From the Publisher
“Brkic digs for sometimes distant, sometimes recent history, putting her findings into beautiful and poetic language that conjures up lively imagery." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Written with lyrical precision." —Richard Eder, The New York Times
"Brkic is a talented writer...[and] her talent with the language of fiction brings on a nonfiction narrative with true softness....Exquisite." —Peter Maass, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Brkic tells [her story] sensitively, sparely and with quiet passion." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
Richard Eder
Contemporary accounts of a tragedy are like temporary grave markers. Instead, the author has carved a funeral monument, its artistry marred sometimes but in the main enhanced by the rough cuts of her chisel.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
This heartbreaking memoir wends between Brkic's years in war-ravaged Bosnia (1993, 1996-1997), first interviewing refugees and then excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica, where 7,000 Muslim males were slaughtered, and including her family's history in Bosnia-Herzegovina surrounding WWII. Brkic, an archeologist, was 21 when she first began working in Bosnia with the UN International War Crimes Tribunal, and 24 during her second foray, with Physicians for Human Rights. A first-generation American of Croatian descent, she returns to Bosnia, invoking what, postwar, is only memory: the land of idyllic childhood summers where she remembers her aunt's catfish swimming in a tub and the taste of lamb fed on chamomile leaves in a countryside now littered with land mines. In the former garment factory, now morgue, outside Tuzla, where she works, Brkic feels alien to the other human rights workers; her ties to the region superimpose the face of her brother on the newly dead; her assertion that not everyone bears equivalent guilt for the war causes her to angrily demand that Serb workers not excavate the mass graves she believes they had a hand in filling. Whiting Award winner Brkic's haunting, hopeless memoir is an agonizing treatise on the awful cost of war and its long, pain-stoked aftermath in which, as she records it, those outside forget and those inside can barely continue living. Photos, maps. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Aug.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Whiting Award winner Brkic, who previously authored Stillness, a short story collection about the war in the Balkans, returns with this affecting genre crosser. Part history, part memoir, and part family saga, the book starts out as an account of Brkic's work at a morgue in Tuzla, Bosnia, where she worked with a UN forensic team to uncover the victims of the war's ethnic violence. It then shades in and out of the author's own family history, concentrating on the story of her Herzegovinian grandmother, who was widowed early on and imprisoned during World War II. Readers who were confused by details of the Balkan conflict during the time might still be confused after reading this, but the book as a whole is hypnotic. Poetic writing (that every so often is a touch too gloppy) and vivid imagery bring this area and its people to life with a certain amount of exoticness and mystery. Recommended for public and academic libraries, particularly those collecting in Eastern and Southeastern European studies.-Terren Ilana Wein, Univ. of Chicago Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Short-story author Brkic (Stillness, 2003) combines a stirring, elegiac memoir of time spent picking up the dreadful remains of recent Balkan history with an exploration into her grandmother's life in the region. Names like Tuzla and Srebrenica send shivers down the spines of even those without a clue about where those towns sit on the fault lines of new Eastern Europe. Evil things happened there, the fallout of something sour and hoary among Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Slavonians, and Bosnians, and it was Brkic's job as a volunteer American field archaeologist to recover the remains of people who had been killed and dropped into graves, mass and otherwise. Seven thousand died in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 alone, so there was plenty of work for her, as well as the pathologists, anthropologists, and the band of armed protectors accompanying them. Brkic had other matters to attend to as well; her paternal grandmother had lived in the area, and the author retells a grim story of internal exile and young widowhood, arrest for harboring a Jewish man during WWII, striving to stay put on shaky ground during the time of Tito vs. Stalin. That same ground shakes Brkic as well: she washes bones that have been delicately excavated, or dries clothes in hopes that they may be identified and a family's hopes laid to rest. Once her group recovers a rare letter from a remain; it had gone through the wash, and a co-worker brought it to her "cradled in the palm of his hand like an injured bird." The author displays a dark temperament in her narrative-hardly surpassing, given its content-and though meeting family members and finding a lover slightly lighten her load, she is finally undone by the horror ofit all. Bears faithful, sensitive witness to the centuries' dire impact on Eastern Europe. (Photographs, family tree, map, not seen)Agent: Sandra Dijkstra
