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Baskı Altında
Bu acımasız ve yürek burkan, Zoro Verlag (2004) ödüllü öykü seçkisi, Boşnak yazar Faruk Şehiç'in birçok dilde yayımlanan en önemli eseri. Aynı zamanda bir savaş gazisi ve şair olan Şehiç, güzelliği ve dehşeti bir araya getiren etkileyici üslubuyla okuru şaşırtmayı başarıyor ve savaşı, kelimenin tam anlamıyla bir AK-47'nin gözünden tasvir ediyor. Silahların gölgesi altında yazılan bu öyküler; vahşi, natüralist, dürüst ve uzlaşmaz bir tavırla okurun karşısında. Yapılan tüm baskılara karşı güçlü bir isyan. Maktüller ve katiller, cesetleri ve evleri yağmalayan çapulcular, içip içip kavga çıkaranlar, ölmüş bir askerin parçalanmış üniformasıyla aynanın karşısında yürüyüş kararı sayanlar Şehiç'in kaleminden dünyanın kalbine bir hançer gibi saplanıyor.
Şehiç'in öykülerindeki iyilik, vahşet ve korku; okuru baskı altında hissettirecek kadar çarpıcı ve nefes kesici.
"Bu kadar özgün bir üsluptan ötürü heyecanlanmayalı epey zaman oldu. Şehiç, yazılarında metaforlardan ve abartıdan kaçınıyor ancak bu, onu 'Bosnalı Hemingway' olarak övgüyle takdim etmeme engel olmuyor." - Rosie Goldsmith, European Literature Network
"Şehiç, savaşın vahşet dolu çirkinliğini okuru sarsan bir üslupla aktarıyor." - Houman Barekat, The Guardian
"Şehiç, Baskı Altında ile okuma deneyimini yeniden ele alıyor: Çoğunlukla çatışmalardan beslenen, yarı otobiyografik ve güçlü sahneler..." - Tim Judah, The Economist
"Şehiç'in üslubu ve tasvirleri; vahşeti, aşırılıktan uzak bir estetikle okura sunuyor. Muhteşem, güçlü, şairane ve nefes kesici." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Şehiç, savaşı kelimenin tam anlamıyla bir AK-47'nin gözünden tasvir ediyor. (...) Baskı Altında'da sarhoş olmak daha iyi, paralel bir 'gerçekliğe' kaçmak demektir. Gerçek olmayan ancak daha iyi hissettiren kurmaca bir hayata..." - Yosip Mlakiç
Şehiç'in öykülerindeki iyilik, vahşet ve korku; okuru baskı altında hissettirecek kadar çarpıcı ve nefes kesici.
"Bu kadar özgün bir üsluptan ötürü heyecanlanmayalı epey zaman oldu. Şehiç, yazılarında metaforlardan ve abartıdan kaçınıyor ancak bu, onu 'Bosnalı Hemingway' olarak övgüyle takdim etmeme engel olmuyor." - Rosie Goldsmith, European Literature Network
"Şehiç, savaşın vahşet dolu çirkinliğini okuru sarsan bir üslupla aktarıyor." - Houman Barekat, The Guardian
"Şehiç, Baskı Altında ile okuma deneyimini yeniden ele alıyor: Çoğunlukla çatışmalardan beslenen, yarı otobiyografik ve güçlü sahneler..." - Tim Judah, The Economist
"Şehiç'in üslubu ve tasvirleri; vahşeti, aşırılıktan uzak bir estetikle okura sunuyor. Muhteşem, güçlü, şairane ve nefes kesici." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"Şehiç, savaşı kelimenin tam anlamıyla bir AK-47'nin gözünden tasvir ediyor. (...) Baskı Altında'da sarhoş olmak daha iyi, paralel bir 'gerçekliğe' kaçmak demektir. Gerçek olmayan ancak daha iyi hissettiren kurmaca bir hayata..." - Yosip Mlakiç
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
11 people are currently reading
317 people want to read
About the author
Faruk Šehić
23 books114 followersFaruk Šehić was born in 1970 in Bihać, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Until the outbreak of war in 1992, he studied veterinary medicine in Zagreb. However, the then 22-year-old joined the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he led a unit of 130 men. After the war he studied literature and has gone on to create his own literary works.
