Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and energetic debut novel is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California.
He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving his family behind, he must “write everything.” The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet’s childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. As Ismet’s foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man—real or imagined—named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight. When Mustafa’s story begins to overshadow Ismet’s new-world identity, the reader is charged with piecing together the fragments of a life that has become eerily unrecognizable, even to the one living it.
Shards is a thrilling read—a harrowing war story, a stunningly inventive coming of age, and a heartbreaking saga of a splintered family.
“Fierce, funny and real, it also says much about war, exile, guilt and fear.” —Chicago Sun-Times, Favorite Books of 2011
Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and energetic debut novel is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California.
He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving his family behind, he must “write everything.” The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet’s childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. As Ismet’s foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man—real or imagined—named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight. When Mustafa’s story begins to overshadow Ismet’s new-world identity, the reader is charged with piecing together the fragments of a life that has become eerily unrecognizable, even to the one living it.
Shards is a thrilling read—a harrowing war story, a stunningly inventive coming of age, and a heartbreaking saga of a splintered family.
“Fierce, funny and real, it also says much about war, exile, guilt and fear.” —Chicago Sun-Times, Favorite Books of 2011
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Overview
Ismet Prcic’s brilliant, provocative, and energetic debut novel is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California.
He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving his family behind, he must “write everything.” The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet’s childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. As Ismet’s foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man—real or imagined—named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight. When Mustafa’s story begins to overshadow Ismet’s new-world identity, the reader is charged with piecing together the fragments of a life that has become eerily unrecognizable, even to the one living it.
Shards is a thrilling read—a harrowing war story, a stunningly inventive coming of age, and a heartbreaking saga of a splintered family.
“Fierce, funny and real, it also says much about war, exile, guilt and fear.” —Chicago Sun-Times, Favorite Books of 2011
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802195067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
* A Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of the Year
* An Oregonian Top 10 Northwest Book of the Year
* Shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize
* Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction
* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award
"Impressive . . . Inventive . . . Pushes against convention, logic, chronology . . . Ambitious and deep . . . [Prcic] succeeds at writing an unsettling and powerful novel."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Fierce, funny and real, it also says much about war, exile, guilt and fear."
—Chicago Sun Times, Favorite books of 2011
"Prcic captures the insanity of war and its unceasing aftermath."
—Publishers Weekly
"A playful but heartfelt debut . . . Brightly detailed . . . [Prcic is] a spirited, soulful talent."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Brilliant . . . With verbal glee, Prcic serves up a darkly comic vision of the terrors and misunderstandings of immigration. Tight, glorious little tales-within-tales abound, rattled off with a quick, artless naturalism. . . . The writing is packed with one original metaphor after another, language that's almost drunk with colorful, startling images. . . . Brimming with scraps of memory, regrets, and rationalizations, Shards leaves an indelible scar on the reader's imagination. Prcic has pieced together a young man's story from the torn and exploded remains of his former life, and the sheer power of his language leaves the reader shaken."
—Shelf Awareness
"Brutally vivid."
—The Oregonian
"The experience of reading Shards—the deliberate disorientation, the layering and morphing of events that characterize the book—reveals in a more visceral way what it might be like to live always with a full awareness of the tenuousness of civil society, of the terrible precariousness of calm."
—St. Louis Beacon
"Compelling, sensual detail . . . Prcic’s prose is effective both at delineating the psychological nuances of his characters, and the sometimes-dodgy circumstances of the outside world. . . . There is a strain of dark humor running throughout, and an elastic joy in storytelling and linguistic expression that prevents this from being a simple recitation of atrocities and pain. . . . Well-written and thought-provoking . . . The story it tells is as unique and individual as the author who penned it."
—PopMatters
"Experimental and brutal and heart-wrenching . . . You just give in to it, as you do when reading someone like Faulkner. . . . What makes Shards so compelling is, first of all, the language . . . which has an almost ferocious beauty. Secondly, and as important, is the organization of the book, which gives it a sense of urgency. . . . Ismet's confusion is so vivid that it becomes ours, making us participants in this story. . . . To have had such a life when you are so young is hard to convey without becoming sentimental or pathetic, yet Prcic has done it brilliantly."
