Tomorrow at 1 pm, the BiH Museum of Literature and Theatre Arts will host the annual award ceremony of the Writers' Association. The award will be presented to Damir Uzunović for the novel "I Am" published by Buybook.
On this occasion, we are publishing a comprehensive review of Srebern Dizdar.
A book of familiarization and recognition
Along with the usual publisher's remark that this is a "second edition" of the book I am Damir Uzunović (Sarajevo, 1965), [1] one must somehow impose the thought that it is, indeed, a second and different edition of this Sarajevo author. In his literary career so far, he has expressed himself more as a poet, then as an editor of numerous and valuable editions of the publishing house "Buybook", of which, together with Goran Samardžić, he is the founder and long-time very successful helmsman and captain, one of the initiators of the manifestation, the international literary festival "Bookstan", which, since its first edition in the summer of 2016, has greatly enriched not only cultural Sarajevo, but also the entire region, and beyond, by bringing together very well-known world names, as well as those who have just they think of expressing themselves both on a literary and a critical level. One could probably mention a few more virtues of this self-effacing writer and cultural worker, but, having known him for many years, he himself would refrain from responding to that imaginary roll call with that characteristic Sarajevo and Bosnian-Herzegovinian expression “I am!” However, it should be mentioned that he has so far published three books of poems ( Brod s talismanom , a collection of poetry, Veselin Masleša, 1992; Mađioničar , a collection of poetry, Svjetlost, 1995, and Ljudi i ptice , a collection of poetry, Space Production, 2005), as well as a collection of stories Kesten (Dani, 1996). His works have been included in the anthologies of Bosnian-Herzegovinian prose Pod pritsimo and Rat i priče iz cijelog svijeta , and in the poetry anthologies Ovdje živi Konan and Zašto tone Venecija .
Both his poetry and prose have been translated into English (in the magazines Frank and Lica ), French, Slovenian and Turkish. He won the First Prize of Večernje Novina for the story "Doruša", as well as the Second Prize of NiP Ljiljan for the story "The Dream of a Franciscan". His first novel received, in a strong and appropriate competition of authors from this area, [2] the Fric Award, which is awarded by the Croatian weekly Express based on the famous Booker Award "for the best book of fictional prose" in 2021. Uzunović is the fifth laureate to receive this prestigious award and the first from Sarajevo, and in 2023 he was joined by another (former) fellow citizen, Miljenko Jergović (Sarajevo, 1966), for the story collection Trojica za Kartal (Fraktura, Zagreb, 2022). If we add to that list Darko Cvijetić, a native of Ljubija near Prijedor (1968), who was the winner of the same award for the novel Schindler's Lift in the fall of 2019, it turns out that Bosnian authors were recognized every other year as the best among the best in prose creation in this region. It's as if in some imaginary roll call, when all those valuable names and their books are listed, their first and last names are heard from a light half-nap, and they react in accordance with the title of Uzunović's novel: "I am!" Or they hear an inner voice that says: "I'm the one!", which sounds like a response in physical education class, or during roll call in the army: "Here!" or "I'm here!" And since the book has already been recognized among readers and critics, it would be appropriate to get to know it and its over 500 characters (!), or rather, to present at least some of them in a somewhat broader analysis. Since the title is already intriguing enough, and the book is worth translating into other languages, we could start from the author's decision to choose exactly that title, and not some other. Surely, at that moment, he did not think that the book could indeed appear outside of these areas and what troubles he could put both editors and publishers, and above all a reading public from a different cultural register, for whom the title I Am would be insufficiently familiar, and even incomprehensible, if it were translated incorrectly.
In possible translations of this extremely interesting and unusually readable book into foreign languages, this expression, which was also used as the title of the work, could pose numerous dilemmas for potential translators. And perhaps even greater problems in how to approach this specific response of his father while he was waiting at the bus station in Sarajevo for a bus from Zagreb, which brought a package with the newspaper Zarez at the beginning of the new century and millennium, in December 2002. In most Western European languages, this would have to be translated in at least two ways. In French, it would be: “ Je suis “, but also “ C'est moi !“, and even “ C'est moi-m ê me !“ (as the French King Louis XIV pretentiously said back in 1655: " L'État, c'est moi !" – The State is me!); just as in English: “ I am “ and “ It's me !“, and even “ It is myself !“ And it is not a small difference, but a rather important one, which often reveals, or, as it were, "betrays" a non-native speaker that he has not fully mastered the subtle nuances of a foreign language. In his translation work, which includes a multitude of films from the English-speaking world, another character from this book, Fahid Uzunović, managed to avoid them. From him and with him, the author was able to learn what was less or almost not available during his growing up years, not only about films, but also about literature and art in general, both domestic and international.