His second book ‘Hit depot’ (2003) was the absolutely literary bestseller in Bosnia despite that was a poetry book. In this book he made a sketches of a several main topic of his later works such as postwar life on the edge of society. His poems are about local (and global) feeling of capitalistic way of life mixed with desperate postwar life in ruins, remains of dead society in Sarajevo and Bosnia.
Literary critics have hailed Šehić as the leader of the ‘mangled generation’ of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. His collection of short stories ‘Under Pressure’ (Pod pritiskom, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel ‘Quiet Flows the Una’ (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) received the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His most recent book is a collection of poetry entitled ‘My Rivers’ (Moje rijeke, Buybook, 2014) for whom he received Risto Ratković Award for the best poetry book in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2014. His books are translated into french, italian, german, english, bulgarian, macedonian, polish, slovenian and hungarian language. Šehić lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist in respected political magazine ‘BH Dani’.
His second book ‘Hit depot’ (2003) was the absolutely literary bestseller in Bosnia despite that was a poetry book. In this book he made a sketches of a several main topic of his later works such as postwar life on the edge of society. His poems are about local (and global) feeling of capitalistic way of life mixed with desperate postwar life in ruins, remains of dead society in Sarajevo and Bosnia.
Literary critics have hailed Šehić as the leader of the ‘mangled generation’ of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. His collection of short stories ‘Under Pressure’ (Pod pritiskom, 2004) was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize. His debut novel ‘Quiet Flows the Una’ (Knjiga o Uni, 2011) received the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His most recent book is a collection of poetry entitled ‘My Rivers’ (Moje rijeke, Buybook, 2014) for whom he received Risto Ratković Award for the best poetry book in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2014. His books are translated into french, italian, german, english, bulgarian, macedonian, polish, slovenian and hungarian language. Šehić lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist in respected political magazine ‘BH Dani’.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 17, 2020
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020
Another translation from the RofC list, and another that is very difficult to assess and review. Šehić served in the Bosnian army during the war in the early 90s, and this book is a collection of short stories inspired by his experiences there. This soldier's eye view of war is not always a comfortable read, as there is nothing sanitised about it.
As others have noted, the translator's choices of regional accents seem a little incongruous, but representing the use of dialect must be almost impossible to get right. Now and again, a little of Šehić's poetry creeps in, but for the most part both the horrors and the monotony of war are reflected faithfully.
Another translation from the RofC list, and another that is very difficult to assess and review. Šehić served in the Bosnian army during the war in the early 90s, and this book is a collection of short stories inspired by his experiences there. This soldier's eye view of war is not always a comfortable read, as there is nothing sanitised about it.
As others have noted, the translator's choices of regional accents seem a little incongruous, but representing the use of dialect must be almost impossible to get right. Now and again, a little of Šehić's poetry creeps in, but for the most part both the horrors and the monotony of war are reflected faithfully.
January 31, 2020
To reach the conclusion that I’ve finished a short story collection, because writing about war has temporarily drained me.
To think of the structure of the book which resembles the EKG if a healthy heart. The peaks and valleys are stories of different emotional timbre, pace and rhythm. To feel the draw of long prose form with plenty of poetry thrown in.
With this book, Faruk Šehić becomes the joint-first author (with Isabel Waidner) to be longlisted twice for the UK's finest literary prize, The Republic of Consciousness, after his debut novel Quiet Flows the Una, translated by Will Firth from the 2011 original Knjiga o Uni, was longlisted in the prize's first year in 2017.
Under Pressure was originally published as Pod pritiskom (in 2004) and translated by Mirza Purić from Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, and published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Istros books.
The author explained the evolution of his literary career, from studying veterinary medicine, to volunteering as a soldier, to publishing poetry, short-stories (this book) then his debut novel (Quiet Flows the Una), in this interview with Susan Curtis: http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/faruk-s...