—The Arts Fuse
"Innovative in form and startling in its storytelling, Shards is a brilliant debut novel from Ismet Prcic."
—Largehearted Boy
"Ismet Prcic has taken apart the complexities of war, love, family and home and scattered them across a novel that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Shards is an original work of art, brutal and honest, and absolutely unforgettable."
—Dinaw Mengestu, author of How to Read the Air
"Ismet Prcic's prose is a gleaming pinball kept in inexhaustible play, kinetically suspended in time and space, endlessly flung away from its inevitable ending, colliding with memory and invention. This is writing fed by skill, inertia, horroor, and sorrow, a survivor's story of triumph and guilt. Yet Prcic's sensibility is at once brutally and tenderly comic. Humanity seems to run deepest among those who have survived its near-absence in the world."
—Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of their Lives
"A brilliant debut that manages to be both experimental and emotionally resonant. Comparisons to that other Bosnian-American writer, Aleksandar Hemon, will be unavoidable, but Prcic’s work is completely and wholly his own. Shards will come to be seen as the definitive novel of the Bosnian war and its resultant diaspora."
—Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust
"This novel moves at light speed, with shattering immediacy, through the parallel universe lives of two young Bosnian men—who may, in fact, be one person. Like fear, it will make you open your ears."
—Rae Armantrout, author of Versed
"The reason this novel is so good, hard, beautiful, and disturbing is that there is more than one Ismet delivering the many sharp pieces. Shards feels like a primary document torn from life by a powerful new talent."
—Ron Carlson, author of The Signal and Five Skies
"A passionate heart beats in these pages devoted to the reassembling of a life sundered by war. Ismet Prcic’s debut novel Shards is an outsized, outrageous, outstanding performance."
—Christine Schutt, author of All Souls
"[A] heartbreaking, rude, surprisingly compassionate, and still violent story about a Bosnian refuge who is trying to make sense of his new life in southern California . . . You're not going to find many sentences in any book, anywhere, like the sentences you find here. . . . Prcic makes use of preposterous and somehow dead-on analogies and allusions, profanities and profundities. He celebrates the hieroglyphs of punctuational tics, smears words, elevates typefaces, deploys footnotes, diary entries, memoirisms, blasphemy, theater, treachery, vulgarisms, and it works. . . . This book cannot be explained. It is to be experienced. Sentence by sentence, scene by scene."
—Beth Kephart
"I read the book with my mother, we were laughing, we read passages to each other, we said: Look, it’s giving me goose bumps, and then mother was crying quietly, and I thought: What a great book, what it is doing to us!"
—Saša Stanišic, author of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
NOTEBOOK ONE: THE ESCAPE
(... cheese ...)
As the KLM flight finally touched American soil, the white-knuckled Bosnians in the back — people for whom just a few months ago airplanes were but thin lines of cloud, silently crisscrossing the skies above their godforsaken villages — erupted in spontaneous applause. I joined them, despite the queasy feeling in my stomach brought on by the cheese and fruit we'd received somewhere over England. The cheese had been yellow and maybe rancid, and throughout the flight I'd hurried up and down the aisles in search of an unoccupied lavatory, where — kneeling awkwardly in front of one tiny toilet or another — I'd find myself unable to hurl.
These people, my people, the refugees, they were fleetingly happy and stubbornly perplexed. They smiled but also furrowed their brows at the unfathomable patter coming from the speakers. The plane came to a stop at the gate at JFK, but the little belt buckle next to the crossed-out cigarette over our heads remained lit. We sat there. The man in front of me, a youngish fellow with a wife and a daughter and a mouth of cataclysmic teeth stuck his head over the seat and peered at me through glasses.
