Saša Stanišić:
Story-telling is both method and content in this novel. Aleksandar, the protagonist, invents and recounts – as he promised his grandfather before he died. So the journey the author made was appropriate to his task of telling and gathering stories. They deal with Višegrad in the years during and after the war and are therefore thematically relevant to the book. The aim was to record the moods, resentment, fears, anxieties, happiness, wishes, hate, and love – everything that the people the author met found worthy of telling – and to select from the pool of stories. Much has found its way into the fiction of Aleksandar‘s world.
The most important aim of the research trip was therefore to gather additional material, so as to create a work full of legends and detail, illustrating the nineties world on the small scale of the school, the family, children’s games, in all its tragicomic, awesome and at times absurd character. The author himself no longer experienced the city in the years following the war, since he fled in 1992. That means most of the researched events extend beyond his own experience.
The chapter “I made lists” is based on numerous discussions with Višegrad residents and observations in the city. Aleksandar also meets people that played a role in his former life. The city of his childhood, as he discovers, hardly exists anymore. Višegrad not only lacks jobs and prospects for the future, but also the people and encounters needed to recall the city Aleksandar was forced to leave. The reticence to talk about what happened, and the old wounds that have not yet healed, make the city an unfamiliar place for the returning man who feels alien in this environment. Those are also the most important perceptions the author himself makes during his visit to his old home. So the research trip became an attempted journey towards his personal feeling of home. He hardly felt it in the Drna valley, however. At present, memories are the closest thing to home he has.
Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert, Luchterhand Literaturverlag, hardback, 320 pages, 13.5 x 21.5 cm,
€ 19.95 [D] / € 20.60 [A] / SFr 35.00, ISBN: 3-630-87242-5
