Girl at War by Sara Nović
My rating: 5/5 cats
In America I’d learned quickly what it was okay to talk about and what I should keep to myself. “It’s terrible what happened there,” people would say when I let slip my home country and explained that it was the one next to Bosnia. They’d heard about Bosnia; the Olympics had been there in ’84.
this is one of those debut novels that makes you really really excited for the future of fiction.
everything about this book is phenomenal. her writing is fluid, her characters are vivid, and she brings a strong perspective and voice to subject matter that is serious and important while resisting the temptation to play it sentimental.
it is about a ten-year-old croatian girl’s coming of age in zagreb, in the midst of civil war. it covers the innocent times just before the conflict, the horrible events she witnessed during, the things she did to stay alive, her escape to new york, the difficulties of adjusting to a “normal” life, having seen all that she had seen at such a young age, and how her past affects her adult self.
there is a slight detachment in the narrator’s voice that is spectacular – hers is a clear-eyed assessment of a situation that would only be cheapened by employing a heavily emotional tone. my beloved jonathan dee, in his blurb for this book, calls this “ruthless understatement” which proves he is a much better writer than i am.
there’s such economy to her prose, so much bubbling underneath the actual words:
…when they got to the photos of the mass graves, I slipped out a side door and vomited in a potted plant. I didn’t come back for the rest of the presentation, not wanting to see someone I recognized.
there are several memorable moments that will smolder in the mind long afterwards. so many carefully-written scenes that seem small in scale, but resonate.
The sandbags were supposed to be strongholds we could stand behind and shoot from if the Serbs came to capture us. But instead of a sense of safety, the barricade imparted an air of naïveté. It was as if we believed a flood of tanks was like a flood of water and could be stopped by a pile of sacks. It was as if we’d never seen the footage of the tank plowing over the little red Fićo in the streets of Osijek, of an army truck crushing a passenger bus into a ditch on the side of the road. It was as if it never occurred to anyone that blocking the incoming roads was the same as blocking the escape routes.
she writes so well of the adaptability of children who find themselves in a war-torn world
By the end of the week we’d absorbed the sandbags into our playscape. War quickly became our favorite game and soon we had given up the park altogether.
and the way her memories of war are wrapped up with her memories of childhood
As jarring as the guns were to the pale crowd before me, for many of us they were synonymous with youth, coated in the same lacquer of nostalgia that glosses anyone’s childhood.
and the quiet ache of a childhood uprooted, turned fierce.
The girls in the picture were strangers, but they could have just as easily been me. Caught in that void between childhood and puberty, skin still smooth but limbs gawky from growth spurts. Each held a Kalashnikov across her chest. The taller girl had her other arm over the shorter one’s shoulder; they might have been sisters. Both gave half smiles to the camera, as if they remembered from another time that one was supposed to smile in photographs.
it’s beautifully done, from start to finish. there’s an immediacy to the writing that is incredibly compelling, whether she is writing about bloodshed and terror or about her discomfort in talking about her experiences to americans, who are well-intentioned but lack any comparable background which would allow them to truly understand.
Their musings about how and why people stayed in a country under such terrible conditions were what I hated most. I knew it was ignorance, not insight that prompted these questions. They asked because they hadn’t smelled the air raid smoke or the scent of singed flesh on their own balconies; they couldn’t fathom that such a dangerous place could still harbor all the feelings of home.
the way she finds herself softening the blows, pulling the punches of the details of her memories when speaking of them to americans is heartbreaking. everything about her transition to america is heartbreaking, actually. it’s tender and scalding all at once.
i feel like this book will be a strong contender for any of the awards people give to books, and it is accessible enough for use in any book club. it is powerful and absolutely perfect.