"Are we there, or are we just getting gas?" he whispered to me in Bosnian, eyes bulging, half-fearful and half-embarrassed. Despite his attempt at discretion, everyone heard him, and they turned to me, the only Bosnian on board with any English, for information.
"We're here," I mumbled, nodding.
Murmurs of approval spread from seat to seat. The man turned back around.
"I thought so," I heard him say to his wife.
"Don't pretend you knew," she said.
"You always have to turn the harvest combine off before refueling, otherwise it's a fire hazard," he explained pointedly. "Same goes for planes. Machine's a machine."
"Yeah, yeah, you know everything."
"Shut it, woman."
It had begun with politicians fighting on television, talking about their nationalities, their constitutional rights, each claiming that his people were in danger.
"I thought we were all Yugoslavs," I said to my mother, although at fifteen I knew better. You had to live under a rock not to see that the shit was about to hit the fan. I don't know why I said it. Maybe the Communist message of Brotherhood and Unity had been so thoroughly drummed into my head that it surfaced robotically and overrode my actual experience. She told me to shut up and turned up the volume on the television.
Then reports had started coming in: sieges, civilian casualties, concentration camps, refugees. Croats and Muslims being slaughtered left and right by Serbian paramilitaries and by the Yugoslav People's Army, who, as their actions made evident, seemed not to really belong to all of the peoples of Yugoslavia.
"Which ones are we?" I asked my mother, still playing dumb, hoping that my willful denial could erase the images on the screen, erase my fear, make everything normal again. Again she told me to shut up and turned the volume even higher, until the downstairs neighbor started broom-handling our floor and my mother had to turn the TV down.
All at once your nationality became very important. There were reports of Serbian paramilitaries stopping all men trying to flee Bosnia, ordering them to drop their pants and underwear to prove they were Serb. Being circumcised meant your ass.
All the Bosnian cities and towns, if not overrun, were suddenly under siege. This went on for years. Civilians chopped down park trees, got buried in soccer fields, burned books and furniture, kept chickens on balconies, duct-taped their footwear, caught and ate pigeons, made makeshift stoves out of washing machines, grew mushrooms in basements, replaced broken windows with murky plastic, went nuts and jumped off buildings, drank rubbing alcohol diluted in chamomile tea until it was no longer flammable, rolled herbal tea cigarettes in toilet paper, suffered, hoped, waited, fucked. Authorities emptied the jails and mental institutions because they couldn't provide for the inmates and patients. Thieves and murderers went back to their families. Lunatics walked around town doing funny things like comparing people to watermelons and sad things like freezing to death behind churches. Soldiers fought for all of them and for themselves. My father, a chemical engineer, got lucky and came up with a contraption that turned industrial fat into edible fat and got paid ten thousand German marks by a small business entrepreneur and war profiteer, which saved us. My mother ate just enough to survive, because she felt so guilty about not being able to quit smoking. She rationed her cigarettes as much as she could, walking around the apartment like a restless ghost, playing her solitaire, counting seconds before the next one. Sometimes, my brother and I stole a cigarette when the pack was close to full andhid it somewhere in the apartment just to pull it out, unexpectedly, when she didn't have any left, just to see her eyes light up for a moment. Later it would break our hearts to see her fingering the wool of the large tapestry in the corridor, looking for our stash, her forefinger touching her lips, her eyes on fire.
The airport corridors glowed majestically. The current of passengers moved us along. You could tell who was a refugee and who wasn't — facial expressions, postures, surety of stride. The natives and the tourists walked briskly, trying to get it over with, catch their next flight, and be somewhere else. Their bodies were streamlined. The refugees, we walked like somnambulists, clutching our carry-ons, putting them between our bodies and the new world as if for protection. Hungry-eyed, we took in the wall posters advertising liquor and Disneyworld, the tiled floors, our stolid shoes, our knobby knees, our hands against these unfamiliar backgrounds. We drank it all in, giddily and guardedly at the same time.
