Tvrtko Kulenović is a well-known Sarajevan writer, the author of works on theatre, art theory, literary criticism, and of novels, travel books, short stories, radio scripts, and a film script. The present book was first published in the original in 1994, and won the Writers of Bosnia and Herzegovina Award. It is a literary salmagundi based on the author’s own life and works. Among its various elements are: novelistic passages; autobiographical entries; social commentary; passages of what could be radio or film script; and accounts of travel.
The book is the record of a highly intellectual literary life, lived in the vicinity of continuing urban warfare; it recalls a past often coloured by violence. It contains numerous references to other books and writers – Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov (
But who would, in this unfortunate town, in these terrible times, use such foolish words as postmodernism, where its tendency towards the specific and individual appears here in the form of the words bread, water, electricity, snipers, shells. (p. 109)
And yet he cannot resist resorting to the realm of books and aesthetics, surely to provide himself with some respite, some means of coping with the situation. And this strategy offers some relief to the reader too, in the midst of the private and public destruction recounted. But though he engages in dialogue with Camus, for example, he cannot escape the awful circumstances of the present. Camus’s ‘Return to Tipasa’ idealises, from a child’s perspective, the presence of the sea: ‘I grew up with the sea and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable’ (p. 23). Kulenović, who had originally considered ‘Return to Tipasa’ ‘sacred’, now declares:
I find it sounding grotesque now: children in basements of Sarajevo drawing their longing for happiness do not draw the sea: only a brook, a tree, a flower, a blade of grass, a peaceful and unbroken bench in the clearing among demolished buildings. (p. 23)
The book immerses one in this disfigured world, and it is heart-breaking.
At intervals the author refers to the present in Bosnia as ‘the age of vampires’. Violence is ever present; the times are awash with blood:
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Kulenović, with the type of minute prosaic focus on local buildings and their history juxtaposed with the horror of this incident, needs to bear witness, and one can understand this, but it does not make the book any easier to read. The ‘disease’ proclaimed in the title is death (p. 161). Father, mother, friends, scores of people die unnaturally, through atrocities, through vendettas. In such circumstances one needs all the consolation from other sources that one can get, and, as hinted above, this fact links the book’s postmodern aestheticism to a level altogether different from the writerly ‘play’ usually associated with the term.
The book is divided into eight sections, each dealing with different autobiographical circumstances, and incorporating various modes of expression: a diary’s entries pertaining to his mother’s illness and death; a personal narrative pertaining to a vendetta started because of an accidental death; a radio script which takes its cue from a Pink Floyd song,
There are typographical errors in the book, and the worst is linked to the author’s interest in Indian art. I only make this observation to warn the reader that there are moments of irritation to be overcome because of such errors: writing about the Taj Mahal, Kulenović refers in the original to the ‘beloved wife’ of the Great Mughal, Shah Jahan, translated here as ‘bellowed wife’ (p. 95). Other errors have to do with spelling, grammar and syntax. This said, the book still reads well and strikes one as a valuable artefact to emerge from an immensely troubled society, yet one which is still committed to just values and great art.