Unspeakable Home

by Ismet Prcic

A stunningly original, stylistically brilliant, and brutally honest novel from an award-winning Bosnian refugee and writer who, decades after escaping his war-torn home country looks back on his childhood, imploded relationships, and battles with addiction—offering powerful insight into the human cost of conflict.

It’s been two years since our narrator divorced his beloved and lost his safest and most adoring home when he fled Bosnia as a teenager. The marriage couldn’t survive his brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himself—even the person he loved most. But, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try.

A linguistically adventurous, structurally ambitious, and emotionally brave odyssey, Unspeakable Home takes us through the memories and confessions of our refugee narrator as he reflects on his bomb-ravaged childhood, the implosion of his relationships, and an agonizing battle with alcoholism. As multiple narrators surface in fragments with increasingly tenuous connections to reality, Prcic unearths the psychological cost of exile and shame with a roving, kinetic energy and a sharp, searching sense of humor. What emerges is a vivid and poignant exploration of the stories we create to hide the deepest parts of our identity from ourselves, as well as a hard-won, life-affirming promise of redemption.

Genres: Fiction, Audiobook

304 pages, Hardcover

Published August 6, 2024

About the author

Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and was the recipient of a 2010 NEA Award for fiction. He is also a 2011 Sundance Screenwriting Lab fellow. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife.

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

neither

TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home

SAMUEL BECKETT

As a Bosnian who emigrated as a youth to the United States during the Yugoslav Wars, Ismet Prcic no doubt has plenty of trauma to unpack. Unspeakable Home reads as an autofictional account of just such a young man’s journey — containing stories of his shame-filled childhood, teenage years as a drunken orange-mohawked punk, a short-lived stint with his paternal uncle in California, and his college/young adult/married years with the Beloved — and the format is highly self-aware and unconventional by design. Prcic starts with a fan letter to the comedian Bill Burr, bemoaning his recent marital breakup (You wonder whether she would have filed for divorce if, instead of PTSD and alcoholism, your diagnosis had been diabetes or cancer, if your maladies were visible, measurable, if they didn’t have to be communicated by words, if they didn’t have to be believed to be true.) and then proceeds to describe how he intends to write this novel as a sort of mix tape of two halves. Throughout, details are hinted at in these letters to Bill Burr, and then stories are told about those details, often from different angles, and by the end, an entire, trauma-filled life has been explored in a precisely crafted work of art that knowingly exposes the craftsmanship. I truly do admire Prcic’s craft, and I am grateful for what I learned here about the Bosnian war experience, but I don’t always perfectly connect emotionally with this kind of postmodern MFA-trained writing style: art is subjective, and while I can recognise the skill on display here, it wasn’t entirely to my own tastes; I will understand every five star review or award this garners. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Historically, the Balkans — that gorgeous, ungovernable, godforsaken peninsula always in turmoil, always on the fringes of civilizations, always a broken-up borderland — had for centuries been a place to survive, endure. It had also been a place to fail to escape from and — both because and in spite of this — to love fiercely. If you were from this lush volatility, chances were you’d in some way participate in at least one war — two or even three if God really had it in for you and gave you a long life.

Coming from a centrally planned childhood with seaside vacations — surrounded by family and comrades — and huffing glue on bombed out streets with his punk gang (always afraid of being called up early to the country’s underequipped, undermanned army), the narrator was of two minds when his family decided to send him to America: relief at escaping the chaos, and survivor’s guilt for leaving everyone else behind. He describes this as PTSD (and when he eventually reveals some secrets about his childhood, we learn why he was always kind of broken), and this leads to alcoholism (with many stories of hiding and sneaking and scrounging for alcohol), and this leads to him losing everything. This is a novel of vignettes, framed between the fan letters to Burr, with self-aware metanarration, as when he quotes an article by Marina Biti and Iva Rosanda Žigo (“The Silenced Narrator and the Notion of ‘Proto-Narrative'”) that references Prcic’s first novel Shards:

The complexity of the narrative structure that involves not only multiple levels of diegesis and various diegetic combinations discussed by Genette but also an unusual correlation between verifiable reality and fiction, invites theoretical speculation primarily concerning elements that can be qualified as ‘disruptive’ to the memoir, related to trauma.

So, I guess he’s telling us that that’s what he’s doing here, too? Prcic later writes:

I’m not writing a biopic here; this is not that kind of story and mine is not that kind of life. I’ve got my conciliatory designs on the synapses between life and story of life — my own timid, wide-eyed attempt at living it — which is why I’m compelled to leave my sketches in, to show the work, as it were. If you spend your time on Earth trying to understand how you fit in life instead of living it, then to you, trying to understand is living, and what you’re reading is that hard admittance.

And so: This is obviously a well-written novel, crafted by a skilled and self-reflective author — and it also did give me a sense of what living through and escaping a conflict like this can do to a mind — so it is undeniably a worthwhile and artful read; another reader will want exactly this. This reader, as a matter of taste, prefers a novel that pretends to be only what it is.