But what I thought was going to be a short, silent, incognito burp turned out to be a mouthful of cheesy vomit. I stopped, dropping my bag next to the wall, and choked the burning, foul liquid down. It made my eyes water. I kept swallowing, trying to coat the inside of my throat with saliva. Then I realized that no one was passing me. When I turned around, sour-faced and disgusted, I saw that all the Bosnians were queued up behind me, waiting, all eyes. They had been following me. Even the few who had been walking ahead had stopped where they found themselves, looking over their shoulders.
"You all right there, pal?" the harvest combine operator asked, carrying his blonde-angel daughter in his arms like a sack of grain. His wife, a loose white headscarf over her head, was lugging two bags behind her and scowling.
"Zgaravica," I managed, and they all made sympathetic faces. Indigestion. I picked up my bag and started walking again, swallowing. There was poison oak in my mouth, my throat, the middle of my chest.
One part of me felt pride to have fifty people stopping when I stopped, going when I went. The other part was embarrassed by them, by their bucolic cluelessness, their needy, confused eyes. I fought the urge to run ahead and merge with the natives and the tourists, to ape their body movements, roll my eyes at the slowness of the line, pretend I cared about what time it was, and become one of them.
The corridors spewed us out into a huge room. A black woman in a uniform stood motioning with her hands, first to the right and then, just as eagerly, to the left. Her lipstick was bright red and you didn't have to be close to notice that some of it was on her teeth.
"Citizens and resident aliens, line up to the right. Everyone else, please keep left," she said, impatiently eyeing a Bosnian family of six, who, painfully baffled, planted their feet and gawked at her, holding up their manila refugee envelopes like signs at a rally and impeding the flow of traffic.
"Go left," I yelled ahead in Bosnian, and the family hesitated, turning to me. When I nodded, they lowered their envelopes and lined up to the left, checking to see if I really would follow suit.
The right-hand line was moving fast. Immigration officers waved the Americans to their stations, opened their passports, shot some shit with them, stamped the stamp, closed the passports, and, smiling, welcomed them back. Pretty soon the right side of the room was completely empty — until another wave of Americans, from some other flight, crowded it again.
The left side was uniformly compact, with foreigners inching down a monotonous maze. At the front, stepping over the yellow line became an issue. Officers kept repeating their admonishments with disgust, and the refugees kept looking around the floor, wondering why the hell these Americans were yelling and pointing at the tiles, checking their pockets to see if they'd dropped anything important, shrugging their shoulders.
When it was my turn at the yellow line I stood as close to it as possible without going over, like I was about to shoot a free throw. My heart rocked my body; I could feel its beat behind my eyes, on the sides of my neck, at the tips of my fingers, in my toes. For a moment I forgot about the rawness of my throat, about the putrid weight in my stomach, the bad taste in my mouth. I stared ahead at the PLEASE WAIT FOR THE NEXT AVAILABLE STATION screen, praying silently, sending good vibes, and visualizing the perfect outcome.
The screen changed to a flashing number eleven. I swallowed and crossed the yellow line toward the station where a young Sikh gazed at me politely but without emotion. I approached with a smile, psychically projecting Koranic verses instead of uttering them, and handed him my everything.
"Welcome to the United States. Good luck."
I wandered out of the immigration maze on a pair of legs that weren't mine.
There was a man with a sign in his hand that read BOSNIA, a chicken of a man in gray woolen pants, an off-gray jacket, and long navy blue coat. He had one of those comprehensive foreheads that, over the years, creeps up to the top of an egg-shaped head and a pair of eighties-style aviator eyeglasses, the top of which were tinted and flush with his eyebrows; the bottoms drooped to the middle of his cheeks. At the end of the corridor behind him was a uniformed cop — the last line of defense — whose forearms seemed rooted to his Batman utility belt. He was a huge redhead with the voice of a gargoyle and hands that could squeeze a confession out of a sculpture.
"What nation is abusing us now?" he boomed at the man with the sign watching me come down the corridor. But seeing me slow down, the man disregarded the question and came toward me.
