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154 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 22, 2026
This story is told through the perspectives of five Bosnians of different religious and social backgrounds, all of whom were displaced during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s and are now attempting to return to their homes following the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995.
The Dayton Agreement held as one of its provisions that all parties should create suitable conditions for displaced people to return to their homes:
Yet for the five Bosnians in this book, returning (let alone reintegration) is far from harmonious. Some houses have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by damage from the fighting. Many of those that remain habitable have been reoccupied by other displaced people who are, likewise, awaiting their own opportunity to return. Or they consider themselves rightful owners and refused to be moved. There are also clear preferences for who should return, as one character learned from a spray painted warning in his old neighborhood: “No dogs. No Muslims”
Although there are offices established for providing assistance to returnees, few underlying tensions have resolved. “All possible assistance” required by the Accord is interpreted loosely on the ground. Although there are threats of violence that inhibit some returns, there are also bureaucratic refusals, prejudices hiding behind paperwork. Creating the paper trail that proves ownership claims necessary for a return is complicated by the changing names of cities, regions, and streets as the borders of countries and regions are redrawn. Is, then, a refusal to acknowledge ownership rights because of a changed street name an act of defiance or a mistake made by a bureaucrat who doesn’t and couldn’t know any better? It can be hard to tell the difference when both feel the same and neither seem like an attempt to facilitate returning.
The writing feels a little like journalism at times, which keeps many of the characters at arms length. Yet, it does not require much closeness to these characters lives to see the intractable problems associated with returning and the frustrations from encountering bureaucratically disguised prejudice.
The Dayton Agreement held as one of its provisions that all parties should create suitable conditions for displaced people to return to their homes:
The Parties undertake to create in their territories the political, economic, and social conditions conducive to the voluntary return and harmonious reintegration of refugees and displaced persons, without preference for any particular group. The Parties shall provide all possible assistance to refugees and displaced persons and work to facilitate their voluntary return in a peaceful, orderly and phased manner, in accordance with the UNHCR repatriation plan. (Annex 7, Article II)
Yet for the five Bosnians in this book, returning (let alone reintegration) is far from harmonious. Some houses have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by damage from the fighting. Many of those that remain habitable have been reoccupied by other displaced people who are, likewise, awaiting their own opportunity to return. Or they consider themselves rightful owners and refused to be moved. There are also clear preferences for who should return, as one character learned from a spray painted warning in his old neighborhood: “No dogs. No Muslims”
Although there are offices established for providing assistance to returnees, few underlying tensions have resolved. “All possible assistance” required by the Accord is interpreted loosely on the ground. Although there are threats of violence that inhibit some returns, there are also bureaucratic refusals, prejudices hiding behind paperwork. Creating the paper trail that proves ownership claims necessary for a return is complicated by the changing names of cities, regions, and streets as the borders of countries and regions are redrawn. Is, then, a refusal to acknowledge ownership rights because of a changed street name an act of defiance or a mistake made by a bureaucrat who doesn’t and couldn’t know any better? It can be hard to tell the difference when both feel the same and neither seem like an attempt to facilitate returning.
The writing feels a little like journalism at times, which keeps many of the characters at arms length. Yet, it does not require much closeness to these characters lives to see the intractable problems associated with returning and the frustrations from encountering bureaucratically disguised prejudice.
December 9, 2023
“It was better during the war. It was easier thinking how to survive, than now, figuring how to live.”
“He remembered how in a newspaper published in Sarajevo he had read an article in which a journalist from Mostar predicted that one day, when everything was over, and everyone came back, when they met on the street, it would be the victims, and not the killers who would bow their heads. The victims, because more human than the killers, would feel pangs of their conscience in their stead - and every time he went to the other side of the city he thought oh how right that man had been.”
Various stories of people claiming their property immediately after the war in the former Yugoslavia had ended. Their struggle is as important as their feelings, emotions and reactions of the people around them.
A short book read fast but leaving an imprint on my soul and mind.
