A bird from another flock: Sarajevo war stories

Three decades after its first publication, at the moment when witnesses are slowly giving way to inherited memory, these stories come before the world’s reader entirely in English, completing the conversation that, in the bar of the opening story, was left hanging in the air between the man with the long name and the stranger who had come to do serious work. The stranger from that story has become, as it now turns out, the addressee of the whole book. What he will find in it goes beyond a document, though the book is that too — a gathering place of terrible experiences, the confession of one who has just endured torture — he will find a literature that managed, from the centre of a historical apocalypse, to speak in the language of art, with irony, with the grotesque, with restrained thought and a sparing word, and that turned its own suffering into a paradigm legible to anyone who knows that evil in history returns in circles, changing only its names. The Latin distichs of Janus Pannonius, set at the opening of the book, describe Bosnia as a hard land rich in silver, a land of grim mountains and high strongholds upon the crags; five hundred years later, Topčić’s stories dig from the same hard earth another kind of silver. The bird from another flock has returned, and its flight, now unbounded by language, is only beginning.

Nermin Ormanović