"Bosnian?" he asked in Bosnian, and I, surprised, said yes in English. The combine operator and his wife attacked the man with a salvo of overlapping questions. As soon as they heard somebody speaking in a language they could understand, my fellow refugees turned their backs on me. I was instantly demoted from general of this ridiculous comedy to grunt, no one paying me any mind, some even pushing past me to get closer to this tiny man. I remembered how six months ago, on the way to Scotland, aboard a ferry from some French town to Dover, my friend Omar and I had separated from the rest of the theater troupe and walked around the boat, crudely insulting everyone we encountered in our native tongue, terrified and giddy that we might stumble upon the one passenger who, realizing he'd been told he was spawned by an ass-eyed, donkey-raping water buffalo, would kick our heads in.
"If you're from Bosnia, let's gather over here," yelled the man with the sign. "I'm Enes, and I'm from the Bosnian consulate. Welcome to New York City. The majority of you are trying to catch a connecting flight, and I'm here to assist you in —" The Bosnians went fucking crazy, speaking to him all at once, waving their tickets, their yellow immigrant envelopes, pushing to the front. Enes tried to calm them down, shaking his head, shouting that he wouldn't help anyone if they didn't queue up.
I felt a little sad witnessing this, so I pulled away. My flight wasn't until the next day, so I knew I would have to stay in New York overnight. I meandered a little way from the group, trying to look native. My stomach cramped and again I felt like I could burp. Fooled once, I swallowed down some spit instead.
"The rats are a-coming," said the redhead cop to a passing American who had noticed the commotion. I glared at him, right into his green blue eyes. He held my gaze.
"You speak English?" he boomed toward me, overpronouncing. There's a word in Bosnian, zaprška, which is a culinary term for the finishing touch to a lot of Bosnian meals. It's golden butter melted in a pan with red paprika, a violently orange sauce (the exact color of the cop's hair) that is poured into stews and over stuffed peppers.
"Zaprška," I said to him, smiling my best fresh-off-the-boat smile, "jebem li ja tebi mater hrdavu, jesi'l cuo!"
A couple of Bosnians heard me and scoffed and chuckled at the insult.
"I know you understand me," yelled the cop, but I took my ticket out of my pocket, pushed myself in between two Bosnian women and waved to attract Enes's gaze.
"Hej care, kad je avion za Los Andeles?" I called.
I sat there people-watching, the shoulder strap of my bag wrapped around my ankle in case somebody tried to steal my wrinkled clothes and smoked beef and the slivovitz I was smuggling as a present to my uncle — stuff he couldn't get his hands on in California. After telling me to wait, Enes had led the rest of the Bosnians away to catch their flights to cities like Nashville, Fargo, St. Louis. I sat there thinking I was cold. My jaw was jumpy. But the more I pressed my arms against my body the more I became aware that it wasn't the cold making my teeth chatter. I looked around. People: shapes, races, demeanors I'd never seen before. They were walking in groups or pairs, or were at ease with their aloneness, purposeful, while I sat there trying not to puke.
Other men with signs displaying the names of other sad countries rolled by with gaggles of confused immigrants, yelling in exotic languages, leaving behind one or two other petrified saps who, like me, tried to occupy as little space as possible. There was a gangly black man in a black suit sitting with four veiled women (resembling babushkas) in a range of sizes, pretending he knew what was up, but clearly scared. Only a young African woman in dark jeans and a white blouse, with closely cropped hair and shiny eyes, behaved with any sort of confidence. She took her seat, took a book and snack out of her carry-on, something noisy and, by the look of it, covered in salt, and proceeded to read and munch like she was on a park bench. I wanted to lay my head in her lap, to be touched and told that everything was fine.
Eventually, an airport shuttle — a smelly, back-loaded van of some kind — drove us through New York to where we were to spend the night. I caught only glimpses of the passing buildings, cityscapes, and cars; the African woman was next to me and our thighs were warmly touching. Feverishly, I imagined her taking my hand in hers, looking deep into my eyes and loving me wordlessly. I could see us hugging, touching, holding each other, walking along the beach, cuddling on a love seat, checking on our sleeping brown babies with their Slavic foreheads and African lips.
