About book How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone (2008)
Kada sam bila mala, baba bi me svaki put terala iz sobe kada razvlači jufke za pitu („Da ne lete dlake“). Bio je to čitav ritual: prvo rasklopi kauč, pošto je njena jufka bila veća od tepiha, koristila se posebna plahta za razvlačenje, znalo se kako se pita slaže u tepsiju. A ja sam bila opčinjena time kako je moguće da testo bude potpuno providno koliko je tanko, a da se nikad ne pocepa, čak ni kada ga baba podigne kao da širi veš.To mi je prošlo kroz glavu manje-više čim sam počela da čitam „Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert“ („Kako vojnik popravlja gramofon“), jer roman čine baš takve vinjete iz pripovedačevog detinjstva u Višegradu. Neke od njih su krajnje realne i svakodnevne, neke dokaz toga da je junak (barem na početku romana) više nego maštovit devetogodišnjak. A neke po svom sadržaju daleko prevazilaze dečju moć poimanja, pa ih je potrebno malo doraditi. Ali srećom narator Aleksandar preuzima te „popravke“ na sebe. Sve što čujemo kroz njegove reči neposredno je i krajnje jednostavno – jer ako možda ne razumeš baš sve, onda je valjda najbolje da opišeš tačno ono što vidiš. Kad dođe rat, doći će i ono što niko ne može razumeti. E tad vam se dečja perspektiva zarije u stomak kao pesnica, jer verujem da ništa nije toliko moćno kao ogoljeno imenovanje i opažanje stvari. Uostalom ovo očuđavanje i nije intelektualističko kao kod Kafke ili Brehta, već emotivno do srži. Usred te mirne, melodične naracije odrasli čitalac shvata da je đavo odneo šalu i nađe se u procepu između toga da ne može da prihvati takav sled događaja i toga da ni na trenutak ne sumnja u njega. Barem sam se ja tako osećala kada sam shvatila da fudbal nikad više ne može biti ekipni sport za 22 igrača i zašto je najbolji hleb na svetu gorak. Da sam ja karakter, a nisam, ovaj osvrt pisala bih na engleskom. (Jer sam za sva dela koja nisu izvorno pisana na našem jeziku odabrala engleski kao lingua franca.) Ali tehnička pravila ovde ne važe. Jer i pored tih hiljada i hiljada nemačkih reči, u ovom romanu sve je toliko po naški da naškije ne može biti. Prilično sam sigurna da nikom drugom „sunce“ nije i izraz milošte i psovka, pa onda još i jedno i drugo u istoj rečenici. Jezička podvojenosti suštinsko je obeležje i junakovog razvoja: Aleksandar će ne samo prestati da peca na Drini i nosi mađioničarski šešir, već će mu biti i sve teže da nastavi priču koju je započeo, jer mu reči izmiču i na njihovo mesto dolaze neke druge. Glavnu nit romana upravo čini splet onoga što izgubimo i dobijemo i onoga što je konstantno u našem identitetu. Nešto kao skapanje kockica dok ne dobijemo sliku sebe. S tim što su kod nekih ljudi te kockice prilično raštrkane i opasno oštrih ivica.Ti usputni motivi nose najveći naboj, jer su u pitanju toliko lični detalji da je skoro pa nepojmljivo da bi ta osećanja mogao deliti s nekim. A meni je sa Aleksandrom zajednička nekadašnja želja da se moje ime drugačije piše, to što takođe navijam za pet reprezentacija, što sam potpuna samo ukoliko uporedo živim na dva jezika (do te mere da je moj dečko morao da nauči šta znači da si zuversichtlich, jer meni nijedan prevodni ekvivalent ovog sveta nije dovoljno dobar) i da sam kao dete verovala da postoje pogrešna imena. S tom razlikom što sam ja imala sreću da moja pogrešna imena nisu objektivno pogubna već subjektivno nepravedna. (Kad sam čula da mamin prijatelja ima sina Nemanju, bila sam užasno tužna zašto neko dete poput mene nešto nema i zašto je time obeleženo, pa sam uporno govorila „Čika Gorane, pozdravi Imanju.“)Kada se kao odrastao mlad čovek vrati u rodni grad, Aleksandar će shvatiti da je Višegrad nastavio da živi bez njega isto kao što je i on sam nastavio život negde drugde i da se neke veze ne mogu izbrisati kao što se druge ne mogu obnoviti. U tom istom Višegradu se uostalom nalazi i kutija s njegovim nedovršenim dečjim crtežima, ali i čovek kom si nekad sedeo u krilu, a sad ne smeš ni da pomisliš šta je radio pre deset godina. Ova priča je neiscrpan izvor nade, ali ne ostavlja prostora za (samo)zavaravanje.