[Nicki Markus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose to request Unspeakable Home from NetGalley because I am working on an around-the-world reading challenge and still needed to read something written by an author from Bosnia. This book was a mixed bag for me. There were some really interesting moments and plenty of emotion; however, I often found the prose a little heavy going and my attention would waver at times. Overall, I struggled to connect with the book on a deeper level and occasionally found myself skim-reading. If you are interested in reading multicultural works about peoples’ real-life experience of war and displacement it is worth giving this book a try. However, for me it was a middle-of-the-road, three star read.

I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC gifted by the publisher

I loved the themes of exploring diaspora, the American dream, reinventing oneself to fit in, processing trauma and how that affects us.

There’s this paragraph towards the end of the book talking about how people only like him for the persona he invented to survive. “… and that I couldn’t keep doing him anymore, but that everyone missed that guy and hated me for not being able to maintain him, to keep him conjured up…” and this totally wrecked me 😭

What didn’t work as much for me is the structure and very self-conscious writing. I got quite lost with the shifting narratives scattered with the MC’s childhood, fan mail to Bill Burr, describing his novel, and his adulthood in the US. The reading experience feels like admiring an abstract art. I like that it exists but I’m not sure how to interpret the pieces

All this to say, UNSPEAKABLE HOME is a great read for those who love good writing and admire craft. Readers who love experimental structures and abstraction will have a lot of fun with this. I’m quite surprised it’s not on the Booker Longlist 🤣

Final note - the narrator’s language is quite vulgar and masculine. If that’s not your thing, maybe skip this book

[Tea · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF-ing at page 58 (20%). There is a lot of things happening in this book and I can’t get into it. Picked this up on a whim to try something new and because the cover was interestingly weird. I really don’t know what to say after that; there was some parts that were cute and even funny but way too much swearing that wasn’t needed to get the point(s) across. Maybe it’s just me, but the last few pages were getting confusing into what I was reading and even questioning why I was reading these scenes.

Not sure if I’ll give this another try or not. For now it’s just DNF and lost in limbo for me.

[Lynette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off really well but just slogged towards the end. I liked the blending of reality and fiction and how the author seems to reach out beyond the page so the act of writing becomes intertwined with the novel, but at the end it became too lyrical and vague to keep up. On a sentence level, Prcic is great though

[Dulcie]

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Unspeakable Home by Ismet Prcic blends a narrative of Izzy’s life in his home country of Bosnia and his life as a refugee in the United States. Many of the stories are funny or positive progression in his life. Others are heartbreaking, especially when he talks about what happened to people in Bosnia or how his alcoholism caused issues. There is a little more adult language than I like to read in a book, and a few gross scenes, but overall this was a pretty good read.

Unspeakable Home is currently on sale at your favorite bookstore. #goodreads #simonandschuster

[Char · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25☆

Unspeakable Home is a semi-autobiographical short-story-collection-glued-into-novel about our protagonist Izzy, an american immigrant from war torn bosnia, who tells his stories in the form of letters to comedian bill burr.

I can't say that this was the smoothest reading experience. In fact it was very disorienting, but im pretty sure that's the point.

though the stories are not explicitly about Izzy, they say a lot about the person who writes them whom i guess is the author? it’s kind of confusing, and its hard to tell where fiction ends and real life starts. this book is more of a feeling and that feeling is irreparable brokenness.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't tell how much is memoir and how much is fiction, and I don't want to find out. A story of a man who emigrates from Bosnia during the war and tries to assimilate in America, but it's definitely not a straightforward narrative. I like that there are references to his punk past, but they aren't heavy-handed. (For example, there's a part where he and his friends want to see the Ramones in Zagreb on their last tour, only a few hours drive away, but they would have to sneak through a war zone, so they miss out.)

[Jake Osman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another that I think is closer to a 3.5 for me but I'm rounding up. I think the voice was quippy and great. I found the story to be a bit meandering and I caught myself a bit distracted. It reminded me of Martyr! in some strange ways; maybe it was the voice and comedy tied to its core themes and topics. Overall and enjoyable book, but I think a particular read so really one to be interested in the summary and voice from the start rather than a book to arbitrarily pick up as I did based on the reviews.

[Kayla Lister · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was confused most of the time. I understand it wasn’t the usual book I read, but the different stories and different characters that were introduced and then forgotten in a random hodgepodge were just too much for me. I struggled to finish this one.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

It this was 60% less self-referential and 20% less Twitter talking points, I probably would have loved this book. There’s a really tender and heartbreaking and poetic story tangled up in the poorly worded prose.

[Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril · Rating 4 out of 5]

"F*ck narrative coherence!". I recommend this book for people who enjoyed On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.

[Ben Silver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant

[Michele Knopp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of hard to keep track of what's going on. Very talented writer.

[Aliki · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a 4, less than a 5 for me. At times brilliant: Poetic, smart, funny and incredibly sad. I was sort of glad when it was over.

[Julie Huston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unconventional in a thought-provoking way. Allowed me to step into the narrator’s traumatic experiences in an incredibly accessible way.

[Sang · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This page break has been brought to you courtesy of a mental breakdown."