Under Pressure is a short story collection, or perhaps a fragmentary novel (*), set in north-western Bosnia, during and after the 1992-1995 conflict caused by insurrection led by Fikret Abdić and his Autonomist forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonom...). The narrator, as with the author himself at the time of the events described, is a early 29s volunteer serving in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, fighting against the Autonomists, and suffering, although he doesn't acknowledge it as such, from PTSD.
(* the author's take from the interview referenced below: “Well, it was originally written as a book of short stories, but in some literary representations it is understood and labeled as a kind of novel, because there is a unity of time, place and space, there is even a chronology, with occasional flashbacks.”)
The story quickly plunges us into the visceral and unheroic reality of war:
Zgemba is flicking bits of brain off the filo pie with his fingernail. He's tearing pieces off with his right hand, dipping them into salt and puting them in his mouth. With his left he's noshing on cottage cheese, from a white plastic bag splattered with a mixture of blood and brains. His mug is sooty from cartridge gas. In his lap he has a 7.62mm light machine gun. Five minutes ago this trench was occupied by the autonomist rebels. A still warm corpse is hanging over the breastwork. A burst blew half his skull off. I turn him on his back. From the inside pocket of his army jacket I take out his wallet. I look at a passport-size photograph of him. He had a receding hairline. Large melancholy eyes. With the sharp edge of the photograph I floss out bits of apple from between my teeth.
Under Pressure is a, deliberately jagged read, like the shrapnel from exploding shells, a piece of which lodges in the novel, Doestoevsky's Demons, which the narrator is reading. And the narration switches from the poetic to the crude, with the narrator and his comrades using alcohol and drugs to escape their grim reality, sometimes in the same paragraph:
October wind musters our veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the first runs as asphalt road. Further down below is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposes to guns of all calibers.
One striking aspect of the translation - and a decision that attracted some comment even in favourable reviews of the novel - is that the dialogue between the narrator and his fellow soldiers in rendered in a generic British vernacular, rather reminiscent of a politician dropping into Estuary English ("Well, did 'e make it, or what?"). This is intended to reflect an effect in the original which the author explained in an interview (https://minorliteratures.com/2019/06/...) and to me it works well:
I told all this to a stranger who’d never been to war, as we stood at the bar in a restaurant car.
I watched as the crimson withdrew from his cheeks and his face turned pale.
...
And I never even mentioned Besic’s steaming intensives, which he pushed back into his stomach ripped up by hollow-point bullets, grey-green lint sticking to the hot mucous membrane.
The effect is to rather expose the futility of wars and the rationalisation of brutality that easily follows - I am a brave patriot, you fell for nationalist myths, they are a war criminal.
To close, one of the more poetic sections where the narrator reflects on what he experienced:
I flick through my memory full of dead faces
With words I try to paint a sphere of warmth
That existed during those forty-four months of life under pressure
To wrest myself from the desire of my words to be bloody and my tongue a blade
To find a single wartime fragment
Of unbreakable human kindness.
Not a comfortable read, a necessary one perhaps, but not entirely to my taste. 3.5 stars
To think of the structure of the book which resembles the EKG if a healthy heart. The peaks and valleys are stories of different emotional timbre, pace and rhythm. To feel the draw of long prose form with plenty of poetry thrown in.
With this book, Faruk Šehić becomes the joint-first author (with Isabel Waidner) to be longlisted twice for the UK's finest literary prize, The Republic of Consciousness, after his debut novel Quiet Flows the Una, translated by Will Firth from the 2011 original Knjiga o Uni, was longlisted in the prize's first year in 2017.
Under Pressure was originally published as Pod pritiskom (in 2004) and translated by Mirza Purić from Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, and published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Istros books.
At Istros, we believe that good literature can transcend national interests and speak to us with the common voice of human experience. Discovering contemporary voices and rediscovering forgotten ones, Istros Books works hard to bring you the best that SE European literature can offer.Istros were also responsible for several of my favourite books in the last year, including Andrej Nikolaidis's brilliant Olcinium Trilogy translated by Will Firth, two wonderful, and very different books, from Dusan Sarotar, translated by Rawley Grau and Daša Drndić's 2019 Republic of Consciousness listed Doppelgänger, translated by SD Curtis (founder of Istros) and Celia Hawkesworth.
