Rick Simonson

He of the Gramophone
June 23, 2008

How many places, how many countries, how many languages he's had to navigate these past few years, I can only imagine - but Sasa Stanisic (sans the accents here), who came through Elliott Bay last week for his luminous novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Grove), has certainly had to navigate them. The book has been published in over twenty countries.

Joseph O'Neill, who gave his own wonderful reading for his novel, Netherland, at our place yesterday afternoon, saw that young Mr. Stanisic had been through, and mentioned some festival they had both been at over in the UK.

In traveling about the U.S. - both as he did before the novel was published (Winter Institute) and now - for Sasa Stanisic it's a matter of holding forth two languages removed from his native Bosnian (or Serbo-Croatian). German became his adopted language and home after his family fled the war which came to his homeland. And here he is going about the U.S. in English.

Most personable and engaging with all - keeping a special eye out for other Bosnians and natives of the Balkans - he gave a terrific accounting of this book which made its way to the U.S. after receiving acclaim everywhere else it was published. Translated by Anthea Bell - most known to some of us as the translator of W.G. Sebald - How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has the feel of one of those books which will be read for a long time.

It is an extraordinary book in what it tells and the way - largely from a young person's perspective - it tells it. Life is lived in the way it is told and revealed to someone growing up. Then the unintelligible, the most horrific, the most unexplainable happens - and the ways of telling seem to go out the window with it. At least, the way that the adults doing the telling and teaching. For young Aleksandar, it is a matter of learning how else to learn, to adapt, to survive. Touchstones of friends, of the beautifully-invoked River Drina are kept as places of bearing.

This is a part of the world, one of the few, that has kept alive - at least until these past conflicts - pockets and places where the oldest forms of storytelling, the kind Homer and those from his time engaged in - orally composed, remembered, and told. Alfred Lord's The Singer of Tales, a classic work of scholarship, was a major study. Talking with Sasa about this, he knew exactly what was being talked of, the single-string instruments these oral tellers would play as they told.

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a book that feels in touch with that old way of telling, even as it is a young person's narrative, and a narrative heartbreakingly of our time. The longing voiced in here, for home, for place, for peace, for a very particular young woman - is voiced mightily, and is the longing of a remarkable old soul.

Posted by Rick Simonson on June 23, 2008 | Comments (0)