In this case, which is the essence of the translation dilemma, both translations are equally correct, which becomes obvious only after carefully reading the book and allowing some time for both the first and second impressions to settle, and only then to calmly and analytically offer a judicious critical view. The only thing that would differ from these two possibilities is to understand the title as "I am" in the sense of loneliness, or even invisibility, which is implied in the title of the novel by the African-American author Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (Invisible Man, 1952) [3] which can also be read as a kind of acronym: I Am. This book by Uzunović is, by all accounts, very visible and deserves to be familiarized with from different sides of its complex fabric/reading, not only emotionally but also with some measure of objectivity and prudence.
However, even that view cannot be entirely prudent, but also colored by the subjective impressions of the viewer, at least the one who, on each of the 432 pages of this edition, feels a beautiful inner warmth that permeates him as he follows an apparently (auto)biographical narrative over a period of about forty years. The choice of writing in the first person could not surprise anyone who still remembers the writer's interview from 2006 (when his third collection of poems People and Birds was published), where he mentioned that he still longed for his father ("We simply didn't talk to each other, even worse, we didn't even touch each other") and that for some time he wanted to write a book about him and to "in a furious, autobiographical pace, reconstruct some important events in which his seemingly secondary role became in the main" and in which he also significantly said:
Namely, in literature I don't feel good whenever I am forced to write in a person other than the first person. It seems to me that I am falsifying, and the placement of all autobiographical details in someone else's life, with other people's names, seems to me to be something that cannot be trusted. Spontaneously evoking belief in the reader, no matter what you write, equals literature to me. [4]
The author's confessional style about growing up in a settlement on the slopes of Hum Hill in Sarajevo, along Drinska Street, above the New Railway Station and opposite the new building of the Sarajevo Tobacco Factory - two vistas that connect winding railway tracks, but also much more than just a roadway - evokes a feeling of warmth. In a similar way - winding and with that fine measure - the narrative fabric of this book pulsates, in which people and events are unobtrusively, but with the author's visible intention not to falter, unfold into three larger units. Although each of them is also a stage, a phase of the author's growing up, the first unit could be said to have the form of a Bildungsroman , or a narrative about childhood and growing up during the 1960s and 1970s in a settlement of "newcomers" and "newcomers". At the foot or lower slopes of Hum Hill, behind the II. World War II, a new settlement was formed in the area that, in the popular imagination of the residents of the old city center, was called "Korea". The association with the horrors and destruction of the Korean War (1950-1953), during which this new workers' settlement began to take shape, in which people from Bosnia and Herzegovina and other parts of the second, Tito's Yugoslavia, settled, is an expression of the Sheretsky spirit of both the people and the time in which this mocking name was intended to indicate disorder, chaos and commotion compared to the alleged order and civility of the older parts of the city, its urban core that was formed on the slopes of Bistrik, Vratnik, Bjelave, or Toka, Džeka, Breka... Similarly, the stadium of FK Željezničar in Grbavica is slangily called "Dolina ćupova", after the famous bloody battle between the two warring parties in the Indochina War on the territory of Laos in the mid-1950s. In the Sarajevo version, it is about the eternal derby between the football clubs “Sarajevo” and “Željezničar” whose fans sometimes fought real battles both in and out of the stadium. Should we mention whose side the Uzunović family sympathized with? Or is it better to leave the answer somewhere in the text, when the broader picture of the city develops into an endless mosaic of snapshots of its inhabitants with all their joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, but also fantasies and confrontations with the reality of the time and space in which the interesting life stories of the inhabitants of Drinska Street in the novel took place.
