When there are already so many wars, how come there are no novels about them wars? Good Romanian, they want to say. Maybe this claim seems too arbitrary to us, but here, let's start from The Iliads, so let's list everything we can think of in the meantime. Until today. Or something seemingly less ambitious: here in this region we had several quality wars only in the previous century, so let's see how many war novels we are able to list. Let it be a little game of the reader with himself: if he lists more than five novels in 10 minutes, it will mean that he is a solid reader; if he lists more than ten novels, it will mean that he is a very dedicated reader. And there are many more wars than good books about wars, and you don't know which war is more disgusting than which. It is precisely the degree of abomination of war as a phenomenon that is one of the reasons that there are not as many good novels about war as, it seems to us, there would have to be in order to... how to - what exactly? How would our reading experience (say) produce any impact outside of ourselves. But there is something else. War is such an abominable thing that it can only be approached, so to speak, from a distance. Between himself and the war, the writer must put up a protective fence, he must fence himself off with a minefield from the war, or at least approach it from behind, if at all possible. Here is Louis Ferdinand Céline, for example, who is falsely claimed to have written one of the best, if not the best, anti-racial novel. A journey at the end of the night. However, he wrote Selin's (nevertheless) brilliant war novel, and every good novel about war is, at the same time, anti-war. Céline, who was largely crippled by the war, had to leave the war to return to it and write well. The experience of war, therefore, is not crucial in order to write about war. The distance from which the war is written is crucial. The war came to Sarajevo writer Adisa Bašić thirty years after its end, and the time distance was already embedded in her writing. But the distance as such, of course, is not enough either. Awareness of the distance is also necessary, a well-measured distance, just as a swimmer needs to measure the distance to the land well, because if he misses it, he will drown.
THE SEARCH
......
The Book of Almir the novel is about Almir Smajić, a lieutenant of the Yugoslav People's Army originally from Bjeljina, who was hit in the neck by a sniper's bullet on November 7, 1991, near Vukovar, killing him on the spot. Before that, Bjeljina had never seen a bigger funeral than at the end of that year in 1991: the whole town gathered behind the coffin of a twenty-three-year-old young man. No one was left indifferent by that death and no one was in that procession by accident. It was the last, desperate cry of people who, gathering and huddling together, tried to ward off what, like an increasingly loud beast, was approaching their city and all of them: war. We know today that the death of that young man could not atone in advance for what happened to Bjeljina: the killing and expulsion of Muslims. And it is quite certain that in that November procession there were those who would be killed or exiled and those who would kill and persecute. Because Alimir's name was still not "wrong" and it was still ours. Behind that name gathered those who did not want to accept what, at that time, despite them, despite everything, could no longer be avoided. Or, perhaps, by mourning Almir they were already mourning themselves, regardless of whether they would be among the persecuted or among the persecutors.
A storyteller who shares almost all the characteristics of the writer Adisa Bašić - but it is never out of place to remind that a writer and a storyteller are not the same, nor can they be - the storyteller is the wife of Almir's older brother Ada, she is a professor of literature in Sarajevo, and according to family tradition, she goes to Bjeljina with her husband and his mother for the anniversary of Almir's death. The tone of the narration is very calm and reduced, and it seems to deal only with facts and data, between which are inserted episodes with a newly born baby, or the occasional remark that refers to Ada, Almir or their mother. At the same time, the narrator also throws in a few suggestions that reveal flare-ups of discomfort because, after all, Ado and his mother were born in Bjeljina and are returning to the city from which the Serbs expelled them, or, at the very least, made their lives so unbearable that they had to leave. And again, Ado is looking forward to meeting her and Almir's Serbian friends, and, along with discomfort, the narrator shows a certain curiosity that, as the novel progresses, will turn into an obsessive search for people who will be able to tell her about the murdered Almir, her husband's own brother. Because Ado never told her about his brother. To that extent, the trip to Bjeljina turns into a multiple detective search: for those who knew Almir, for memories she never talked about with her husband, but also for the father of her child himself, for that man - wonderful in every way - whom she failed to reach, or at least failed to unlock that part that, the narrator suspects, says more about him than all spoken words.