The author explained the evolution of his literary career, from studying veterinary medicine, to volunteering as a soldier, to publishing poetry, short-stories (this book) then his debut novel (Quiet Flows the Una), in this interview with Susan Curtis: http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/faruk-s...
Under Pressure is a short story collection, or perhaps a fragmentary novel (*), set in north-western Bosnia, during and after the 1992-1995 conflict caused by insurrection led by Fikret Abdić and his Autonomist forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonom...). The narrator, as with the author himself at the time of the events described, is a early 29s volunteer serving in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, fighting against the Autonomists, and suffering, although he doesn't acknowledge it as such, from PTSD.
(* the author's take from the interview referenced below: “Well, it was originally written as a book of short stories, but in some literary representations it is understood and labeled as a kind of novel, because there is a unity of time, place and space, there is even a chronology, with occasional flashbacks.”)
The story quickly plunges us into the visceral and unheroic reality of war:
Zgemba is flicking bits of brain off the filo pie with his fingernail. He's tearing pieces off with his right hand, dipping them into salt and puting them in his mouth. With his left he's noshing on cottage cheese, from a white plastic bag splattered with a mixture of blood and brains. His mug is sooty from cartridge gas. In his lap he has a 7.62mm light machine gun. Five minutes ago this trench was occupied by the autonomist rebels. A still warm corpse is hanging over the breastwork. A burst blew half his skull off. I turn him on his back. From the inside pocket of his army jacket I take out his wallet. I look at a passport-size photograph of him. He had a receding hairline. Large melancholy eyes. With the sharp edge of the photograph I floss out bits of apple from between my teeth.
Under Pressure is a, deliberately jagged read, like the shrapnel from exploding shells, a piece of which lodges in the novel, Doestoevsky's Demons, which the narrator is reading. And the narration switches from the poetic to the crude, with the narrator and his comrades using alcohol and drugs to escape their grim reality, sometimes in the same paragraph:
October wind musters our veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the first runs as asphalt road. Further down below is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposes to guns of all calibers.
One striking aspect of the translation - and a decision that attracted some comment even in favourable reviews of the novel - is that the dialogue between the narrator and his fellow soldiers in rendered in a generic British vernacular, rather reminiscent of a politician dropping into Estuary English ("Well, did 'e make it, or what?"). This is intended to reflect an effect in the original which the author explained in an interview (https://minorliteratures.com/2019/06/...) and to me it works well:
>Q: This book was translated by Mirza Purić.The translator explained his rationale, in a later interview: https://inpressbooks.co.uk/blogs/news...
FŠ: Mirza is so important not only because he is a great translator, but because he knows the dialect I have used in this book. His mother is from the same city as me, in fact. He knows the soul of the language I use within the book’s dialogue, which is a mixture of western Bosnian dialects, largely the language of rural people, because in the war we were mostly fighting in villages where none of us had been before. We were urban lads, and for us this way of speaking was ridiculous, archaic and unknown. We ridiculed it at first, but through this kind of interaction this way of speaking entered our personal speech and became part of our new linguistic identity.
Q: Yes, the use of that dialect really struck me. The English interpretation of it is something approaching provincial working class, I think. Does that rest easy with you? Why that over the “thee”, “thou” and “thy” afforded to the Catalonians of Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, for instance? The dialogue in other ways is very similarly to this book.
FŠ: I think this is more a question for Susan Curtis (Istros Books editor), because if I remember well, the dialect used by the translator originally was like a Broad Yorkshire. This was changed for practical reasons. It would not be understandable to readers in the US, for instance. The most important thing is that the language in the dialogue is rough and raw, because that’s how it is with the rural slang of western Bosnia.
