"How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone" by Saša Stanišic, trans. Anthea
Bell (Grove Press, ISBN 9780802118660, $24.00)
Let me over-generalize for a second and say there are two kinds of novels:
the ones we read for the plot ("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" over 144 pages is that the narrator
buys some shoelaces on his lunch hour). Bosnian-born Saša Stanišic;'s first
novel, "How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone," which was short-listed for
the 2006 German Book Prize, manages to be both.
Aleksandar Krsmanovic; is somewhere between eight and fourteen, the most
vivid and traumatic time of anyone's life-but in 1992 Bosnia, history
conspires to make any normal coming-of-age impossible. First, he loses his
beloved Grandpa Slavko, a storyteller and staunch Communist; then, he loses
his country. To deal with the sudden senselessness of his existence, he
appoints himself Comrade in Chief of unfinished things: "Starless starry
sky. A sniper's gun without the sniper. Snow without footprints." He
collects moments before human tragedy intrudes. Eventually he flees to
Germany with his family-Serbian father, Bosnian mother-and the novel becomes
a tale of separation, as the maturing Aleksandar reaches out to a Muslim
girl he met once, whose last name he doesn't remember, trying to make sense
of his memories. In his early twenties, he returns to Sarajevo to sort out
what is real and what imagined, and is plagued with the guilt of having
escaped.
Stanišic's writing is like water, like the river Drina Aleksandar fishes and
has conversations with: it's violent and funny and wanders away from itself
only to come back stronger than ever. The narrative's timeframe is
recursive, wavelike: we hear stories before we know what they mean, grow up
with Aleksandar and join his longing for a time "when everything was all
right." Stanišic essentially creates a common childhood, full of hazy,
half-remembered magic and larger-than-life characters (the walrus-mustached
ex-basketball player who comes home to find his wife in flagrante with the
tobacconist, Aleksandar's John Wayne-obsessed great-grandmother, two elderly
Muslim men who live only to bicker with each other). When that childhood is
torn apart by meaningless suffering, it happens to us; when Aleksandar
becomes an exile, relating the first time he forgets a Bosnian word
("birch"), the disconnect with the past is the reader's as well. "How the
Soldier Repairs the Gramophone" is a stunning achievement.
Review by Anna
Perleberg, June 5, 2008
Back
to Reviews