“He remembered how in a newspaper published in Sarajevo he had read an article in which a journalist from Mostar predicted that one day, when everything was over, and everyone came back, when they met on the street, it would be the victims, and not the killers who would bow their heads. The victims, because more human than the killers, would feel pangs of their conscience in their stead - and every time he went to the other side of the city he thought oh how right that man had been.”
Various stories of people claiming their property immediately after the war in the former Yugoslavia had ended. Their struggle is as important as their feelings, emotions and reactions of the people around them.
A short book read fast but leaving an imprint on my soul and mind.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 5, 2015
This svelte, and gorgeous, novel with its five characters recounts the history of the 20th century. It tells the story of the birth and death of nations, of cosmopolitanism collapsed into fickle sectarian rampage, of a utopian vision brought to its knees by sociopathic greed, mistrust and fabricated histories: this is the story of the death of Bosnia….. One of the greatest tragedies of the contemporary past, this was a death that justified social mistrust and gives succour to those who would have us believe that we can only survive through mono-cultural introspection and the fictions of social and cultural purity.
Of course, this isn’t what happens in the novel. Here we have five only tangentially interconnected lives dealing with the end of the Bosnian War and a return home: Safet Sulejmanović whose attempts to recover his property are hindered because not even the town he fled, let alone the street he lived on, now has the same name; Amela Filipović, expelled from her house in suburban Sarajevo when the Serbs took it over and who now works in the office that manages rehousing; Bruno Vasilj, formerly a carpenter but now in charge of property allocations in Mostar; Azer Milavić, trying also to recover his apartment, which Bruno now occupies, and whose family has been taken in by an unnamed elderly woman on the other side of the river, where the Bosniaks now live; and Slobodan Bošković, who just wants to stay in his apartment even though it is not in a Serb part of Sarajevo.
In telling these five stories, Mulić has beautifully humanised the post-war experience, the disruption of the everyday, the corruption that gave shape to post-war Bosnia-Hercegovina and petty power exercised by many, in some cases only because it was the only power they had. She also reminds us that as much as anything else the war was shaped by and shapes symbols – who lives where and who has the power to shape those places, which alphabet they use or which iconography fills their church, what their children may be named or what needs to be accounted for by the papers claimants need. In perhaps the most wonderfully absurd moment, Amela insists that Slobodan will only be able to claim his property if he can prove he is not a Jehovah’s Witness, and in the most vindictive Bruno agrees that property may be returned to Bosniak former owners from current Croat occupiers, but in doing so almost entirely remodels the apartment building so only one of the apartments resembles its pre-war form: would that these were absurdist excesses of Mulić’s fictional world.
There are times when Mulić allows her characters to shake us out of our distancing empathy: “It was better during the war. It was easier thinking of how to survive, than now, figuring out how to live.” The scars of the Bosnian war (as I learned recently, it is often colloquially called The Last War), lie deep. Yet, while this is a novel about the end of the modern nation state (not a nation state, but the nation state) as an inclusive, liberal, thing that we voluntarily join by way of a ‘daily plebiscite’ (as Ernst Renan called it in 1882), it is also a powerful reminder of the human in and humanity of the stories in and around that martial murder of a cosmopolitan dream, a murder that results in the continuing assertion of a blood and soil based ideology of some form of exclusive ethnic singularity. To do that so well, to humanise not the horror of war but the getting-on-with-life of post war is a rare skill, and Mulić does it wonderfully.
The book is published in English by a Sarajevo publisher in a compact edition lavishly illustrated with Yves Faure’s photographs of the Bosnian war, which serve as a powerful reminder of the events behind these small, engaging and potent tales of getting on with life that are Safet’s, Amela’s, Bruno’s, Azer’s and Slobodan’s existences in the now. All these things make it superb.
Of course, this isn’t what happens in the novel. Here we have five only tangentially interconnected lives dealing with the end of the Bosnian War and a return home: Safet Sulejmanović whose attempts to recover his property are hindered because not even the town he fled, let alone the street he lived on, now has the same name; Amela Filipović, expelled from her house in suburban Sarajevo when the Serbs took it over and who now works in the office that manages rehousing; Bruno Vasilj, formerly a carpenter but now in charge of property allocations in Mostar; Azer Milavić, trying also to recover his apartment, which Bruno now occupies, and whose family has been taken in by an unnamed elderly woman on the other side of the river, where the Bosniaks now live; and Slobodan Bošković, who just wants to stay in his apartment even though it is not in a Serb part of Sarajevo.