The feeling of isolation and separation from these older, original parts of the city is deceptive, because there are many relatives and friends, work colleagues, or simply other fellow citizens living there with whom contact is limited to the usual home visits during holidays or important family gatherings. Most of the time, this is discussed in passing, not even in the sense of some side or alternative plot, because the world of children with whom the author and his sister, and in a broader context, the parents, interact on a daily basis is in the foreground. Through the children's perspective, we gradually get to know the other neighbors from the apartment building, where sometimes very unusual and colorful residents live. Their life destinies develop in an atmosphere of mentioning the circumstances that brought them to the city and to that particular neighborhood, with never the slightest trace of criticism or condemnation because of some strange characteristic that makes these characters different from the others. No one is really different - although everyone is really "other", because few people (apart from the almost disappeared and rare former residents in the part of the neighborhood called the Old House) lived there before and can boast of some indigenous superiority over the others - but everyone is given enough space for the writer to present them in the fullness that he thinks is sufficient.
This kind of stylistic restraint is, perhaps, the reason why one feels affection for even the strangest characters and their stories, because it is precisely that Derridian "difference" ( difference / différance ) (certainly not "otherness!" - otherness / altérité ) that makes them more interesting than the others. And, again, everyone survives together in a decent kind of tolerance and coexistence while the days, months and years pass, just as the trains come and go, or as the inhabitants of the settlement go to work in the nearby tobacco factory (where the mother works), to the bank in Grbavica (where the father works), or to school, where the children go. And not only children from the settlement but also “domci”, children from the Institute for Uncared Children, higher up in Hum, [5] whom the social welfare system of the time occasionally tried to reform and put back on the “right path” by giving them a chance to gain some kind of (inclusive?) education by attending school with “domestic” children. And here, different fates are at play, some of which are comical, some tragicomic, and even with an unfortunate outcome. In many ways, these sketches or prose vignettes, which are reminiscent of Hemingway’s interventions into the lives of his characters from early novels, such as The Sun Also Rises ( I sunce se rađa , 1926), [6] reach a point beyond which there is nothing more to say, because something has happened that denies any further story simply because there is no reliable information at all. On the other hand, the various adventures that the writer's family goes through are consistently described, either through depictions of everyday situations in the settlement, or, what is more interesting for readers, in the form of colorful, almost adventurous events during vacations at the Blato camp near Živogošće, or trips across the country - from Boračko Lake to Sutjeska, or Bled and Bohinj to Skadar or Plitvice Lakes. Particularly striking is the father's struggle with the night storm that hit their tent in the camp and from which, despite the danger he knowingly exposed himself, the father emerges victorious. In this part of the book, the characters of the mother and father are intertwined in all their differences, but also in the delicate relationship that has survived since the day they fell in love and got married. The emphasis is, of course, on the image of the mother, because she, almost like an archetype, is more present in every way, and not only because she can come home from work at the nearby tobacco factory in no time, but also because her role in traditional Bosnian families is to take care of everything related to the house. The father is somewhat in the background, which will change later as the author grows up and begins to understand him better. In this sensitive balance lies the hidden beauty of these narratives, because they try to place themselves in equal measure according to the different roles in which the parents found themselves, on the one hand, and the author and his sister, on the other.
