Postcards from the Grave

#766
Title: Postcards from the Grave
Author: Emir Suljagić
Publisher: Saqi Books
Year:2005
Country: Bosnia-Herzegovina
196 pages

Bosnia-Herzegovina. A non-linear report/memorial in pastiche form from a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. Suljagić was spared the fate of his compatriots because he was working as a translator for the UN forces. To understand what's happening in this collection of short essays, first read about the Serbian expansion into Bosnia in the 1990s. As I read, I kept being reminded of Elie Wiesel's holocaust narratives, and particularly of the tension in novels such as The Oath: A Novel in which telling versus not telling the story of the destruction of the community creates terrible conflicts for the narrator.

An often-occurring typo in this book is the inconsistent but frequent elision of a word followed by "I"--"promisedI", for example.