"Here we are," the driver said.
The van pulled into the parking lot of a dingy motel and shat us out the back. The driver said to prepare our documents and follow him inside. I could tell he did this all the time, his body familiar with the asphalt beneath his feet. He knew to pull the front door instead of push it, though there was no sign. You could see that he hated but tolerated the manager, a shaggy man of Arab descent, who asked me: "How many in the room?"
"One, one," I said showing him my index finger. He looked at my passport and had me sign next to my name on a faxed list. Then he shoved a key into my hand. The orange plastic rectangle to which it was attached read 7. He pointed, then turned to the African woman.
"How many in the room?"
I lingered, acting like I was having trouble picking up my bag, hoping to catch the number of her room, but the driver waved me over.
"Indian or Italian?"
"Bosnian," I told him.
He rolled his eyes.
"To eat! Do you want Indian food or Italian food for dinner?" I wanted to stomp on my own balls.
"Indian," I said, figuring there was less of a chance of ending up with a plateful of pork.
"We're leaving at six sharp. I will come and knock on your door. You should be up and ready," he warned, jotting down my choice.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Shards"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Ismet Prcic.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Interviews
Q&A with Ismet Prcic, author of SHARDS
Can you talk about how and when you came to learn English? What was it like writing a novel in a language other than your mother tongue?
I had English in school since the fourth grade but that doesn't prepare you to actually speak the language. You learn a lot of nomenclature, memorize a lot of irregular verbs, but putting these things in the right order to express yourself adequately is a little bit more of a nuanced endeavor. The only way to really learn a language is through an immersion. In my youth I was in a secret punk duo and we wanted to write our songs in English so we could one day be on MTV. I would scour our town's library for anything written in English so I could look at how sentences were constructed and change a word here and there and make the sentences my own. All the American movies and TV series were subtitled in Bosnia and we would tape pieces of paper over the bottom of the screen and watch the movie without the help. It's funny, Mexican soap operas are really popular in rural Bosnia nowadays and it's not uncommon to find Bosnian kids who grew up speaking to each other in Spanish with a perfect Mexican lilt. Like I said, an immersion.
As far as writing in English is concerned, it is hard. Words are never rained upon my keyboard. But this can be very freeing as well. I never finished anything I started in Bosnian because I know the language so well and no matter what I put down I am disgusted by it because I know that there are so many better ways to say what I put down. In English I'm happy to make sense, to be clear. And people say Oh, this is a wonderful way to put it, how do you do that? and I go that's the only way I know how to say that.
Within the book, there are many instances of things falling apart, or being exploded, and also many instances of things being reassembled. How does this inform the structure of the book?
The book is presented, in a way, as a primary document. Every word that the narrator has ever written is entrusted to a close friend who has to make sense of it and put the writings in a particular order and try to capture the essence of his friend, not knowing which parts are autobiographical, exaggerated, or downright invented. On top of that there's an extra complication. The narrator is haunted by this other person, this Mustafa Nalic, and the reader — just like the close friend serving as an editor — is never and will never be sure who this Mustafa is, if he's real or imagined. I think the central metaphor of the book is the little kid called Donut who collects shrapnel trying to reassemble a mortar shell so he can throw it back at the enemy. The impossibility of this endeavor is heartbreaking to me because there's no reassembling of something that has exploded with that kind of violence. There is no going back. The structure of Shards is similar. It's a sack of pieces of a human being that somebody put together to give us a glimpse of him, with a lot of pieces missing, some pieces that might come from some other human being; it's impossible to tell.
It's been said that artists must dare to leave their comfort zones in order to produce, but in most cases, presumably, they do so by choice. One of the reasons Ismet's story is so poignant and powerful is that his coming into his own as a person and an artist intersects with the violent dissolution of his family and his homeland. Does survival feel like a betrayal for Izzy? Or is it simply his lack of familiar footholds in the new world that make it so hard for him to move forward?