In telling these five stories, Mulić has beautifully humanised the post-war experience, the disruption of the everyday, the corruption that gave shape to post-war Bosnia-Hercegovina and petty power exercised by many, in some cases only because it was the only power they had. She also reminds us that as much as anything else the war was shaped by and shapes symbols – who lives where and who has the power to shape those places, which alphabet they use or which iconography fills their church, what their children may be named or what needs to be accounted for by the papers claimants need. In perhaps the most wonderfully absurd moment, Amela insists that Slobodan will only be able to claim his property if he can prove he is not a Jehovah’s Witness, and in the most vindictive Bruno agrees that property may be returned to Bosniak former owners from current Croat occupiers, but in doing so almost entirely remodels the apartment building so only one of the apartments resembles its pre-war form: would that these were absurdist excesses of Mulić’s fictional world.
There are times when Mulić allows her characters to shake us out of our distancing empathy: “It was better during the war. It was easier thinking of how to survive, than now, figuring out how to live.” The scars of the Bosnian war (as I learned recently, it is often colloquially called The Last War), lie deep. Yet, while this is a novel about the end of the modern nation state (not a nation state, but the nation state) as an inclusive, liberal, thing that we voluntarily join by way of a ‘daily plebiscite’ (as Ernst Renan called it in 1882), it is also a powerful reminder of the human in and humanity of the stories in and around that martial murder of a cosmopolitan dream, a murder that results in the continuing assertion of a blood and soil based ideology of some form of exclusive ethnic singularity. To do that so well, to humanise not the horror of war but the getting-on-with-life of post war is a rare skill, and Mulić does it wonderfully.
The book is published in English by a Sarajevo publisher in a compact edition lavishly illustrated with Yves Faure’s photographs of the Bosnian war, which serve as a powerful reminder of the events behind these small, engaging and potent tales of getting on with life that are Safet’s, Amela’s, Bruno’s, Azer’s and Slobodan’s existences in the now. All these things make it superb.
May 14, 2017
Da Bog na hajr i na dobro okrene!
This is a book that should be read with a good bottle of wine (or rakija), to numb the senses. Reading it whilst sitting in the sun in the safety of my garden did not do so well.
This little book may be fiction, or pretend to be, but it's realistic and true. Who knows what one would do when faced with a situation of war and displacement of people. What side would you pick, is it allowed to make the best of a situation to save your own? How to continue after peace is enforced but not felt?
What would you do?
We need to treat refugees better.
This is a book that should be read with a good bottle of wine (or rakija), to numb the senses. Reading it whilst sitting in the sun in the safety of my garden did not do so well.
This little book may be fiction, or pretend to be, but it's realistic and true. Who knows what one would do when faced with a situation of war and displacement of people. What side would you pick, is it allowed to make the best of a situation to save your own? How to continue after peace is enforced but not felt?
What would you do?
We need to treat refugees better.
May 18, 2026
There are many books about the Yugoslavian war but I have not seen so many about the end of the war. This is the story of the intersecting lives of several people displaced by the conflict, and their attempts to return to their former homes - ones generally appropriated by others during the conflict. It is a moving tale of trauma, forgiveness, understanding, reconcilliation and hope. Highly recommend for a delicate, sympathetic, non-judgemental account of this tragic period.
February 2, 2024
The loss of home, the de-humanization of it, the erasure of identity; the struggle of living after surviving the unspeakable. Refugees, internally-displaced people and the devoid-of-meaning bullshit that inter-faith hatred carries. So short, so powerful, so masterfully written. Highly, highly recommended.
April 24, 2018
Da Bog na hajr i na dobro okrene!
September 26, 2025
<< It was better during the war.
It was easier thinking of how to survive, than now,
figuring out how to live. >>
It was easier thinking of how to survive, than now,
figuring out how to live. >>
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews