Stillness

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Out of the ashes of the brutal war that raged in the former Yugoslavia arises this vivid debut story collection. Most of what we've heard about this conflict consists of mind-numbing reports of body counts and damage assessments that seek to contain the suffering that occurred. But Courtney Brkic, who worked for the UN War Crimes Tribunal and as a forensic archaeologist in Bosnia-Herzegovina, has written a work of fiction that makes the human tragedy of the war painfully real, in a way no news report or statistical summery possibly could. Her stories, filled with searing accounts of atrocity and horror as well as incredible human endurance, provide a powerful testament to the wide array of lives destroyed or forever altered by war. In Stillness, we read of the daughters of war criminals, of refugees struggling to make a new home in a strange land; and of those physically and emotionally scarred by the war, including an amputee.

Through each of these stories runs the common thread of lives broken and haunted by the ethnic hatred and senseless killing that marked the conflict in Bosnia and Croatia. Brkic is a gifted writer, able to place readers inside the lives of her characters. In the process, she adds to the war record a human dimension that is all too often lost. (Summer 2003 Selection)

The Washington Post

… Stillness is a provocative and all-too-timely look at the ravages of war. One can make the case that Brkic could just as easily -- and perhaps more powerfully -- have fashioned a memoir out of her experience in the Balkans (the book's preface, which includes a journal entry from Brkic's time in Bosnia, certainly supports that position). But going the fictional route may have been the more fruitful choice; it allows Brkic to survey the destruction in the region from a rich range of viewpoints. — Amy Kroin

Library Journal

In this first collection, Croatian American Brkic takes an intimate look at the effects of war in the Balkans. Her strong, lean writing vividly details the wasteland through which her characters struggle as they try to hold onto shreds of their humanity, however small. Whether it's a wife helping her husband deal with the loss of his leg even as she dreams of escaping the entire situation, the daughter of a Serbian leader facing the social and emotional repercussions of her father's office, a husband and wife attempting to reunite after a forced separation in detention camps, a sniper concocting an elaborate list of rules by which to select his victims, or a father dealing with the constant rise and fall of hope as he tracks down each rumored sighting of his missing son, each story depicts people grappling with the physical and emotional loss of loved ones and a way of life. The results are poignant and powerful-and based on firsthand experience. Brkic, who has worked with the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, was a forensic archaeologist in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the war. Recommended for academic and public libraries.-Heather Wright, AWBERC Lib., U.S. EPA, Cincinnati Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Sixteen stories from a woman who combines her Croatian heritage and her training in forensic archaeology in traveling back to a motherland grated by war. "In the morgue and on-site, I found letters and prayers in shirt pockets or rolled up with amulets inside tiny leather pouches that the dead had worn around their necks," Brkic tells us of her own experiences, in 1996, as a researcher and translator in Croatia, and a forensic archeologist in Bosnia after the war. Fiction almost always suffers when the goal is to create a core of tales around a specific event, political or military, but Brkic often maintains a nice distance, even if she sometimes seems to beat her subject to death. A woman in "In the Jasmine Shade" tries to hide a pregnancy from her husband just as they are separated at the onset of the holocaust, creating questions as to whose baby it really is and whether something as frail as trust can survive the trauma. "Surveillance" is an odd love story of a man watching a woman who may be involved with dissidents abroad--but will he ever get closer to her than the lens of his camera? Javier, an Argentine forensic anthropologist fresh from Rwanda, is surprised by Bosnia in "Adiyo, Kerido," and by the local women anxious for news of the contents of mass graves. "We Will Sleep in One Nest" looks at war from the point of view of paintings that get left behind when families are forced to evacuate on a moment’s notice. And "I heard the drumbeats of all those buried people, of a city living underground," says the meditative narrator of "Stillness," who goes on to discover a form of pause and poise amid the crumbled lives that litter the landscapes of slaughter. Generally strong debut.Here’s hoping Brkic goes on to explore other and different material.