How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic
Hmmm. A first time novelist. Book set in Bosnia with most of the action taking place in the early 1990s. It should be a serious memoir of one boy’s survival of genocide. Have the publishers got the cover wrong, again? No.
The story begins in 1991 with the death of Aleksander’s beloved grandfather. This grandfather taught the boy that the world could always be better if you used ‘magic’ or your imagination to finish stories. A great deal of this book takes place in the year following this opening and the arrival of the soldiers in 1992. During the time the reader gains a gentle, even whimsical look at the town of Visegard and the people that make the town special. Enter the soldiers. Soon Aleksander and his family escape to Germany, but not before the boy manages to rescue a Muslim girl from certain death.
Jump 10 years. Now a young man, Aleksander wants to return to Visegard to look up some old friends before deciding where he will live and what he will finally do with his life. But Visegard is not the place his imagination ‘finished’ or even the gentle friendly village he remembered.
I am not really sure how I felt about this book. The tone was very gentle, even naive, totally appropriate for the young boy. And it may well be the only way a child could understand the tragedy invading his life. But there always seemed to be an underlying message that was never revealed. I kept waiting for something more. Even the young man was simply too naive to comprehend what his home town had become.
Sorry, but the events that took place in Serbia and Bosnia in the 90s are too tragic for this trivial treatment. It is a lovely book about childhood, but the setting is wrong.