This is very well seen in the second part of the book, titled Maniac in the attic of the neighboring building, and when the world of childhood gradually moves into the world of youth and adolescence. It is interesting that in terms of volume (number of pages), that part is almost identical to the first one - about 125 pages each, although in the central part of the book the action thickens somewhat, because most of the necessary information is already presented in the introductory, first part. And again, here too, the events and characters were somehow divided, split. In the already seen sketches for portraits of certain characters, mostly schoolmates or those with whom the writer had more intense socializing, there is something of Fellini's atmosphere in the film Amarcord , or Sidranov's poetics from the films Do you remember Dolly Bell and/or Father on a business trip . This is not an imitation or imitation of, first of all, the writing style of his older colleague-writer, academician Abdulah Sidran, who became famous not only for his poems, stories and novels but also for the scripts for today's cult films directed by Emir Kusturica; but rather about establishing an atmosphere of discovering unknown, even forbidden things that young people of that era were faced with. It is about opening up the understanding of sexuality beyond its procreative aspects, because the book discusses this topic with restraint and in a way that does not border on good taste, although the author does not hesitate to call sensitive parts of the human anatomy by folk names, or mention them in a jargon (and to some extent derogatory) register that each generation establishes for itself. There are also the inevitable swearing, devouring erotic magazines, or going to the Arena cinema to see erotic films starring the then film icon Sylvia Cristel, [7] visiting the strip-tease bar in the Carmen nightclub of the Bristol Hotel, along with those famous Sarajevo pranks (fooles and farces) on how to get out of the bar unnoticed and not pay for a drink after several performances by “erotic artists”. The real focus of this second part, divided into seven subsections and a multitude of shorter and slightly longer narrative entries, is the arrival of the girl Olivera at the writer’s house after the earthquake in Montenegro in April 1979. Her extremely unusual appearance, not only due to the unsettled family circumstances that led her to the Home for Uncared Children, but also her very peculiar personality, opens the way for the writer’s fantasies and quiet infatuation. The fact that she joined them as the fifth member of the family, with whom they also go to a weekend house in Velika Dvorišta on Jahorina, and they give her the necessary attention and try to enable her to socialize and integrate into the Sarajevo conditions of the time; is simultaneously intertwined with nostalgic recollections of the imminent end of an era - both in a broader context, social and political due to the imminent death of President Tito in early 1980, but also a deeply personal one in which the fascination with Oliver is also an opportunity for the reader to prepare for the crucial, third part of the book. Some unexpected things will happen here, in addition to those that one might assume happen within every family in which children gradually separate from their parents' wing and move towards the next phase of growing up.
The usual misunderstandings between the older sister and brother may seem too intense in some scenes, but they are also related to the context of the time in which Sarajevo became a place of great creative energy. This is the period of the 1980s in which the XIV Winter Olympic Games were held, but also pop and rock music was booming, avant-garde theater performances were held, new young, talented writers appeared, cult films were made, and other major changes took place that would, on a broader scale, lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism as a global process. However, in this part, characteristically called “Three Deaths of Fathers”, the author’s relationship with his father is increasingly imposed, and he can be considered to be slowly taking over the main role in the story. It unfolds in three subsections and covers the time of a summer vacation in Zelenika, a small town on the Montenegrin coast to which Austria-Hungary once built a railway line as the end point of the railway network of the Black and Yellow Monarchy in southeastern Europe. This first subsection also introduces new characters – Lisa, Zorka and Bato – guest workers from the Parisian suburb of Nanterre in France, who have built a holiday home by the sea for rent, but with whom their Sarajevo guests establish close, almost kinship-like relationships. Times are dark, as Serbian political leader Slobodan Milošević gave his famous speech at Gazimestan on Vidovdan (June 28) in 1989 as an introduction to the bloody years of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The author skillfully balances these broader events with situations he himself finds himself in when going to the funeral of a relative of their hosts in a village near Belgrade, where he is looked at cross-eyed as a “Turk”, and the stay of the unbridled Lisa in their apartment in Sarajevo, which is a variation on his earlier infatuation with Oliver. Behind this seemingly not very exciting emotional connection, the first drama unfolds with the health of his father Ismet, who will end up in the heart clinic at the Koševo hospital due to heart problems. It is as if this prompted the son to devote more space to information from his father's biography, and also to other family members whom he had not previously had the opportunity to mention, let alone say a few more words about. Here, that Andrić-esque calmness is at work, with which numerous details from the lives of several generations are described and listed, but with a factual and seemingly cold ordering of names that suddenly became important. And, of course, the related key events from his father's biography - a talented football player in FK Sarajevo during the 1950s, then a bank employee and a married family man, who had a strong urge to gamble and gamble, which is why his mother seriously threatened him with divorce, and after which he renounced this gambling passion; and those small memories of the gifts he would bring to his children, or his neatly folded uniform as a reserve officer of the JNA. All of this suddenly took a back seat in the whirlwind of war events that engulfed Bosnia and Herzegovina in the spring of 1992, and which the book discusses somewhat from afar – from the perspective of Lisa's frequent phone calls from France, mentions of the refugees she visited there, and some sparse information about the burned-down Sarajevo Post Office on the Coast, which completes the transition to the next situation in which the father almost died for the second time.
