Shards by Ismet Prcic

This book is about Bosnia, the Balkans, war, and trauma. It is more uplifting than it sounds, but not by a mile. The novel is constructed in a series of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla, Bosnia and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the “meat grinder” of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind. The novel comprises mostly segments from his memoirs and excerpts from his diary. The fragments are roughly organized into three strands. One consists of a diary Ismet (now called Izzy) keeps after he moves to America. Prcic, who immigrated to the United States in 1996 at the age of 19, has acquired a fluency in English that enables him to assimilate convincingly--on the surface--scratch that surface and you find damage. The second of the strands is Ismet’s memoir of growing up in Bosnia. Much of it is told in a lively and compelling adolescent voice, sensitive but also full of American pop-­culture references from the 1980's. Ismet is loved, particularly by his mother, who has a muse-like quality that is combined with the tragedy that she knows war is coming. Ismet (the author) is perceptive and brings his readers the experience of the war in small human details, especially effective in this strand. The novel’s third strand revolves around a Bosnian called Mustafa. Unlike Ismet, he fights in the war. Eventually, all three strands meld together. Figuring out how they corroborate one another or not, and how to reconcile the various versions of Ismet’s story, is one of the pleasures of reading this ambitious and deep novel. Ismet experienced the war in real life, but he also experienced it through television and the movies. He explains some of the factors associated with PTSD--saying that “movies don’t do it justice — that’s all I’m going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town.” Finally, he doesn’t register his experience of a massacre in Tuzla until he sees it on the news later. It reminds us how strange it is that people now watch their own wars on television, and how this seems to compound the trauma. The book is not solely about trauma and it's effects, but those elements are there, and it is eye-opening to read about them in this very interesting novel.