Survivors always struggle with that. At times you count your lucky stars, other times you wonder why me?, what did I do to deserve to survive? and the like. But it's exactly this duality and the pondering of this duality that becomes a driving force behind wanting to write it down, wanting to pacify the mind-splitting experience by putting it on a piece of paper. Some get into the business of rewriting the narrative, bringing it to a satisfying but un-true conclusion that makes it easier to deal with the experience. Others try to capture it as it is, conflicting, dual. Triumph and guilt, two opposing feelings about a single experience, exist within the same mind simultaneously and they do not cause it to short-circuit. I'm obsessed with the idea that, when it comes to humans, when a coin is tossed once into the air it is possible that it will land on both sides simultaneously.
What makes it hard for this narrator to move forward is not the fact that he cannot figure out how to negotiate the new world but the fact that it is impossible to run away from trauma. Trauma shatters who you think you are, what you think you love, believe in, think, and if you survive, you are this reassembled person who will never again trust him or herself to love, believe and think with the same intensity and surety in their beliefs or thoughts as before, because they experienced firsthand just how fleeting and immaterial these things are in the face of death.
As he moves from place to place, refuge to refuge, before, during, and after the war, Ismet reads lots of books, no matter where he is, and often has to leave them behind. Now you've written your own. Can you talk about the role that literature and art played in your own survival?
I've always thought that art is done not in spite of, but because of, one's circumstances and I often say that war is the best thing that could have happened to me as an artist. Just like the narrator, I was a part of an avant-garde theater troupe and I recall a particular stretch of time in which the Serbs shelled my city every hour, on the hour. It went on for awhile and people started winding their watches to it. You would realize that it's two minutes to noon and you would leisurely make your way to the closest building, go down into the basement and wait. The noon shell would explode, and you would leisurely go back out and go back to your life until two minutes to one p.m., at which point you would have to go and find another building to hide in. And, despite this, not once did our theater troupe miss a single rehearsal though we had them pretty much every day for four hours. It was a form of rebellion against the aggressors; your shells cannot stop me from being me, from doing my art.
I've always thought that a reason to read literature is to witness how other minds, different minds than your own mind you, perceive the world and engage with it, deal with its absurdity. There's nothing like finding out that some other poor soul from South East Asia thinks about "reality" the same way you do as you sit there in your ski suit and under four blankets next to every member of your immediate family on a freezing winter night in Tuzla, 1994, with no electricity and with a single piece of wick floating in a jar lid full of vegetable oil, making all the shadows in the room flicker and throb. You feel this kinship across the distance, across ages, and no amount of shells that one can lob into the city can take that away from you. And it's the same when these writers' ideas are totally different from your own. As long as they create a spark of thought, make you look at everything with new eyes, you feel like you're not alone; you're in dialogue with a fellow human being across the globe, across centuries. Even escapism feels good in this situation. You just can't go wrong when reading books, any books.
Writing also seems to be what drives the character of Ismet over the edge. What is it about writing that can be so dangerous?
It seems that we write diaries in times when we cannot comprehend what is happening to us and by writing sentences about our experiences, and organizing those sentences into paragraphs, and so on and so forth, we somehow tame the experience, make it manageable, digestible. We take the scary trauma, we liquefy it, dip our pen into it, and spread it cursively all over sheets of paper, and when we run out of ink we have our trauma transferred into words. It's sitting right there on the desk in a stack, you can pick it up and lock it in a drawer forever, or give it to others, or burn it, but just like somebody taking your photograph steals a little bit of your soul, so does writing about trauma steal some of its potency. It's therapeutic.
However, if the person trying to tame his or her experience by writing about it is not ready, is split between two worlds, is broken, then what comes out is not therapeutic at all. What comes out becomes clear evidence of this person's brokenness. Think of Jack Nicholson in Kubrik's The Shining. It's not much of a book but it gives us a glimpse into what it's like to be broken in this particular way.