Q: did you face any specific challenges related to the cultural specificity of the story and the author’s experience?Towards the novel's end the narrator and his comrades are enjoying a respite from the war, in town, and listen to Kurt Cobain's rendition of Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World from Nirvana Unplugged. The lyrics (not included in the novel) include:
MP: In many ways this is a very local book. For instance, most of the dialogue is in a rather rustic local dialect which can be barely comprehensible to most outsiders. I grew up a bike ride from Faruk so this was no problem. I originally had broad Yorkshire there, as I thought the socio-linguistic status and distance from the standard were about right, but there were concerns that the readers would have to work a bit too hard to make sense of all t’ clipped articles, funny syntax and obscure words, so in the end I had to go with some kind of generic non-standard English. I’m a bit of a stickler for heritage languages and dialects and I’m not too happy about this, but it had to be done.
I searched for form and landBut losing control is precisely what they do. Fuelled by alcohol and grief at the loss of a fellow fighter they end up in a losing fight with the local police, before exacting indirect revenge by brutally assaulting some Autonomist prisoners of war. The narrator then relates:
For years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazeless stare
We walked a million hills
I must have died alone
A long, long time ago
Who knows?
Not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world.
I told all this to a stranger who’d never been to war, as we stood at the bar in a restaurant car.
I watched as the crimson withdrew from his cheeks and his face turned pale.
...
And I never even mentioned Besic’s steaming intensives, which he pushed back into his stomach ripped up by hollow-point bullets, grey-green lint sticking to the hot mucous membrane.
The effect is to rather expose the futility of wars and the rationalisation of brutality that easily follows - I am a brave patriot, you fell for nationalist myths, they are a war criminal.
To close, one of the more poetic sections where the narrator reflects on what he experienced:
I flick through my memory full of dead faces
With words I try to paint a sphere of warmth
That existed during those forty-four months of life under pressure
To wrest myself from the desire of my words to be bloody and my tongue a blade
To find a single wartime fragment
Of unbreakable human kindness.
Not a comfortable read, a necessary one perhaps, but not entirely to my taste. 3.5 stars
January 31, 2020
Fragments are often quite jagged and sharp, one should handle them with care
Both abstract and concrete shrapnel tends to cause mutilation or death
It is therefore best avoided when it flies hot and deadly through the air
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize for UK small presses.
This book is published by the UK small press Istros, from their website (my emphasis) …
At Istros, we believe that high-quality literature can transcend national interests and speak to us with the common voice of human experience. …. Istros is the old Greek and Thracian name for the lower Danube River, which winds its way down from its source in Germany and flows into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and goes on to cross many of the countries of South-East Europe: Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Its watershed also extends to other neighbouring countries, with one of the main Danubian tributaries, the Sava, serving Slovenia and Bosnia/Herzegovina, while also feeding the waterways and lakes of Macedonia and Montenegro and Albania. These are the countries of focus for Istros Books, evoking the image of the Danube river flowing carelessly across the borders of Europe and encapsulating the ideal of the free-flow of knowledge and the cultural exchange that books promote.
Faruk Šehić was already longlisted for the inaugural version of the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2017 for a translation of his 2011 novel “Quiet Flows the Una”. That book won the EU Prize for Literature and the citation there detailing his career is worth reproducing in detail as it captures much of the sense of this collection, originally published in 2004.
“most of his other works include the subjective experience of the war as a focus. The prose in his short stories is sober. Without judgement, he depicts the everyday experience of war, the brutal events, but also weaves in natural observations of the soldiers. Every detail is valued, be it the death of a comrade or the sight of birds on a power line. The unsettling effect of the stories unfolds through this ironic juxtaposition. Šehić knowingly uses authenticity as a rhetorical device, saying, “my readers should hate the war.””
It is translated by Mirza Purić, who brings to the translation both his origins growing up close to the author (which means he understands the local dialect the soldiers in the book adopt – albeit with no clear way to render that effect in English) and his background as an ex-military interpreter (to what is a book dominated by the lives, thoughts and dialogues of soldiers).
The book was written as a short story collection but I think it is better seen as a fragmentary novel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmen...) or more appropriately I think as a Shrapnel Novel . ™️ ©
A series of fragments which capture how war is not just horrific, but for those both banal and mindless but all encompassing to those involved in it with effects which reverberate in their lives long after the physical war has ceased.
