How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

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More About This Book

Overview

For young Aleksandar Krsmanoviæ, his grandfather Slavko’s credo—"the most valuable gift of all is invention, imagination is your greatest wealth”—endows life in Višegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina with a mythic quality, a kaleidoscopic brilliance. So when his grandfather dies suddenly, Aleks summons this gift of storytelling to see him through his grief. It is a gift he will have to call on again when soldiers transform Višegrad—a town previously unconscious of racial and religious divides—into a nightmarish landscape of terror and violence. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past, and especially by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, he sends manic, anguished letters out into the abyss, again turning to language to conjure all that he’s had to forfeit—his homeland, his mother tongue, his innocence. Beneath the infectious vibrancy of Stanišiæ’s voice is a sweetness and pathos that will haunt the reader long after the book ends. Powerful, vivid, funny, and devastating, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone captures the catastrophe of war through a child’s eyes and shows how words have the ability to mend what is broken and resurrect what is lost.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Stanisic's debut novel is the moving story of a young Bosnian refugee named Aleksandar Krsmanovic. Aleksandar is the apple of his family's eye, but his sheltered childhood ends when ethnic wars brewing in the surrounding republics make their way to his hometown in the spring of 1992. As Serbian troops storm the village, Aleksandar's family hides, but nowhere is safe. The violence forces the family to Germany, where they struggle to adjust to their new lives as refugees. In the depths of their despair, Aleksandar's grandmother makes him promise to "remember when everything was all right and the time when nothing's all right." Aleksandar keeps his word, and the memories pour out of him like a river. The author organizes Aleksandar's recollections as a stream of consciousness, operating on no distinct linear time line and often stopping one story and starting another in the same breath. It is difficult to keep up with this frantic pace, but it pays to be patient because a remarkable life's journey unfolds. (June)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal

It's the early 1990s in ViAegrad, and young Aleksandar Krsmanovic´ is devastated by the death of his grandfather, who taught him that with his imagination he can do anything. And so he devises a kaleidoscopically cracked and beautiful view of the world that carries him through any boy's normal growing pains to the ominous moment when a classmate announces that he doesn't have the right name; soon, his city is conquered by former countrymen, and his family escapes to Germany. There, Aleksandar struggles to contact the girl he left behind and makes wildly fractured lists, trying to anchor his life in memories of a homeland that's changed forever. Having fled ViAegrad, first novelist StaniAic´ now listens to his protagonist's grandfather and writes brilliantly cockeyed prose that borders on the surreal-or maybe the psychedelic. (One chapter is titled "How the soldier repairs the gramophone, what connoisseurs drink, how we're doing in written Russian, why chub eat spit, and how a town can break into splinters.") This book won Germany's Readers' Prize and was nominated for the Deutscher Buchpreis, and rightly so; it's voice of a bold young Europe and a child's-eye view of war all the more poignant because it's not gritty realism. Highly recommended for anyone not expecting standard plot. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/15/08.]
—Barbara Hoffert

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Kids say the darnedest things -- and, when it comes to warfare, the most damning. Adults may take comfort in the soulless brevity of reportage, the headlines of factions and troop movements and body counts, but as long as there is war, children will go on shaming us with their blunt hyphen-bullets and Crayola wounds. Lacking "context," they make perfect sense out of senselessness.

Sasa Stanisic, born in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978, was forced from his home by war at age 14. His debut novel recaptures the confusion and horror of that experience: it tells the story of Visegrad, a mixed Muslim and Christian city on the River Drina, which fell to the Serbian-backed Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) on April 16, 1992. The precise identity of the aggressors is never revealed by Stanisic's young narrator, Aleksandar Krsmanovic, lending an air of unreality to a very real catastrophe.

Indeed, the proceedings will be difficult to interpret for readers not reasonably well-versed in the history of Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, this works in favor of the novel. It isn't a history lesson so much as an attempt to render a child's-eye view of war and dislocation, and this it manages with a startling degree of success.

Why startling? Innocence, particularly innocence lost, isn't easy to depict without sinking into the maudlin and manipulative. The American novel Stanisic's debut most closely resembles is Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, not only because Foer's book is narrated by a child and retails a tragedy (September 11th) but also because both novelists have a distracting penchant for whimsy and mannered verbal invention. Stanisic's very first chapter is entitled "How long a heart attack takes over a hundred metres, how heavy a spider's life weighs, why a sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the comrade-in-chief of the unfinished can work," and the reader can't help wondering how or why a Bosnian refugee in Germany (where the narrator has relocated) is channeling the Park Slope–Mission District Axis of Eggers.

