotpot,” Sarajevo is described as inclusive enough to be “a city that didn’t require people to change the habits of a lifetime—it could even put up with people’s contempt.” But with the start of the shelling, the city is abandoned, its lovers scattered to refugee camps and cemeteries. By the time Sarajevo is described in “The Letter,” it is written in the language of loss: “At first it was rumored that the Serbs would take the city, and then that they would kill everybody. As soon as we realized that neither event was going to happen, we understood that we had to be—different the outside world became an object of hatred.”

The final loss illustrated in this translation comes out in the final story, which—like all great final stories—encapsulates and lifts off from the dissociation embodied in the earlier pieces. Describing the burning of libraries, Jergovic writes:

There’s no point in not letting a fire swallow up things that human indifference has already destroyed. The beauty of Paris or London is only an alibi for the criminals who have allowed Warsaw, Dresden, Vukovar and Sarajevo to disappear. But even if they hadn’t ceased to exist, they would have become places inhabited by people who even in peacetime were ready to evacuate, who were prepared to abandon their books.

And so we return to the loss that contemplation of translation hints at. With language, with life, each moment slips past, irretrievable, lost. Only a few instances stick for more than their allotted time; these instances are epiphanies such as the last sentence of Sarajevo Marlboro: “Gently stroke your books, dear stranger, and remember they are dust.”

Almost every part of the globe that has seen war has also seen an emergence of books probing the experience, whether as straightforward storytelling, romanticism, or magical realism. Bosnia is no exception, but this collection of stories is in no way “yet another book” on the subject—it is probably the most effective of the lot in its portrayal of the mundane human experience. Jergovic, a native Sarajevan who has in recent years become a literary celebrity in the region, truly tells it like it is by zooming in on the ways in which war creeps into the lives of ordinary citizens, not only when it is already raging but also before it begins. “If the war spreads, heaven forbid, I’m well prepared,” proclaims Mr. Ivo in one story. “If it doesn’t, so what? I had a lot of fun digging up by garden.” What better way than this to convey the nature of a mentality so deeply rooted in dark humor and paradox? The concluding story, “The Library,” offers a powerful interpretation of the roles that books played during the worst of times and the horrible ways in which they perished alongside those who value them. An indispensable purchase.