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Title: S.: A Novel About the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulic, Marko Ivic ISBN: 0-14-029844-4 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 02 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: War? What War?
Comment: When I saw this book, I bought it immediately, because I had read "How we survived Communism and Even Laughed" and enjoyed it. It does not seem correct however, to say that I enjoyed this book.
Slavenka Drakulic has stated that she wanted to add the feelings and emotions to the facts of the mass rapes and experiences in the camps that occurred during the Bosnian war. I believe that she has done a marvelous job. It is a courageous and very honest book in that it tells us what we humans can be like, not just what we would like to think we are like. Drakulic does not demonize or idealize anyone, neither the soldiers or the women.
After leaving the camps, and on her way to Stockholm as a refugee, S. "is still troubled by the thought that all the while the 'women's room' existed, so did this world, with its regularly flying planes and smiling flight attendants." For the other passengers war is not real. When I was a young, I remember reading about some horror happening to children in World War II and I thought, that can not happen to me, my parents will protect me and if they can't, the police would not allow it to happen and certainly the government of the United States would not allow it. Yet we all knew about Bosnia and the destruction of Sarajevo, we watched it on TV, just as we had watched the olympics there a few short years earlier.
As I read this book, I wondered how the World could have allowed these things to happen. This is not an optimistic book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A horrifying, necesssary read.
Comment: The book S: A NOVEL ABOUT THE BALKANS takes place in Bosnia in 1992 and 1993 during the war in which Serbian paramilitary instigators caused chaos in the nation, killing 250,000 Bosnian people and displacing around 2 million more. This novel focuses on the use of rape as a military tool to ethnically cleanse regions and to torture and dominate women in war.
S is a substitute teacher in a small Bosnian village, who is originally from Sarajevo, and is more urbane and educated than her colleagues in the town. Her father is Muslim, her mother is Serbian. (I am sorry to use these titles, as "Muslim" is used often instead of "Bosnian" based on Serb propaganda that there were no Bosnians, only Serbs and people of the Islamic faith, remnants of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans). One morning, before work, buses roll into the town, all the women are told to pack a few things and get on them with their small children, the men are rounded up, taken out of sight and shot. S.'s family in Sarajevo has already disappeared; she does not know where they are. She takes with her some jewelry, a nice dress and fancy Italian shoes and a family photo album.
The women get on the buses and are taken to a prison camp. While staying in the camp, some of the women are selected for occupation in the "Women's Room." These are quarters to which the Serbian soldiers go to get women to rape as they please. S. is chosen to live there, and must endure the pain, humiliation and dehumanization of that existence, until the camp commander chooses her as a weekend "companion" for himself. Because she is the captain's special choice, the other soliders leave her alone.
After some time, the camp occupants are told they will be exchanged, and they travel by bus to the Croatian border. Within Croatia, which has already successfully separated from Yugoslavia, the refugees live in another camp. S. has a cousin in Zagreb, but she does not accept her offer to live with her, seeing that she has not much to give, either. She chooses instead to emigrate to Sweden (it is the most different place she can think of to go from where she has been), and there she gives birth to her child, whom she conceived in the Women's Room at the camp.
Drakulic, a Croatian journalist (sorry, I cannot make the diacritical mark above the c that Serbo-Croatian uses; I believe it is pronounced, "DRAH-koo-leech"), began this project by speaking to women who had suffered in the war, had been routinely raped by soldiers, some of whom had born children as a result of those attacks. The Penguin version that I read contains a readers' guide in the back in which a conversation with Drakulic is included, along with discussion questions and a short introduction.
She spoke with women who were very willing to tell her the details of what happened to them, but not their emotional responses, as that was too horrifying for them to recount, so she turned the project into fiction, so that she could write the response of the victims to this dehumanizing torture tactic. All of the characters are known by their initials only, in an effort to universalize their existences, to disallow the reader to feel that this could not happen to them, that it happened far, far away. As a woman with a name that starts with S. I was distinctly drawn in to her identity. S's story focuses on how the war alienates the victims from the rest of socieyt, but rape distinctly isolates the women victims from anyone's understanding.
S. focuses a lot on the mental state that allows people to be immediately subjugated by another's will. She cannot accept how all of them, herself included (who offered coffee to the soldier that came into her apartment and told her to pack), immediately obeyed the invaders, left their entire lives and identities behind and followed without fighting. She is struck by how quickly they willingly lie down on the floor of the former machine shed at the camp and defecate in a field in full view of the captors.
The book is violent at times, but the horror of it is somewhat removed, very realistically told by someone who cannot quite bear it and who would never sensationalize the obviously vile by over elaborating on it. There are particularly egregious acts retold through the prisoners' eyes (the burning of male prisoners' corpses, a particularly vicious rape in the Women's Room of a girl by a boy she grew up with), but overall the book focuses on the pyschological state of a victim of the war's cruel machinery.
Though it is fiction, I think in some ways, it is more powerful than a factual article would be. We know these things, abstractly; we understand that they happened. To read a novelization, an amalgam of the sufferings of thousands of women, who become personal to one, makes the truth burst inside the reader's psyche with the force that a thousand newspaper articles cannot convey. A descriptor on the back lists the book as "grim and horrific" and says the book "puts a human face on harrowing headlines." Indeed it does.
I recommend this book to anyone. It's well written, and fulfills a role well that fiction is meant to play, illuminating another's reality so that it becomes one's own.
Rating: 5
Summary: The horrors of war from a woman's perspective
Comment: March, 1993 - A boy is born in a Swedish hospital. Instead of cuddling the baby, the mother turns away. She doesn't want to touch it. She feels nothing but animosity towards the tiny creature. She considers suffocating it but can't stand the thought of another death.
Her mind goes back in time to May when she was a school teacher in a Bosnian village.
In short, terse sentences she relives the horror of the Serb soldiers emptying the town and her life in a prison camp. Thus begins months filled with humiliation, torture, rape, and murder. The uncertainty and helplessness of the victims of "ethnic cleansing" and the selfishness that is essential to survival are related in chapters whose titles are locations and months.
The book reads like a journal with each chapter being a month, but is told in the third person with occasional thoughts in the first person in italics. People and towns are reduced to initials. The Serbs are not even given initials - they are just a nameless death-dealing terror that surrounds the women of the camp.
This is a story of the horrors of war as it is experienced by women, but it also tells the tale of the courage and resilience of the human spirit. Hard to read, but important, this is a great piece of writing that will be appreciated by students of the Balkan tragedy and by those who can stand to face the stark realities of war.
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Title: Cafe Europa: Life After Communism by Slavenka Drakulic ISBN: 0140277722 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War by Slavenka Drakulic ISBN: 006097608X Publisher: Harpercollins Pub. Date: 01 May, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Bridge on the Drina (A Phoenix Book ; P746) by Ivo Andric ISBN: 0226020452 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1984 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Eastern European Literature Series) by Danilo Kis, Joseph Brodsky, Duska Mikic-Mitchell ISBN: 1564782735 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Taste of a Man by Slavenka Drakulic, Christina Pribichevich Zoric ISBN: 0140266224 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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