The blurring of boundaries between the Ismet vs. Mustafa stories keep the reader on his toes, and can at times feel like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. Where did the idea of Mustafa originate for you?
The way Ismet and Mustafa are presented in the novel was inspired by my high school Physics professor Mr. Omer Mesic and my very limited knowledge of quantum mechanics. Sometime in 1994 we were studying allied optics and Mr. Mesic lectured that photons, the smallest units of light, are both waves and particles simultaneously. He then went on to explain it further and I got some of what he was saying but I remember leaving that class in a trance. This new knowledge that things could be both matter and energy simultaneously floored me. I went home that night and wrote in my journal making a following youthful connection: humans are made of the same stuff as light because we're also both matter (body) and energy (soul, spirit, consciousness, what-have-ya) simultaneously. So, there you go.
Can you describe what it's like when you go back to Bosnia now to visit your family? Has the experience changed over the years?
My answer here is going to be banal. Of course everything is different now and it's not chiefly because the times change but because we grow old. My father has died. My mother lives by herself, pacified by her faith, calmer than I've ever known her to be. My brother is grown up and married and there's more respect and love between us now. The old Bosnia is gone. We traded socialism for kleptocracy... I'm realizing that this is all pure nostalgia. We all think of the past as good ole times, forgetting that it's not the times that we miss, not this political regime or that standard of living, but our own youth and stupidity. It's just when you stay in your hometown your growing old seems more gradual. When you live elsewhere and visit your home town on a regular basis and witness the transformations from year to year, it makes you grow old faster, makes your bones ache.
But still the first thing you do back in Tuzla is make an obligatory round of visits to all your family members where you have to convince them (individually and usually on the sly) that you're alright, that the reason why you and your wife don't have progeny yet is due to economic and not medical or domestic reasons. You eat chevapiat the Tin Can, make a pilgrimage to the old stomping grounds, meet up with balding, thickening high school friends (all of you in your mid-thirties) whose business cards claim they are risk managers, managing directors, database administrators but who have no problem meeting you at a bar at 1 PM on a Tuesday and drinking you under the table for four or five hours, mostly on you (because you're rolling in it), and whose sleek cell phones never chirp and whose wedding rings are easily removable, and who keep bitching about their kids, cars, colonoscopies. You trudge the familiar streets in shoe-melting heat, perspire in crowded cafes with no air-conditioning, pounding buckets of iceless Coca Cola Lights and trying to remember whether you went to kindergarten with that broken person murmuring to herself on a stairway in a petticoat.
What's your favorite Tom Waits album?
Swordfishtrombones. My background is in theater and this album is so histrionic it's not even funny. Every song takes you on a different journey and there are these instrumental intermezzos to make sure that the transitions between songs with lyrics are not too jarring. Amazing stuff. But the first Tom Waits album I ever heard was Rain Dogs and that one has a special place in my heart. In the world of the novel that was the album Izzy, the narrator, heard on his twenty first birthday that made him want to stay in the United States forever. But one can't go wrong with Tom Waits. Every album is a trip into new outlandish territories. I would listen to this guy order Chinese takeout over the phone and fart into a half-full can of Pabst Blue Ribbon while sawing his kitchen counter in two. He'd make it sound amazing. You better believe it.
What writers have you discovered lately?
Lately, I'm on a John Edgar Wideman kick. I read Philadelphia Fire in grad school and it floored me, killed me. Now I'm reading everything by him, and also, like other fellow readers who are scared they will run out of books by a favorite writer, I'm saving a book or two for later on in life. He's one of the greats. I don't know what the Nobel people are waiting for. I also discovered a Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy who is a force of nature. Her novel Paradise is magnificent. Nami Mun's Miles From Nowhere is a kick-ass book as well. I also have to recommend Widowby Michelle Latiolais. Yes, she was my mentor and teacher, but this book is so stunning that it goes beyond any bias you may think I have. Everyone should read it and cry.