Sasa Stanisic

HERKUNFT

Sina Medina

This book has won some big prizes and for a very good reason: it's brilliant. Funny, heartbreakingly sad, it tells the true story of a Yugoslavian (a country that no longer exists) family emigrating to Germany, and the son's youth in his new home. As the daughter of a Yugoslavian immigrant, there was so much in here that I recognized - never have I felt so "represented" in a book as a demographic, and in terms of what I knew, liked and did as I grew up. It's mostly a memoir, and partly fabulism and what should have or could have happened.

It's also an utterly charming and whimsical book, which even includes a "choose your own adventure" type ending - something I've definitely never seen in a literary novel, and it was such a brilliant idea - inspired by the author's love for pen & paper roleplaying games and the kinds of text adventure books he read in his youth. (I read them too, and encountering the technique again here was so funny and awesome.)

It took me a few weeks to read because it was very heartbreaking and I often needed breaks to digest it. Its big themes are the splintering of Yugoslavia in its civil war and genocide, losing one's home and trying to fit into a new one, family, aging, and memory - focused on the parallel movements of the author trying to recapture and collect memories, while his grandmother is losing all of hers to Alzheimer's. As this novel made up of memories takes shape and coheres, the grandmother's mind disintegrates more and more.

I can definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to get 100% authentic and instantly recognizable German and Yugoslavian culture to the max, described with great irony and humor and a very sharp, perceptive intellect. Right now this book is not available in English, but I'm sure its translation is only a matter of time.

HERKUNFT

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