“I am one, but there are thousands of us - the unbreakable broken ones,” Faruk Šehić writes. This autobiographical novel by the celebrated Bosnian poet, which has been awarded a European Union prize for literature and is vividly rendered into English by Will Firth, makes a major and complex contribution to war literature. Written 20 years on from the events that shattered “the bell jar” of Yugoslavia and Šehić’s life – he was a veterinary student when the conflict began – the novel opens with a cri de coeur: “My memories are ugly and dirty.” As if testing the reader’s commitment, the narrator tells us early on that he has killed, and more than once. “There are those who did it differently to me: those who prayed to God that they […] might be killed because they were full of life and strength, and that was what oppressed them – the fear they would stay alive with so much terrible energy in them.”
Šehić joined a volunteer military unit for three years, and was present at atrocities committed by both sides, which are sketched into the novel with a poet’s economy. Without being dominant, these events shadow the novel while it moves towards its true purpose: to sustain an act of imaginative reconstruction through the honouring of everything in the narrator’s life that remains beloved, even post-defilement.
To help him become a “time traveller” into the “lost, sunken age” of the prewar era, an Indian fakir at a provincial show hypnotises him. We regress to a magnified Nabokovian realm of enchantment, of fishing seasons on the River Una. In this past that is literally another country, Šehić mentally visits his long-dead grandparents in their riverside house where every object is alive with meaning, and poignant with our knowledge of what is to come. The uneven, moody texture of the book mirrors the narrator’s state of mind, and so does the exuberant inventiveness of the language and the free merging of temporal realities. Each chapter title leads into a themed reflection, so in “The River Bank in Winter” the house “is in complete harmony with the water”, the dreaming mind’s vessel for nightly exploits. In a war flashback, he goes on nocturnal walks in his bombed-out river town.
Šehić is clear that this was a war of territorial aggression, not the religious-ethnic conflict foreign media fancied it to be. Always a poet, he candidly encapsulates the deranging legacy of war: “I have the strength to be ashamed for others”; “Learning to hate isn’t hard, you just need to follow your body whose impulses make you do whatever is necessary to survive”. In the chapter called “Traumometer”, trauma can be measured “by the amount of the present displaced by our bodies”. In another river vision, the “smiling faces of dead comrades were laid out in long rows at the bottom”. Heightened moments are delivered in slow motion, as he dives into a dimension of pure symbol: a heart-shaped apparition in the peacetime town could be a manifestation of collective prewar fragility.
Flashes of horror intrude into these calmer narrative waters: the apple- cheeked Serbian woman casually shot by Šehić’s unit; the Bosnian comrade later castrated by Serbian paramilitaries; the sight of his childhood house torched, the hometown “a festival of ruins”. In one deeply sorrowful scene, the narrator and two friends celebrate the end of the war by going into a recently abandoned torture basement, getting drunk and cutting themselves with broken glass.
Despite the titular reference to Mikhail Sholokhov’s Soviet epic And Quiet Flows the Don, and the riverine echo of an expansive mid-20th century Yugoslav novel, The Bridge Over the Drina by Ivo Andrić, Šehić’s compressed, hypnotic intensity is closest to Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam war novel The Things They Carried. Quiet Flows the Una brands the reader with the same brilliant heat. I hope it is translated into more languages and read by scholars, politicians and schoolchildren alike.
The only frustrating drawback of this novel is the lack of editing, evident in occasional expressions that haven’t travelled well into English. The writing tends to indulgence in places, and I don’t think the poems embedded in the prose work. But the Una of the mind flows on with its submerged treasures, shining in the darkness from which its author has salvaged it. Through his exploration of war and peace, innocence and grief, Šehić has composed a humbling meditation on an existential conundrum that is central to collective and private trauma, but also to more ordinary human experience: how to keep the inner self whole in a world that will assault it in unimaginable ways.
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