Sul Campo Del Mare - Vilenica

V2-2010.PM5216/13/100, 12:13 PMJana UnukDževad Karahasan’s latest three novels address, more or less directly,the war in Bosnia. The Ring of Shahryar, set on the eve of the war and inthe first months of the Sarajevo siege, describes a pair of separated lovers:Faruk leaves for abroad, while Azra in besieged Sarajevo peruses hismanuscript on the apprenticeship of Sheikh Figani, a tenth-century Ottomanpoet, withdrawing ever deeper into her inner world. The title of thebook alludes to the story of Scheherazade and King Shahryar: Faruk is astoryteller, and the enchantment of Oriental storytelling is again evokedby the intricate, skilfully crafted structure of the novel, which might wellbe perceived as nothing short of an apology for the art of storytelling:from the frame story set in wartime Sarajevo, we descend through evernew inserted tales as if down a well, ever deeper into the past, to the verybeginning of time, when the thought of the Sumerian god Enki calledinto existence his female half and, through her, the world.The novel Sara and Serafina (Sara i Serafina, 1999) is an almost documentaryportrayal of life in a city under siege, as well as a penetratingpsychological portrait of the title heroine, Sara-Serafina, who will not leavethe city because of the fatal split in her psyche and because she is fastbound to it by a traumatic experience from the earlier war, World War II.Serafina has longed to turn into Sara ever since her girlhood, attachingthe former, her Christian name, to that facet of her split personality whichseeks to use goodness to control other people and is associated with thewill to life, with external aspects of the world. Sara, by contrast, is goodwithout ulterior motives and associated with the inner world, with sacrifice,death, and her youthful mystic experience of the “white weddingguests”.One of war’s greatest humiliations is identified as the transparencyof life and death in a besieged city – the loss of privacy.Night Meeting (Noćno vijeće, 2005) takes place just before the war, atFoča, where the last two wars exacted a particularly cruel toll. Simon, aFoča Serb and a doctor, returns home after years of working in Germanybecause he is haunted by involuntary reminiscences of his youth. OnSimon’s arrival at Foča, his perspective is a naive, alienated gaze, unableto read the signs of an imminent war and calling to mind, in itsgoodnatured bewilderment, Dostoyevsky’s idiot. No-one but Simon couldfind, on the eve of the latest Bosnian war, the view of his native Fočamarvellously rounded and perfect, “like a lovely ripe plum”. Night Meetingdraws on the traditions of the Gothic novel and fantasy, and the evilin it is as condensed and palpable as in Dante’s Inferno. Simon descendsinto the cellar, among the dead souls of the Muslims butchered there inthe wars gone by, and together with him the reader is confronted withdescriptions of hell, a horrifying encyclopaedia of martyrs’ deaths.Whether read as a fantasy or as the protagonist’s descent into his own orhis nation’s collective subconscious, the passage addresses the relationbetwen evil and literature, more precisely: Just how much horror, suffering,violence can a description encompass, and in what detail? OtherKarahasan’s war-related works include the well-known Diary of an Exodus,translated as Sarajevo: Exodus of a City (Dnevnik selidbe, 1993), about21