In this second subsection of the third part of the book, the story shifts to the other side of the world, to Los Angeles, California, where the author came for a three-month stay after the end of the war cataclysm in Bosnia. He ended up there thanks to a program to help young writers from all over the world, who were hosted at Villa Aurora in Pacific Pallisades on the Pacific coast, owned by benefactors Lion and Martha Feuchtwanger, by employees of their foundation, which was specially established for this purpose in memory of the suffering of millions of innocent victims, especially Jews, in the Holocaust. Here, the rhythm of the book unfolds as in the stories of Jack Kerouac, namely, his most famous novel On the Road ( On the Road , 1952). Of course, it is a strong reminiscence, because anything else would be an anomaly for a young writer and journalist for a Sarajevo weekly, who, by the finger of fate, after terrible war experiences, suddenly found himself on the wide highways of sunny, almost heavenly California, where he will often drive either in some old Chevrolets or on the scooter of some pretty photographer. He was obliged to write something about that, but also about anything else, which he was duly reminded by two younger Jewish-German women who took care of the overall stay of the young authors, but his inspiration, a girl he calls Dalija, remained in Sarajevo with whom he is madly in love. It is not unusual for people who experienced and survived the terrible horrors of war, and suddenly found themselves in an almost unreal environment, which does not really suit them, no matter how strange it sounds. Especially before he and Dalija decided to get married and start a life somewhere far away, outside of Bosnia, anyway. However, this did not happen thanks to bureaucratic obstacles that stopped their plan for a “quick wedding”. Going to America was a great test for their relationship, despite the phone calls and letters that were circulating from both sides of the world. Between them, certain episodes from public appearances by young writers in Californian libraries or “cultural” centers are described quite precisely, where they talked about the recently ended war and with the inevitable presence of various politically extreme or nationalist groups who came to express their disapproval, and even disgust, with that “Alija’s country” from which, well, some young writers had come to teach them some lessons. These descriptions are a strong contrast to the inner turmoil in the author, who, on the one hand, feels the desire to stay in America, and, on the other, becomes increasingly aware that his heart is pulling him back to Bosnia. And it is here, as in some good plot twist, that Lara appears, who works as a freelancer for BBC radio and who was in Bosnia, where she went after the nasty breakup of a previous love affair. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that there is some affection between them, as her nickname "Bezubi" reveals a serious accident in Sarajevo a few hours before the author and his unit were to go to the front. While walking with Dalija, hugging each other, along Drinska Street, a car hit him from behind and badly injured him, especially breaking his jaw and breaking many of his teeth, but it turns out that this indirectly saved his life, as many of his comrades soon died on the battlefield.
The relationship with Lara is not easy to describe, let alone recount. In addition to the emotional side, it contains very strong references to literature and individual writers that obviously influence the profiling of the author's artistic expression, but there are also visible great doubts about how to reconcile this simultaneous affection for Dalija and for this new American friend. Especially since Lara suddenly appears in Sarajevo and gets a job as a foreign lector at the Faculty of Philosophy, but stays in the city even after her contract expires. However, she wants to return to America, where her divorced parents and a wealthy old uncle, whom she takes care of with frequent visits in a nursing home, are also there. Lara persistently tries to return the author to America after all her work engagements expire in 1998. Although he initially accepts her invitation, in the final part of the book he feels an increasing connection with his father, whom, as he himself says, he only began to get to know better towards the end of his life. It seems that this internal split between leaving and staying influenced the accelerated rhythm of the narrative, in which the author's stay in America alternates with the intellectual environment of New York, which one could logically assume would suit him, if nothing else, because of the opportunity to see it up close, and even to eventually become an integral part of it. Since in Bosnia and Bosnians in general, logic is less important than what its inhabitants feel in their souls, these encounters turn into a cry of protest against the endless discussions of his American interlocutors about deconstruction and its prominent advocate Jacques Derrida in that characteristic Sarajevo reaction, full of undisguised contempt: "Fuck you, Derrida!" And this casual socializing is interrupted by a phone call about his father's second heart attack and the urgent packing to return home on the first plane. While waiting reclining on the airplane seats for departure, the possible title of the novel he is writing also comes to mind, and it seems to him that All the Father's Deaths are an appropriate phrase for what he persistently wants to write about, but somehow the story eludes him. Fortunately, the father got away this time too, it's true with pneumonia, which makes his son feel stupid and deceived, but he prepared a version with a heart attack for Lara, I guess to make it more dramatically convincing, and even more acceptable.
