The Balkan Express - Slavenka Drakulic

The Balkan Express:
Fragments from the
other side of war.

I am ashamed to say that I only remember the war depicted in this book as little more than an intellectual enterprise. It was given to me by a friend of my wife's as we had just come back from a holiday in the region, and she thought I might be interested.

In 1991, when the short essays in this book commence, I was 19 years old, and living in Melbourne, Australia.

I remember the news coverage, as limited as it was, showed in point form the actions of one group of people visited upon another group of people, all of whom were on the other side of the world.

News was like that in Australia in the early nineties. It's probably not much better now.

As one of the other reviewers on Amazon.com states:

This book was published in 1993. This makes it hard to read, since several times Drakulic talks about the war being "almost over". When one knows that the worst in the former Yugoslavia was yet to come this makes this depressing book even more depressing.

It's true. This is a hard book to read, not because of Drakulic's lack of writing talent, she writes supremely well, but because it describes the real hardships of everyday folk trying to go about their lives, while the dogs of war slaver in the streets below.

This is a great if somewhat humbling read from someone who was there, but with no political agenda. Just a person whose world crashed around her, leaving her not overly interested in the political why, but definitely the personal processes that happen when war is all around you.

Read this book, it will make you ask again and again: 

If we are supposed to learn from history, why do people repeat these atrocities?

I remember 1999 and what happened in Kosovo far clearer than I do the destruction of Yugoslavia in 1991.

Melbourne took plane loads of Kosovo refugees and I remember watching them disembark via a TV report.

It struck me then that refugee is a divisive term: Years of seeing African refugees starving in shanty towns had given me a pretty solid idea of what a refugee should look like.

The Kosovo arrivals looked like me, they wore the same clothes, same shoes, all looked healthy.

I remember saying to my girlfriend (now my wife): They could be passengers getting off a plane after any domestic Australian flight. These people aren't refugees, they could be us.

A counterpoint to the passage above re: Drakulic's belief that the war was almost over, 5 years and hundreds of thousands of lost lives before.

The Light Between Oceans - M.L. Stedman

The Light Between Oceans
M.L. Stedman

I really wanted to like this book, and on balance it is a good one. But there are some real clanging issues that hold it back.

It is set in the 1920's at what was then an Australian outpost. For the most part it is written in a modern voice - which I don't mind, what I do mind is that the author would go from writing a beautiful, descriptive passage (truly mesmerising painting of landscape and characters) then in dialogue the modern voice would continue until for reasons I can't fathom she seemed to periodically release her inner Steve Irwin. Terms like "doing your 'nana" or "give it a burl" are certainly colloquialisms of the time, but seemed shoe-horned into the text as a reach for Authenticity.

It's probably something that wouldn't be noticed by non-Australians, but adding such terms in the context that they were delivered is akin to writing an American Southern States epic in a modern voice, and then dumping a couple of "y'alls" in as some lame reach for authenticity.Or a Canadian book with some poorly placed "Aboots"

The other clanger, and this one unforgivable, is her switch between past and present tense. While I am aware that this is a technique to create immediacy and drama. It wasn't well applied.

I'd be there on the island, nothing existed but for the words and the image-scapes, and then the tense would change and I would feel like I'd have to interpret it to past and.... BAM I'm back in my reality holding a book. The Island gone and I am having to think about the context/tense/reasons why she chose to switch.

The colloquialism issue could have been resolved by picking a couple of obvious characters - like the boat guys - and made them as Steve Irwin as she liked... it would have given space and presence to the novel without looking like trying too hard.

The tense issue? Unforgivable.

The premise is a good one, the concepts of moral accountability; the isolation that might make people make decisions that they would not have had they been firmly attached to a community, rather than isolated on a rock and away from prying eyes, makes for some pretty hard questions. 

One of which is how not being accountable to the view of a community could sway a situation.

The technical issues though hold this book back for me, although I can see that the book has already gained a lot of traction so I am likely to be firmly in the minority on this. Nonetheless: even though the premise was immense I can only give it a 3 out of 5... at best.

The Dog Stars - Peter Heller

I wish that I could say that someone recommended this book to me.

I wish that there was someone I could figuratively walk up to and thank for telling me about this it.

I stumbled upon it late one night while letting my kindle roam the book lists. I saw it and on a whim hit the purchase button.

What a great find.

It's hard to describe the book without giving a whole lot away, so I won't go in to great detail:

After a flu epidemic, and then - just to make sure - a liberal round of blood poisoning wiped out 99.5% of the world's population, those that survive do what they have to do.

Staying alive is paramount, but the book also alludes to the processing of the grief of loved-ones lost, along with the moral switch that occurs to enable people to carry on and survive the horrors that they have had visited upon them, along with the violence they must inflict upon others that come within the boundaries of tenuous safety.

Unlike "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy - there is some working infrastructure left, and the Narrator, a writer-turned-building-contractor, has use of a plane, (he lives in a rural airport in Colarado) the company of his dog Jasper, and the sometimes overbearing protection of a professional survivor and only human cohabitant - Bangley.

The immediate nature of their lives is counterpoint to the slow unfurling of information about "before".

Brutal, and never without a sense of impending failure or loss the book still manages to deliver some magnificent image-scapes and explores the nature of personal relationships in impossible circumstances.

The writing style is not your run of the mill layout, and takes a couple of pages to get used to - but if the reader lets go of some of the literary  rules that they might expect, and the allow that this is a narrative of an articulate man speaking in his own and honest voice, the rewards are immense.

Available in paperback or Kindle.

US and most other places, get yours here:

UK folk - here's your link.: