Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic

Text Box: Book Pick
Title: Sarajevo Marlboro
Author: Miljenko Jergović
Genre: Short Stories
First Published: 1994

Sarajevo Marlboro
by Miljenko Jergović

This is a unique collection of stories. Nowhere else have the death of Billie Holiday and the bombing of Sarajevo been so elegantly intertwined. Although centered on the Bosnian War, Jergović's stories avoid politics and epic themes whenever possible. They focus instead on the delicate ways that people struggle to avoid war's reality: through random love affairs, daily preoccupations, music, drink, and the exchange of cigarettes.

The book reads like flipping through an old, fading photograph album. Each story captures an impression of a person and time, in no direct relation to the others. What joins these fragments is the hellish destruction of a world breaking apart. With poignant simplicity, Jergović describes how each character balances the shards of their past life with the emptiness of their future. He does so with honesty and imagery, and the results are poetic.

Stories titled "Cactus," "The Bell," "The Library," "The Letter,"--this is how Jergović creates a portrait of Bosnia. Though it doesn't preach or offer historical facts, Sarajevo Marlboro might spark a shadow in your mind, and it may even move you.

Excerpts:

        She was always afraid of missing the beautiful and important things in life. She traveled a lot, but more often she panicked because she was stuck at home. For some reason she always imagined that real happiness and pleasure lay elsewhere. As a result she was forever thinking up new ways of stopping time and grasping that crystal moment when life becomes a dream or a fairy-tale. (11)

. . . If the fire is slow and lazy, it means that the burning flat belongs to some poor people. If it bursts into a huge, blue fireball, then it's somebody's nicely decorated attic with paneled walls burning. If it burns unremittingly, then the flames must be coming from the apartment of a wealthy shop-owner, full of massive antique furniture. But if the flame suddenly shoots up, wild and uncontrollable, like the hair of Farrah Fawcett, and disappears even more rapidly, allowing the wind to spread paper ash over the city, that means somebody's private library has just burned down. As you witnessed many such vigorous fires over the months and years of shelling, you got to feel that the foundations of Sarajevo must have been made out of books. (151)


         5 out of 5

        Reviewed by Laurel

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Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović. Translated from Bosnia by Stela Tomašević.
Published by Penguin Books. Copyright, 1994. Translation copyright, 1997.