Long Memory, Short Fuse: Balkan Fiction

When the former Yugoslavia disintegrated in front of our eyes during the 1990s, readers of fiction from the region should not have been surprised. Novel after novel had as a subtext the memory of past injustices, grievances held for generations, and a thirst for revenge.

THE BRIDGE ON THE DRINA (Univ. of Chicago. 1984. ISBN 0-226-02045-2. pap. $12) by Ivo Andric, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature, is an excellent introduction to the tangled history and ethnicity of the Balkans. A Croat by ethnicity, a Serb by choice, and a Bosnian by birth, Andric, is an old-fashioned storyteller who writes about a bridge that unites a sleepy Bosnian town for four centuries. As he traces the history of the town under its various rulers, from the Ottoman Turks to the pre–World War I Hapsburgs, he exposes the harshness of a world where a soldier's brief moments of inattention will result in his execution, where Muslim, Christian, and Jew live together in relative peace until it is the will of the government to set them against each other. Despite the brutality of his narrative, Andric is ultimately hopeful that the various ethnic groups will achieve the equilibrium to allow peaceful coexistence. He died before the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Danilo Kiš wrote A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH (Dalkey Archive. 2001. ISBN 1-56478-273-5. pap. $11.95) as an indictment against Stalinism. In each of seven pseudobiographical stories, the protagonist is condemned to death by a ruthless tyrannical state. The arbitrary nature of tyranny, whether employed by the Stalinists in 20th-century Russia or by the Inquisition in 14th-century France, is portrayed in the coldest matter-of-fact narrative. Kiš, who was strongly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, uses extensive quotes from historical documents in his text to make his depictions of fanatic ideology gone mad more real. Years after his fellow writers criticized the book for plagiarism, the same individuals chose Boris Davidovich as one of the five best works of Yugoslavian fiction in the 20th century.

Originally published in the 1960s, Meša Selimovic's masterpiece DEATH AND THE DERVISH (Northwestern Univ. 1996. ISBN 0-8101-1297-3. $24; LJ 7/96) is set in Bosnia during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Revenge for his brother's unjust execution motivates narrator Sheik Ahmed Nuruddin, the local religious leader of a Mevlevi sect of Muslims—known in our culture as whirling dervishes. The Sheik concocts an elaborate plot to destroy the corrupt officials who condemned his brother but in the end is caught in his own trap and sentenced to death.

Albania's Ismail Kadare often writes about the effects of Communism on his homeland and the paranoia of the totalitarian state. In BROKEN APRIL (New Amsterdam. 1995. ISBN 1-56131-065-4. pap. $12.95), however, he focuses on an earlier part of the 20th century to tell the story of a blood feud in which a young shepherd, forced to avenge his brother's death, has 30 days of grace before his victim's relatives will come to kill him. Nowhere has the endless cycle of inescapable violence in all of its futility been portrayed with more power.

The metafiction of Milorad Pavic is significantly more challenging, but the rewards are rich. In LANDSCAPE PAINTED WITH TEA (Knopf. 1998. ISBN 0-679-73344-2. pap. $19), the hero is searching for his lost father and seeking to define his own identity, which he does by reinventing himself, metamorphosing from a failed Serbian idealistic architect into a wealthy American magnate responsible for polluting on a world scale. This dazzling novel is written in the form of a crossword puzzle and may be read across or down, depending on the reader's pleasure.

Aleksandar Tišma looks at a more recent epoch of horror in THE BOOK OF BLAM (Harcourt. 1998. ISBN 0-15-100235-5. $23; pap. Harvest. 2000. ISBN 0-15-600841-6; LJ 9/1/98). A Holocaust survivor, Miroslav Blam, wanders the streets of Novy Sad recalling the Jewish residents who lived there before the war and remembering how they died, massacred by the fascist Hungarians in 1942. As the narrator examines the violence that has been a result of ethnic hatreds, he also describes the guilt of the survivor who lives but can no longer enjoy life.

Scars from the most recent conflict are portrayed in Slavenka Drakulic's S.: A NOVEL ABOUT THE BALKANS (Penguin. 2001. ISBN 0-14-029844-4. pap. $13; LJ 2/15/99). Her protagonist is in Sweden and has just given birth to a child, the result of her imprisonment, torture, and rape in Bosnia. The author's stark prose as she relates the experiences of the female victims and the consequent numbness that her heroine develops is chilling. Again, the atrocities visited upon one ethnic group by one of the others, in this case Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, creates a new layer of hatred to be added to other accumulated grievances.

The price of memory in the region is as devastating in fiction as it is in real life. Ismail Kadare's ELEGY FOR KOSOVO (Arcade: Little, Brown. 2000. ISBN 1-55970-528-0. $17.95), Danilo Kiš's HOURGLASS (Northwestern Univ. 1997. ISBN 0-8101-1513-1. pap. $22), Ivo Andric's BOSNIAN CHRONICLE (Arcade: Little, Brown. 1993. ISBN 1-55970-236-2. pap. $14.95; LJ 11/1/63), and Milorad Pavic's DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS (Vintage. 1989. male edition: ISBN 0-679-72461-3; female edition: ISBN 0-679-72754-X. pap. $16) are other wonderful examples of literature exploring the ethnic tensions and unpredictability of Balkan life.