When the somewhat grown-up Aleksandar searches for Asija, the girl who holds a key to his lost childhood, American readers may recall the tedious storybook quest of Foer's boy narrator for the key to his own mystery. The question is why it works, more or less, in Stanisic's case; the answer is sincerity. Aleksandar is more than the usual mix of precocity and naivete, the prodigy slinging Family Circus koans of piercing moral vision. He is an ordinary child engaged in an extraordinary act of memory, attempting to preserve for himself and his family the things war is taking away from them.

Here, for instance, his paternal grandfather's funeral summons an important fragment of family history -- or is it mythology?

Grandpa Slavko once told me about a festival in Veletovo, he said that long ago Great-Grandpa mucked out the biggest stable in Yugoslavia in a single night because in return its owner promised him his daughter's hand in marriage-today she's my Great-Granny. Grandpa wasn't sure just when it all happened. Two hundred years ago, I cried, and Uncle Miki tapped his forehead: there wasn't any Yugoslavia back then, midget, those were the royal stables after the First World War. I liked Uncle Miki's version because it made Great-Granny into a princess.

Necessity being the mother of invention, Aleksandar embellishes and amplifies his memories in order to give them more force as they recede in time. The death of his maternal grandfather, Rafik -- an alcoholic who drowned in the Drina -- is transformed in Aleksandar's imagination into a macabre ceremony: "His face was under the water, his feet were on the bank -- his beloved Drina was kissing him in death.... He had smartened himself up for the wedding, he was wearing his uniform with the railwayman's badge."

Alongside surrealistic tableaux like this are scenes that should be pure fantasy but are anything but -- like a group of prisoners forced to play soccer for their lives. In an unforgettable moment one of them is forced to retrieve the ball from a forest "with more mines in the ground than mushrooms." He is given a bullet-proof vest: "Wrap it up well before you bring it back," a soldier tells him. This is gallows humor at its blackest.

But Meho wasn't blown up, he just crapped in his trousers, it would wash out. His own side and some of the Serbians applauded as he stalked back to the clearing with the ball under his arm and his head still on his shoulders, looking as if at the very least he'd just scored in extra time in the final against Brazil, making it one-nil, and was on his way to the terraces to acknowledge the cheers.

Stanisic has a fantastic talent for blending the mundane and the soul-shattering. To see his characters fretting over their Tetris scores while being shelled by unseen enemies is to understand that this can and does happen anywhere. But war isn't Stanisic's true subject. Nor is religious conflict: the names of his mother's parents, Rafik and Fatima, are our only clues to a mixed heritage that gives Aleksandar his special sensitivity. The book is above all a tribute to individuality, how the inner world of memory and invention must assert itself in the face of forces that divide and level.

Aleksandar, like his creator, escapes to safety in short order, but he is undeniably changed by the ordeal. This is reflected expertly in Stanisic's prose. When Aleksandar returns to his home years later, his voice is subdued; it is unmistakably his but filled with solemnity and respect. He is no longer a child at the center of his own strange universe. He is both grateful and ashamed to have escaped. And so when his uncle Miki launches into a tirade about Aleksandar's father, who "sends money, and photos of a swimming pool and your mother in a bathing costume," Aleksandar forces himself to accept the anger. It is a fine moment in what is a very rare achievement: a book that describes childhood without, as so many American novels do, glorifying childishness. --Stefan Beck

A writer living in Palo Alto, California, Stefan Beck has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion, and other publications.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780802118660
  • Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  • Publication date: 6/10/2008
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 992,932
  • Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 1.30 (d)

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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Posted July 9, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    9780736698917 9780375703423

    I guess it was the writing style

    This is sort of a stream of consciousness novel....the characters are well developed but I was bored somehow...it was actually a good story way way underneath the writing.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted June 12, 2008

    A reviewer

    Sasa Stanisic's sensational novel debut, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, well earns its space on the overcrowded shelf of coming-of-age-during-wartime novels. Beyond succeeding as a compelling fictional account of the very real tragedy of a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it's also testament to the power of the imagination¿and its limitations

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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