The story with Lara will continue again in Sarajevo, more precisely in a restaurant near the Roman bridge on Ilidža, where she is in the role of a godmother to a girl, a journalist from Banja Luka, who was her employer during her previous stay in Sarajevo. Her last attempt to (acquire) the author for herself was the symbolic giving of a bouquet of flowers (biedermeyer) after the marriage act, but it turned out that it was also the act of their parting. There were more long letters, not even phone calls, in which she accused him of ruining their love, which ultimately resulted in ten poems written by him as if in a trance. As he himself says: "If someone from my side was supposed to put an end to Larina and my relationship, if it was supposed to be me, then I wrote everything in those songs, from there sadness emanated like a heavy smell from an empty closet." (p. 381) This is exactly the impression of this difficult love prose that spreads like sadness from the pages of this book. It is briefly interrupted by an episode with another unfinished love affair with a girl named Felicia, who worked for the UN, and an episode with a girl originally from Montenegro who was a model at the Academy of Fine Arts (ALU), but next to her name, as some incidental information, there is now an American surname, and the novel enters the finale in which Lara will appear again in some strange encounter on the Adriatic coast where she came to visit a friend after the death of her mother and uncle. Although it seemed that it was their last meeting, because upon her return to America she found a new partner, not a Bosnian again but an American, a guide for mountaineering tours, with whom she gave birth to a son at the age of 41, Lara will appear once more at the very end of the novel. At that time, the writer was already living in a new apartment on the slopes of the city, not far from Kartal Street, where his father was born. It seems symbolic that Miljenko Jergović called his latest collection of stories Trojica za Kartal , which the subtitle says is a remastered version ( Sarajevski Marlboro remastered ) of his first and now cult collection Sarajevski Marlboro (1994). The writer's daughter Ajša was born on the same street (and there are both Donji and Gornji Kartal) in 2002, and at the end of that year, the third death of the father occurred, after he had picked up a package of newspapers at the bus station.
This time, death won, as the author once wrote: " Man is most marked by death during his life ". When it is written in those happy times when death does not visit loved ones, dear ones, and acquaintances, then it sounds like an empty platitude, but when it starts to appear more and more often and take those relatives, dear ones and acquaintances with it; then memories are awakened in every human being and about those that he has not thought about for a long time. Even to those who once preceded him and left behind some photographs, or memories in family selections based on some character traits or events in which one of those ancestors participated. The last thirty pages of the book are split in half again - on one side, a summarized genealogy of those ancestors is listed, I guess, so that they are not forgotten, because what is written is also proof of existence; and, on the other hand, which became the first, is another vignette about the wife, whom the writer met at the beginning of the new millennium and with whom he had children, and whose memory of the grandfather will be remembered by the unusual inscription under the photo in the black chronicle section of the newspaper: PASSED AWAY WAITING BUS. As well as the unwritten text on the death certificate that the son wanted to put on that sad notice, but which, however, he did not write: " He left me nothing but himself, every day I question how much he is ."
It must have been that legacy was big enough to fit between the covers of this beautiful and warm book. But not only what his father meant to him, but also his mother, whose condition after her husband's death was condensed into a few powerful pages of "Epilogue". And her life with her daughter, a teacher, with whom she lived in a shared household and constantly resented her son for not finally finishing that book he had been writing for too long, and all her small and big joys while answering questions from the past in which she had done this or that, but, most of all, herself, like almost all Bosnian mothers who have all four, and not the proverbial three, corners of the house fall on them. She didn't mind it either, she simply accepted that it was so and that it couldn't be otherwise. It was as if she knew about that saying of the ancient Stoics: "Life is more the avoidance of pain than the pursuit of happiness", which sounds like the cruel fate of all wives across the Mediterranean since those Homeric times. And it seemed to her son that she had left this world without having finished something that someone else could fix. Or maybe continue writing in a subsequent book, because the author eventually realized that the book was mostly about the mother, because there is so much more to say about her, so he couldn't even say that he wrote everything about his mother, as in Pedro Almodovar's film Todo sobre mi madre - Everything about my mother, from 1999, at the end of that century and millennium whose several decades spilled over into the pages of this book.