This book, due to its style and subject matter, was not one I would have contemplated reading without its longlisting – and to be honest not a subject or style I would seek out again – but that is personal taste. Partly I think because the book at heart is about holding up the reality of warfare (and the impact on those forced to conduct it) to those who buy into nationalistic myths around both – and I did not need any extra convincing on those points.
January 31, 2020
Shrapnel /ˈʃrapn(ə)l/ (noun) - fragments of a bomb, shell, or other object thrown out by an explosion.
It is probably because I am a photographer, but I always take some time before starting a book to look at the cover. On a Kindle, this requires some effort as the Kindle has a habit of dropping you in at the start of the “proper” text and I always skip back, mainly to see the cover but also to check all the bits the Kindle has assumed I don’t want to read.
The cover of this book fascinated me. I could see two interpretations. In one, I saw images of war represented as shrapnel flying out of a head-shaped figure along with an explosion. In the other, the one I now prefer, I saw the war and other memories as shrapnel flying into a head-shaped figure and causing an explosion of words and emotions.
This second image is how the book reads. It is fragments, it is memories of war or of war time even when the action moves away from the actual fighting. It is raw emotion.
I found myself conflicted as I read. Firstly, I would not normally pick up a book about war because most of the ones I have tried (and this is no exception and is, in fact, more graphic than most) have been depressing to read. I think they are supposed to be that. But, on the other hand, there is beautiful writing here, very poetic in a way that makes the visceral hurt and dirt of war feel very real. These two factors meant I read uncomfortably but appreciatively, which is a confusing emotional state in which to find yourself.
Is it a collection of short stories or is it a novel? From a bit of internet research, I understand it started life as the first of these but gradually shaped itself into something which feels like it tells a story, has a sort of chronology going on, references back to things that have already been described etc. i.e. is, in effect, a novel.
I can’t say that I enjoyed this “novel-as-shrapnel”, but I did admire it. As the blurb says - “beauty and horror”.
It is probably because I am a photographer, but I always take some time before starting a book to look at the cover. On a Kindle, this requires some effort as the Kindle has a habit of dropping you in at the start of the “proper” text and I always skip back, mainly to see the cover but also to check all the bits the Kindle has assumed I don’t want to read.
The cover of this book fascinated me. I could see two interpretations. In one, I saw images of war represented as shrapnel flying out of a head-shaped figure along with an explosion. In the other, the one I now prefer, I saw the war and other memories as shrapnel flying into a head-shaped figure and causing an explosion of words and emotions.
This second image is how the book reads. It is fragments, it is memories of war or of war time even when the action moves away from the actual fighting. It is raw emotion.
I found myself conflicted as I read. Firstly, I would not normally pick up a book about war because most of the ones I have tried (and this is no exception and is, in fact, more graphic than most) have been depressing to read. I think they are supposed to be that. But, on the other hand, there is beautiful writing here, very poetic in a way that makes the visceral hurt and dirt of war feel very real. These two factors meant I read uncomfortably but appreciatively, which is a confusing emotional state in which to find yourself.
Is it a collection of short stories or is it a novel? From a bit of internet research, I understand it started life as the first of these but gradually shaped itself into something which feels like it tells a story, has a sort of chronology going on, references back to things that have already been described etc. i.e. is, in effect, a novel.
I can’t say that I enjoyed this “novel-as-shrapnel”, but I did admire it. As the blurb says - “beauty and horror”.
February 19, 2020
Talvez, em segunda mão, a experiência de uma guerra jamais poderá ser compreendida na totalidade. Daí que os contos do bósnio Faruk Šehić sejam lidos como fragmentos de algo maior, de um mundo ruindo. Veterano dos conflitos na Bósnia dos anos de 1990, ele escreve sobre o trauma, os momentos de esperança e as vidas (de soldados e civis) devastadas. Seu primeiro livro em prosa, ele narra com vigor e melancolia, homens e mulheres tentando sobreviver a uma guerra. Um deles pergunta ao companheiro: “O que você fará se sobreviver à guerra?”. “Vou comer e beber feito louco. Tentarei viver. A possibilidade de paz me assusta um pouco. É difícil imaginar o mundo sem guerra. Parece um filme de ficção-científica para mim.”