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 because most of the books I’ve been reading are a few decades old, and it’s nice to find one which is fresh out of the oven (published in German in 2006; the English translation by Anthea Bell in 2008).How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone tells the story of Aleksandar Krsmanović, a boy who is growing up in the Bosnian town of Višegrad but flees with his family to Germany in 1992 to escape the war. Since Stanišić grew up in Višegrad and moved to Germany in 1992 as a fourteen-year-old, I assume it is somewhat autobiographical.The blurb on the back cover compares Stanišić with Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace, which gives you some idea of the kind of writer he is: a clever young man who isn’t afraid to leave evidence of his cleverness on the page. There are sections written in different voices, stylistic quirks, elements you might call magical realist, a bit of a book-within-a-book and so on. In fiction there can be a fine line between overtly clever and overly clever, and for the first few chapters I was a bit unsure which side of the line this book falls, but it won me over.Here’s a fairly randomly picked passage:My Nena went deaf the day Grandpa Rafik married the river Drina, face down. The marriage was legal because Nena and Grandpa Rafik had been divorced for years, something unusual in our town. After Grandpa Rafik was buried, they say she said at his graveside: I haven’t cooked anything, I haven’t brought anything, I haven’t put on black clothes, but I have a whole book full of things to forgive. They say she took out a stack of notes and began reading aloud from them. They say she stood there for a day and a night, and word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page she forgave him. And after that she said no more, and she never reacted to any kind of question again.Nena Fatima has eyes as keen as a hawk’s, kyu, ket-ket, she recognises me before I turn into her street, and she wears headscarves. Nena’s hair is a secret — long and red and beautiful, she gave the secret away to me as we sat outside her house eating börek in summer and feeding the Drina with minced meat. Cold yoghurt, salted onions, the warmth of Nena rocking silently as she sits cross-legged. The dough is shiny with good fat. Nena rocks back and forth and lights a cigarette when I’ve had enough. I am the quietest grandson in the world, so as not to disturb her stillness and our sunset. Sultry heat gathers over the river and looks attentively at Nena Fatima, who is humming as she plaits her secret into a long braid. I don’t laugh with anyone as softly as with my Nena, I laugh with her until I’m exhausted, I don’t comb anyone else’s hair.As I do the Read The World challenge, various themes are recurring; this is the third book I’ve read (along with My Father’s Notebook and The Kite Runner) which is written by a refugee, starts with nostalgic memories of the home country, and then describes the country collapsing and the refugee experience. It is much the best of the three, I think; I did genuinely enjoy The Kite Runner, but it is deeply emotionally manipulative, like watching a Hollywood film about a difficult subject by a skillful but solidly mainstream director. The kind of glossy film on a ‘brave’ subject which is daring enough to win a few Oscars but which you look back on a few years later and think… meh. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a more interesting book all round; messier, more personal (I think), funnier, sadder. And while I don’t want to overstate the originality of it — it’s been nearly a hundred years since some bright spark invented modernism, FFS — it is at least less of a straight down the line conventional narrative.
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Wat een bijzonder boek. Ga het lezen als je van de stijl van Jonathan Safran Foer houdt, als je zin hebt in mooie zinnen, als je benieuwd bent naar de blik van een kind op de oorlog in Joegoslavië, als je wilt weten wat mensen elkaar aan kunnen doen tijdens blinde haat en als je je een voorstelling wilt maken van wat er van een land en zijn bewoners over is gebleven als de strijd voorbij is. Ga het niet lezen als je eigenlijk geen tijd hebt, want het vergt de nodige concentratie en echt makkelijk leest het boek niet, maar het verdient absoluut gelezen te worden.
