How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Even with hindsight, the Clinton-era conflict in the Balkans remains a confusing mess of clashing ethnic, national and religious identities. A handful of compelling stories about this this genocide-marred period have been bubbling to the surface, most recently Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. The latest, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by a young Bosnian named Sasa Stanisic (which for for some reason comes with a cover image featuring American author Daniel Handler), stands out as one of the best.Stanisic's hero, Aleksandar, is a precocious, sports-loving twentysomething from the multiculti Bosnian town of Visegrád. His background is mixed-his father is Serbian and his mother is a Muslim Croat-although this isn't an issue until the early '90s, when Yugoslavia disintegrates and Bosnian Serbs, then allied with Slobodan Milosevic, begin massacring their political opponents. Aleksandar and his family flee to Germany, but he cannot escape the past. During his long exile, Aleksandar wonders what became of his childhood friends-specifically Asija, a young Muslim girl he hasn't heard from since his abrupt flight. Stanisic's novel works best when it exposes the impossibility of truly understanding the war. Not even expectations of the worst can prepare our hero for his return to the former Yugoslavia. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is probably too unconventional-a mix of wordy meditations on violence and subtler hints of postwar numbness-to appeal to fans of authoritative war histories. But its relentless attention to inexplicable evil makes this book a challenging and haunted work.