August 11, 2019
Well... This collection of stories is certainly not a reading for pleasure: as I turned the last page I felt as if my head was being squeezed by two iron fists and my heart was trying to set itself free by thumping and pushing through the temples. This is because each story is like a piece of shrapnel that strikes a nerve. There is no actual story line that connects fragments, rather together they show the ugliness of war and how it deforms humans in times of hostilities, and scars them for life, even after the peace is restored.
Sometimes the details were too brutal despite being honest, and when reading such descriptions I felt the author's urge to shock and use words to slap. He did succeed in that for sure, but I cannot say I enjoyed that, although I appreciate books which shake you out of the Zen mode. Probably it was because these gruesome details shook me to the extent of feeling sick.
What I do, in fact, continue to enjoy in Faruk Sehic's books is his style of writing. Although his books seem to be not that long, his writing is very condense as each sentence is packed with meaning and becomes a small story within a bigger one. His similes reflect his unique way of seeing the world, often making me pause and gasp at the genuineness of a comparison. His descriptions of nature continue to reveal a very sensitive and vulnerable soul of a dreamer, the image he involuntarily supports once one has managed to squeeze an off-guard smile of him. And that is hard to reconcile with expressions of bitterness and anger in his books that he spits out like a chewing tobacco.
It would be interesting to see which of the two – the dreamer or the bitter cynic - will finely prevail, as he continues his literary career, which I am keen to follow.
I am grateful to the author for the advance copy of this book.
Sometimes the details were too brutal despite being honest, and when reading such descriptions I felt the author's urge to shock and use words to slap. He did succeed in that for sure, but I cannot say I enjoyed that, although I appreciate books which shake you out of the Zen mode. Probably it was because these gruesome details shook me to the extent of feeling sick.
What I do, in fact, continue to enjoy in Faruk Sehic's books is his style of writing. Although his books seem to be not that long, his writing is very condense as each sentence is packed with meaning and becomes a small story within a bigger one. His similes reflect his unique way of seeing the world, often making me pause and gasp at the genuineness of a comparison. His descriptions of nature continue to reveal a very sensitive and vulnerable soul of a dreamer, the image he involuntarily supports once one has managed to squeeze an off-guard smile of him. And that is hard to reconcile with expressions of bitterness and anger in his books that he spits out like a chewing tobacco.
It would be interesting to see which of the two – the dreamer or the bitter cynic - will finely prevail, as he continues his literary career, which I am keen to follow.
I am grateful to the author for the advance copy of this book.
June 5, 2022
Keskin, güçlü, gerçek.
Faruk Sehiç'i okumak neden okuduğumu da hatırlattı bana: Bilmediğim, haberdar olmadığımı gösteren, kafamı çevirmek istediğim "o yanı" bana işaret eden yazardan ödünç bir çift göz.
Faruk Sehiç'i okumak neden okuduğumu da hatırlattı bana: Bilmediğim, haberdar olmadığımı gösteren, kafamı çevirmek istediğim "o yanı" bana işaret eden yazardan ödünç bir çift göz.
February 6, 2020
I read this book as part of the 2020 Republic of Consciousness long list. Unfortunately, I am nearing the end of my attempt to read all 12 books before the shortlist comes out and am quite exhausted from the many selections there seem to be portraying the grim realities of war, drugs and sex. I am not putting it on my personal list to make the shortlist but if it happens to make it I will give it another try.
I appreciate the great reviews from other readers of the RoC list and hopefully will be more in the mood to appreciate some of the excellent writing they speak of (though with reservations) in their reviews here on GR!
I appreciate the great reviews from other readers of the RoC list and hopefully will be more in the mood to appreciate some of the excellent writing they speak of (though with reservations) in their reviews here on GR!