—Zazou
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic (Trans. by Anthea Bell, Grove Press, 2008)How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has an unusual structure: it is divided into two parts, the first one with the same title as the novel, the second titled “When Everything Was All Right” and authored by Aleksandar Krsmanovic, the novel’s narrator (and, obviously, an alter ego of Sasa Stanisic). This is not a story within a story, but rather, two twin stories, as both tell the story of a young boy growing up in a small Bosnian village in post-Tito Communist Yugoslavia. Stanisic’s novel is not written according to the structure of a gradually thickening plot; rather, it is a chronicle of a world about to be swept off by history. The chapters focused on the life before the war seem taken from a film by the French director Tati, revealing a series of picturesque characters and their daily interactions. Aleksandar’s grandfather, the main object of the narrator’s affection, a charming old man very likely based on the author’s own grandfather, happens to be a Communist who holds some title in the local Party nomenklatura. Interestingly, unlike writers from older generations, Stanisic doesn’t seem very critical of Communism, probably because in comparison with the hell that followed, it was “all right.” There are parts in the novel, especially at the beginning, that made me feel ambivalent about it: on the one hand, Stanisic is, undeniably, a very talented writer, and his characters are extremely vivid; on the other, there is a certain…cuteness in the description of this old world (justified, in part, by the fact that the book is written in the voice of a thirteen-year-old) that I sometimes found off-putting. In 1991 the villagers’ life (which, in retrospect, appears idyllic) is disrupted by the unthinkable: war. Once the war beings, the narration acquires a raw authenticity that makes it (and not only in my opinion) one of the best works on war in modern literature. Although I am a strong believer in the power of imagination, I think that there are certain extreme events that one can only write about in an authentic way if one has experienced them, and war is one of them. This is not because one cannot imagine war, but because often, when representing such extreme situations, writers tend to transform them into something spectacular (in all the senses of this word), and therefore ob-scene (a spectacle made to be shown on stage). There are numerous accounts of contemporary tragedies that revel in their bloodiness, usually written by authors who haven’t witnessed them. Stanisic’s honesty, combined with his gift for storytelling (by which I mean the telling of a story in a way bards used to do it, that is, an account informed by orality) give the novel a poignant immediacy. There is a chapter describing a soccer game during the war, when, apparently, the Serbian army and the Territorials (i.e, the Bosnian army) used to play in opposite teams during brief cease-fire breaks. Nowhere else is the absurdity of war more evident than when the soldiers stop the carnage against each other to play together, and afterward go back to killing each other. The chapter describing this absurd game, at the end of which the Serbian leader orders a bloodbath—breaking the rules of the game—is extraordinary.If one takes into account that Stanicic published this novel at 28 in his second language, German, one can predict a great future for this young writer.
—Alta
Sasa Stanisic schreibt aus Kinderperspektive und schreibt immer wieder autobiografisch von der eigenen Flucht aus der Heimat Visegrad an der Drina - dem schönen Fluss. Wie so oft sind Kinderperspektiven, vor allem in der süffig bildhaften Sprache Stanisics fesselnd, wie hemmend gleichermaßen. Stanisic bemüht Zeitsprünge und Kapriolen, wie die des durchgehenden Hengstes, der alle Zäune mit Leichtigkeit nimmt, um die Kinderperspektive zu halten, um das Märchenhafte, das Entrückte trotz Krieg und Schrecken im Kinderblick zu behalten. Sobald ihm die Worte ausgehen, sobald die Perspektive nicht mehr ausdrücken kann, was sein Herz vielleicht nicht hergeben mag, springt er davon und landet in Schulaufsätzen, in Geschichten von Welsen mit Nickelbrillen und Fußballspielen zwischen den Soldaten, die sich vor und nach der Waffenruhe noch die Köpfe zusammenschossen. Das hat Kraft, doch täuscht nicht über die Defizite im Gesamtbild hinweg.Das Buch kann vieles, doch eben nicht alles. Es ist immer wieder faszinierend, wie Stanisic die guten Geschichten auch in schlechten Zeiten zu erzählen vermag, doch es verbleiben Leerstellen, die er nicht füllen kann, die er überspringt. Als meine erste Lektüre über den Bosnienkrieg dennoch ein guter Start. Leseempfehlung für Einsteiger in das Thema - wie mich.
—Tina Janik
