In 1994 the Bosnian War was at its height - an international armed conflict that took place between March 1992 and November 1995, involving the neighbouring states of Croatia and the (then) Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo was in the heart of this conflict and here we find ourselves in the horrifying and bloody midst of war.The book starts with an almost elegiac and nostalgic recollection of a bus trip to a scenic waterfall at Jajce, as recalled by a young boy. Whilst there is a degree of trauma here (a fatal road accident is witnessed), this vignette is in stark contrast to the collection of short stories that follow...The overriding theme of this collection of short stories is that of ordinary lives suddenly interrupted - and often cut short - by shocking violence, usually in the form of heavy shelling on the city. The format is often similar in each work, a purposefully mundane description of ordinary urban lives - and then a cataclysmic moment of violence - often retold in the same mundane, matter-of-fact tone as the preceding part of the story. For instance in an excerpt from "The Gardener"... "We were coming home with our water when the shells began to fall, so we ran into the nearest building. The hall was already full of people. Ivanka leaned against the wall and put her canisters down, but I didn't let go of mine. She lit a cigarette, and then the place just exploded. People fell to the ground, and then one by one they stood up again. All except Ivanka, that is - she didn't stand up."And the author, Miljenko Jergović, does not limit his observations of the conflict to the somewhat detached use of shells on civilian cities, he also describes with great insight and pathos the way in which personal relationships and communities were torn apart by the ethnic divisions which shaped this conflict. Stories such as "Beard" illustrate the heart-breaking instances where neighbour was turned against neighbour in this conflict, and the spectre of ethnic cleansing - in this instance at the hands of 'Chetniks' (Serbian paramilitaries) - infuses many of these accounts with brutal realism ("Beard" opens with the line... "Juraj's head lay in the mud like an empty dish into which the raindrops fell. But the soldiers marched past without giving him a second look").All this is not to say that there is no room for humanity - and even humour - in this collection ("Beetle" is a poignant story - at first seemingly written to a lost loved one but which, as it turns out, is actually a requiem to a beloved VW Beetle Car owned by the narrator - itself a metaphor for the loss of normal life in post-war Bosnia & Herzegovina:- and the irony of the Beetle being a car designed by the Nazi regime of World War II is not lost on the author).In striking such a balance - and in the sheer descriptive and emotional quality of the writing - Jergović shows himself to be a writer of real quality, one whom, like so many other writers I have encountered in this part of Europe, is deserving of a much wider audience in the Western world. If I have one criticism it is this - the constant format of normal lives destroyed by conflict in each successive story has the effect of numbing the reader to the impact of these stories by the end of the book. However, in achieving this effect - perhaps unconsciously - Jergović effectively demonstrates how us readers in the relatively peaceful West reacted to the Balkan Wars on the 1990s at the time... horror at first, sympathy, and then a sense of numbness at the repetition of the atrocities played out on the news each night... and even, eventually, a tragic disengagement with the plight of our neighbours in Southeastern Europe.
I picked up this book beacause it was on the shelf at the library sponsored by Kentucky Refugee Ministries in honor of World Refugee Day. Sarajevo Marlboro is a collection of short stories set in Bosnia before and during the war. The stories were beautifully written and heartbreaking. They were all very short and provided a very brief glimpse into a person's life and how the war changed thier lives. I can't really put into words what I want to say about this book. I think the reason it was so heartbreaking was that I could really relate to the lives of the characters and then to see that life torn apart so quickly by way was just devestating. Stories about refugees weighing their belongings to see how much they could take with them when they left thier homes, stories about communities coming together to support eachother as the bombing started...each story was beautiful and sad in it's own way. I really like what a review on the back of the book said, "Like all great war books, Sarejavo Marlboro is not about war - it's about life." There is too much in the world about which I need to learn. I really liked this book, but it made me realize that I know very little about the war in Bosnia, even though I think I wrote a whole paper about it in college.
Do You like book Sarajevo Marlboro (2003)?
Meget, meget stærkt. En knugende sørgmodig, fortvivlende, skræmmende, men ind i mellem også vittig og i det hele taget fremragende novellesamling om liv og mennesker under krigen i Bosnien og ødelæggelsen af Sarajevo.Jeg var ganske berørt af bosniske Miljenko Jergović (f.1966) debut fra 1994, Marlboro Sarajevo og har svært ved at slippe den. Det er sjældent, at jeg genlæser noget inden for kort tid, men Sarajevo Marlboro har jeg haft fat i flere gange efter at have vendt den sidste side for at genlæse nogle af historierne.Læs hele min anmeldelse her: http://bognoter.dk/2014/08/06/miljenk...
—K's Bognoter
When we tune in to the news, and seen countries being torn apart by war, I think we take a very macro look at the entire scene. We understandably are aghast at the site of corpses in the street, scenes which then cut to militants with guns in the back of trucks. We become familiar with the depictions of "war."But on the flip we forget that lives go on and that people continue to survive in these war zones. There are still individuals down there digging up water wells to share with their neighbors, citizens sharing a cigarette and swapping stories at a cafe, and families huddled down in cellars waiting for the bombs to cease so they can go back outside. Teenagers fall in and out of love, stores are opened and closed. Life. Moves. On.Miljenko Jergovic uses the micro to highlight the atrocity of the macro. The characters in Jergovic's story experience war and death and loss, but they also experience outings with their mothers, watching apple trees blossom year after year, and purchasing a car and driving around the city. They experience the day-to-day while bombs and fires live beside them.I think that's where the power comes from in this book. The realization that war is not a television episode that we watch for 24 minutes (plus commercials). It's alive, it's happening, and there are people living through it. War doesn't exist in such a short timespan that they can live around it, but rather they continue their lives in the midst of it, and must find ways to adapt and change to survive.
—Jared Della Rocca
Gently stroke your books, dear stranger, and remember they are dust.My biomom sent me this book in 1999, probably. No doubt it was read in a heady flurry. I have flipped through it again in recent years, but my initial opinion on that first reading still stands: it establishes the horror of civil war in an antecedent-consequence format, rife with foreshadowing and leitmotifs. There was discussion just now - this night - about our myriad relatives cast about across all maps by the mad logic of binned history.
—Jonfaith