April 4, 2022
Que difícil escribir sobre algo tan traumático.
Y es que el autor no deja indiferente a nadie cuando relata el día a día de sus vivencias en plena guerra.
Una guerra que le llega de frente y debe vivirla y sentirla ya que de ello depende su vida.
Es sobre cogedor la dureza de sus pensamientos y sus palabras.
Como el alcohol es su única vía de escape en un mundo donde no hay futuro y cada día es un comienzo de cero. Donde tus compañeros pueden desaparecer de un día al otro, en un instante y además ser espectador de ello.
Crudeza, desprecio y miedo reflejan sus palabras y sus reflexiones. Y a la vez, nos relata la simpleza de los pequeños detalles de un hombre, de sus sentimientos, de sus anhelos, de sus recuerdos.
Relatos propios y de otros combatientes, de vidas destrozadas o aniquiladas. Reflexiones de cómo sobrevivir a una guerra y de cómo vivir después de ello.
Sin duda, la sensación al leer a Faruk es de desesperanza y decepción por esta humanidad.
Y es que el autor no deja indiferente a nadie cuando relata el día a día de sus vivencias en plena guerra.
Una guerra que le llega de frente y debe vivirla y sentirla ya que de ello depende su vida.
Es sobre cogedor la dureza de sus pensamientos y sus palabras.
Como el alcohol es su única vía de escape en un mundo donde no hay futuro y cada día es un comienzo de cero. Donde tus compañeros pueden desaparecer de un día al otro, en un instante y además ser espectador de ello.
Crudeza, desprecio y miedo reflejan sus palabras y sus reflexiones. Y a la vez, nos relata la simpleza de los pequeños detalles de un hombre, de sus sentimientos, de sus anhelos, de sus recuerdos.
Relatos propios y de otros combatientes, de vidas destrozadas o aniquiladas. Reflexiones de cómo sobrevivir a una guerra y de cómo vivir después de ello.
Sin duda, la sensación al leer a Faruk es de desesperanza y decepción por esta humanidad.
January 3, 2026
Autor opisuje wojnę w Jugosławii, jako własne doświadczenie. Doświadczenie brudne, bolesne i pozbawione bohaterstwa. Jest to historia bardzo osobista, a raczej zbiór historii, a może bardziej wrażeń i przemyśleń. Wojna nie jako wydarzenie historyczne, a jako rzeczywistość żołnierza tu i teraz - okop, błoto, zimno, strach, papierosy, gadanie z towarzyszami broni. Wszystko się przewija, jak we śnie, a raczej w letargu.
December 29, 2018
Str. 49 - Tempirana bomba sem. Zgnetena v živo materijo. Preklinjam dan svojega rojstva. Čakam, da nekdo izključili elektriko. Pritisne taster, gumb, karkoli. Da se izniči ta stvor, ki misli v meni. In se razblini nasršena zavest.
Str. 150 - Bal sem se spanca, ker nič ni mogla ustaviti hudournika vojnik prizorov, niti srca, ki preskakuje v ritmu kratkih rafalov.
Str. 150 - Bal sem se spanca, ker nič ni mogla ustaviti hudournika vojnik prizorov, niti srca, ki preskakuje v ritmu kratkih rafalov.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 8, 2019
Just awesome!
January 7, 2022
In ways beautiful written, and horrifically tragic, which is the point. War is tragic. I was so into this book in the beginning. Then it lost me, but alas I picked it up and forced myself to finish. Not highly rated on my list.
January 29, 2025
A bleak, fragmented set of stories about the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, which may well present the inhumanity of war successfully but shifted so frequently into crude discussions of bodies that it lost any attempt to be a successful account of humanity through war
February 13, 2023
Mocne. Opisy walki na froncie przytłaczają.
Z bośniackich pisarzy jednak wolę Jergovica
Z bośniackich pisarzy jednak wolę Jergovica
August 11, 2024
Each story shows how war never helps anyone. Black hen personally stands out, but there are so many amazing stories in here despite the difficult translation. It is a quiet book that talks about a quiet war.
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