STORYLINES
Without leaving the calm narrative flow, the narrator opens several parallel investigations and several different time plans. On one level, he collects everything he can find out about Almir: facts, documents and testimonies, and along the way he writes down how he reaches the people he tries to talk to, just as Javier Serkas does in his Salamis soldiers. On the next level, she comments on all the documents and all the stories, and what gives this procedure a convincing literary quality are precisely the direct descriptions of the situations in which she finds herself. It is difficult to determine what is more exciting than what, because there is no idling. For example, a meeting with Ada's old friend, who will give them a spacious apartment in the city center. Her friend, a hairdresser, has a Serbian first and last name, but the narrator will find out that her name was different before the war. Not only will the new and old name be mixed when Ado addresses her, but this sad and, in fact, magnificent heroine of this novel will become a symbol of the incurable wound of this town: everyone, of course, in a small town knows everything about everyone, and Milica (in the Serbian version), whose hairdressing salon is located not far from Draža Mihailović Square (that name is "quite normal for people, a communal thing, they receive mail, fill out forms, when asked, they say - Trg Draže Mihailović, number that and that", p. 56), will no longer fully accept either "hers" or "ours" (and let the reader judge for himself which ones are "hers" and which ones are "ours", and which ones she does not belong to or belongs to). The purity of the motives and the carefulness of the details in the episodes with that woman show the great skill of the writer and, again, a sense of narrative measure. Actually, this book could be written in only one way, the way invented by Adisa Bašić.
A special level is the story of Almir himself.
CALM STRONG DETAILS
This novel could never have been this powerful and this important if Adisa Bašić had made a mistake even once, because the material for this kind of story is a kind of (literary) minefield: it is enough, namely, to make a mistake only once. And how can you not make a mistake when there are so many strong points, when everything is imbued with the deepest and most subtle emotions, when the stakes are a mother's grief, a brother's love and a hard male heart that does not want, or cannot beat in the rhythm in which the storyteller would like, or love? To that question - how not to make a wrong step - the writer herself probably wouldn't be able to answer, but she simply didn't make it. When she talks about Almir, the narrator always relies on something (a document, a VHS tape), or someone (a friend, an acquaintance) and even when she literally takes the speech off the tape because she is unable to process it literary - because that speech is so difficult, terrible and magnificent in its deep darkness - insightful to us with that detail, namely that she does not want to interfere with literature in bare life, the narrator suggests that this is exactly a literary gesture (because, of course, life without literature there is none). That's why the search for Anja, Almir's girlfriend and "beautiful cousin's daughter", will be dramatic, important, indispensable even for the story of Almir. And, again, in every conversation - death: "We finished the conversation and we're heading for the car. It's all too much for me. This book is hard for me, their stories are too hard for me, I hear about Almir's death over and over again. I wanted them to tell me about life, and they all remembered death best" (p. 114). Thus, Almir himself is the thread on which the storyteller, like a tightrope walker, like Philip Petty who strung a wire between the two buildings of the Trade Center in New York and then danced on that wire, above a half-kilometer chasm - Almir himself is that thread that is between the storyteller and the abyss. Because Almir is dead, he is gore, while everyone else is on the ground, in the minefield of literature. And when, finally, he captures Almir with words, when we find out that Almir was ordinary, and, in fact, strange guy, and when we mix what we know with his completely senseless death, we get one of the best war novels in the language, along with By war Miljenko Jergović and Sandblasting sand Milenka Bodirogić (to mention only the two most recent and really big ones).
There is never enough space and time to write about a novel like this, because here, the signatory of this text has barely started, and the newspaper space is already filled and now we have nowhere else to go, except for one more re-reading of Adisa Bašić's novel.