And what else could the reviewer of this book, which is difficult to determine whether, in terms of genre, it is a novel (as the author himself claims), a family saga, or an autobiographical, confessional fictional prose, as the distinguished and experienced members of the jury in Zagreb concluded in their decision, write? Perhaps that the recognizable Sarajevo context managed to rise above the valley in which it was created and, for the umpteenth time, to show and prove that honest and true literature has once again managed to transcend far beyond imposed boundaries or limits. This usually happens when readers (and by God and critics) from environments that are not particularly close to this drinkable reading in terms of the abundance of local color, and which it unsparingly offers them as a kind of preciousness, are faced with a well-formed work and when they manage to make their way without the slightest problem and through a multitude of characters, locations, events, historical and personalized references, and especially the specifics of an easy-to-understand discourse, which, in the end, make it worthy of attention. When we add to that extremely well-matched stylistic-literary characteristics, not only as craft but also as distinctive writer's characteristics; then it can be calmly concluded that this work transcends both the environment and the time in which it was created and approaches the imagined universal values to which only good and best literary achievements inevitably aspire. And the novel Ja sam can certainly claim to be among them.
The book should, of course, be (re)read at least twice, because in that second reading you will discover what escaped your attention the first time, especially those parts that hold the story together with the pure and honest creative power of its author. It would be nice to wish that this strength could also be felt in the works that have yet to be written.
Sarajevo - Mostar, February 2023, Srebren Dizdar
[1] Damir Uzunović, I am , Second edition, Buybook, Sarajevo – Zagreb, 2021.
[2] That year, there were also novels in the competition: Svetkovina Magdalena Blažević (Fraktura), Sonovi, kćere Ivana Bodrožić (Corto Literary), Traveling Theater by Zoran Ferić (VBZ), The Lizard's Tail by Korana Serdarević (Fraktura) and Radio Sig by Ivan Vidak (Sandorf). There were 50 works in the wider selection, 14 in the short selection, and in the end, six of them competed for this prize, which has been awarded since 2017.
[3] In our region, that novel was masterfully translated by the late prof. Ph.D. Zvonimir Radeljković (1943-2021) as: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man , Ex Libris, Rijeka, 2018.
[4] Available at: http://www.omnibus.ba/zurnal/int_uzunovic.php .
[5] The official name of this institution was initially, from 1960, “Students' Home Hum”, and in 1983 it was renamed the Institute for the Education of Male Children and Youth. As stated on the official website, “The Institute then housed neglected children and delinquents aged 7-18, of different ages and school levels (primary and secondary), and the Institute provided them with accommodation, food, clothing, educational and educational treatment and health care. At that time, the primary school was organized within the institution and classes were taught by teachers from the “Dositej Obradović” primary school in Pofalići”. Cited from: https://zavod-sarajevo.ba/index.php/design-and-features .
[6] This novel is often incorrectly translated in our country as And the Sun Rises Again , although it is a biblical reference that points to the existence of the human species in which life unfolds in the usual course of each generation – the sun rises and sets every day. In the English version of the Old Testament, this reads: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever – The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.” In the translation of the Bible by Dr. Lujo Bakotić, in the section Ecclesiastes , this translation is found: “3. What profit is there to a man of all his labour under the sun? 4. One generation cometh, and another goeth away, and the earth standeth still. 5. The sun riseth, the sun set, and again hasteth to the place where he arose.” Cited from: Bible – Old and New Testament , translated by Dr. Lujo Bakotić, Dobra vest, Novi Sad, 1988, p. 438.
[7] Sylvia Kristel (1952—2012) was a Dutch actress, whose roles in the so-called the soft erotic films Emanuelle (1974) and La Marge (translated here as Uličarka , 1976) brought international fame, but also closed the door to character roles in film productions around the world.