<![CDATA[How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone]]>

false <![CDATA[How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1213133571m/2048143.jpg 2048143 11 <div>For young Aleksandar Krsmanoviæ, his grandfather Slavko’s credo--“the most valuable gift of all is invention, imagination is your greatest wealth”--endows life in Višegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina with a mythic quality, a kaleidoscopic brilliance. So when his grandfather dies suddenly, Aleks summons this gift of storytelling to see him through his grief. It is a gift he will have to call on again when soldiers transform Višegrad--a town previously unconscious of racial and religious divides--into a nightmarish landscape of terror and violence. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past, and especially by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, he sends manic, anguished letters out into the abyss, again turning to language to conjure all that he’s had to forfeit--his homeland, his mother tongue, his innocence. Beneath the infectious vibrancy of Stanišiæ’s voice is a sweetness and pathos that will haunt the reader long after the book ends. Powerful, vivid, funny, and devastating, <i>How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone</i> captures the catastrophe of war through a child’s eyes and shows how words have the ability to mend what is broken and resurrect what is lost.</div> 2053079 2007 How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone total:118|5:50|4:40|3:18|2:8|1:2| 118 482 295 56 5 2 false false Sat May 24 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 03 07:42:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 03 08:01:16 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri Apr 04 11:30:12 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 04 11:31:42 -0700 2008 5 2 false false Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 16 15:20:43 -0800 2007 Sun Dec 16 15:20:48 -0800 2007 5 1 false false Mon Jun 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 09 11:05:35 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 23 12:56:02 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sun May 25 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu May 15 17:53:43 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 09 09:06:00 -0700 2009 Gone With the Wind," say, or my beloved "Dragonlance" series) and the ones we read for the writing (Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine", where all that "happens...more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Jun 03 08:46:51 -0700 2008 Wed May 28 06:45:19 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 03 08:46:51 -0700 2008 How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone deftly tells of the experiences of growing up and being caught up in a war. Comrade in Chief of the Unifinished, Aleksander lives a typical boy's life until his city of Visegard is thrust into war in the early 1990s. His story is one of humor and heartbreak a...more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue May 20 11:04:10 -0700 2008 Thu Jul 09 05:55:56 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Aug 09 07:54:38 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 09 07:57:18 -0700 2009
le serment de transformer la réalité en histoires, l'enfant espère jusqu'au bout le réveiller. Son grand-père adoré n'a-t-il pas fait de lui un...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sat Nov 22 06:25:49 -0800 2008 Fri Nov 28 05:36:35 -0800 2008 How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić is my book from Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Read The World challenge. I actually had a different writer in mind — Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 — but when I saw this in the bookshop I switched. Mainly bec...more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Jul 10 14:57:00 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 10 15:04:08 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 1 false true Mon Jul 28 14:06:14 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 28 14:08:29 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Mon Jan 05 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Dec 16 10:18:05 -0800 2008 Mon Jan 05 17:54:25 -0800 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sat May 10 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Mar 05 14:34:32 -0800 2008 Sat May 10 20:31:00 -0700 2008 4 1 false false Wed Apr 30 11:18:36 -0700 2008 Fri May 09 08:21:02 -0700 2008 4 1 false false Tue Feb 12 09:24:14 -0800 2008 Tue Jan 29 08:49:04 -0800 2008 Tue Jan 29 08:49:37 -0800 2008 3 0 false false Wed Sep 24 13:37:00 -0700 2008 Wed Sep 24 13:39:03 -0700 2008
“I want to make unfinished things,” says the young Aleksandar Krsmanovic in Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Grove Press, 345 pages, $24). He will paint “plums without stones, river...more...]]> 0 0 false false Sun Aug 17 09:28:57 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 17 09:29:27 -0700 2008
Thomas Wolfe has nothing on Aleksandar Krsmanović. “You can’t go home again,” is much more than a saying once your town becomes the site of genocide, as Saša Stanišić details in his debut novel, How...more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Aug 09 15:15:31 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 09 15:48:30 -0700 2008
This starts out happy. And then it gets a little bleak. And then it comes together in a manic fit of emot...more...]]> 0 1 false false Sun Jul 20 13:06:31 -0700 2008 Wed Oct 21 20:36:24 -0700 2009
1. As I learned from bookfriend Brian, the other edition has a photo of a man on the cover, which it turns out (unbeknownst even to him) is Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snickett, a.k.a. my boyfriend.
...more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri Jun 06 12:27:02 -0700 2008 Thu Apr 23 16:22:40 -0700 2009 more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=2048143