Odłamki

by Ismet Prcic, Jarosław Rybski (Translator)

Ismet kocha teatr, chce się umawiać na randki i pić wino z przyjaciółmi. Ale w rozdartej okrutnym konfliktem etnicznym Bośni nie ma na to miejsca. Po dramatycznych wydarzeniach chłopak zostawia całą rodzinę. Zostaje uchodźcą. Jednak ucieczka do amerykańskiego raju tylko pozornie jest wybawieniem…

Mustafa Nalić jest żołnierzem. Jego rzeczywistość to wszechobecne okrucieństwo, śmierć najbliższych i frontowe koszmary. Losy dwóch młodych mężczyzn zaczynają się ze sobą niebezpiecznie splatać. Jakby należały do jednego człowieka… Kim naprawdę są Ismet i Mustafa?

Odłamki to imigracyjna powieść z przejmującą panoramą umęczonego wojną kraju i jednocześnie niezwykła „autobiografia” – element terapii Ismeta Prcicia. Książka zachwycająca młodzieńczą nadzieją i humorem, a także wielką dojrzałością w rozliczeniu wojennej traumy.

Genres: Fiction, War, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, 21st Century

432 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2011

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

[Guille · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A mí nunca me obligaron a comer testículos humanos ni a otro ser humano ni a ver como se comían los cerdos a mis conciudadanos. No. En lugar de eso, hui. Eso hice. Esa es mi historia. Dejé atrás a mi madre, a mi padre, a mi hermano, a mi primer amor. Eso es todo no hay más."

Nuevamente, el sentimiento de culpa por haber sobrevivido al conflicto, en este caso, el conflicto de los Balcanes.
En la narración, Prcic nos va a mostrar lo atroz que fue aquello, lo impensable que era pocos años antes de que aquello sucediese, cómo unos dirigentes pueden encaminar a toda una población hacia la locura absoluta, cómo toda una generación de jóvenes perdió su juventud mientras algunos vivíamos la nuestra tranquilamente y a no muchos kilómetros.

El narrador de la novela (alguien que bien pudiera haber sido el propio autor) nos introduce en un juego de desdoblamiento de varios personajes que pudieran ser uno solo pero viviendo en esos posibles mundos paralelos que se formarían ante cualquier decisión que tomamos.

Nunca estamos seguros de la verdad de lo que cuenta o de a quién corresponde esa verdad que nos cuenta o si incluso fue real esa, no obstante, verdad que nos cuenta. Un juego en el que todo sucedió o pudo suceder y que empieza a ser narrado como terapia contra la locura del narrador, que crea una historia, su historia, convincente, dolorosa, bella, angustiosa, humorística, tierna, emocionante (en un amplio sentido del término) y con toda la fuerza que es capaz de poseer la tragedia de lo vivido.

Y en ese desdoblamiento, en ese cuestionamiento de la culpa, el autor parece destinar un mejor destino a aquel que vivió el horror hasta sus últimas consecuencias que al que huyó del horror y no participó del despropósito.

Una muy buena novela, increíble que sea la primera del autor, que te mantiene pegado a sus páginas de principio a fin.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Posted at Shelf Inflicted

I enjoy gripping, personal stories about surviving hardship during war, the mundane details of life that go on despite such major upheaval, and fitting in and finding one’s identity in a foreign land.

This fragmented tale is told from multiple perspectives, that of Ismet while he is living in California, Ismet growing up in war-torn Bosnia, and another Bosnian teenager named Mustafa whose experiences fuse with Ismet’s so strongly that it is difficult to tell what is real and what is imaginary. It is brilliant, unsettling, funny, and beautiful. It is also somewhat lacking in focus and felt too long in places.

There were gorgeous, moving passages like this one:

"It was like we were driven to put that frame in front of us. To make a difference on those people’s faces, you know. Something. We let it sit in our laps, held it erect, and ceased all movement. We became a painting, staring out through the frame into the real world. And soon the real people stopped to stare at us, the painting, forgetting for a moment about the war, the oppressive psychosis that permeated everything. People have to look at art no matter what.

A bunch of children swarmed around us trying to catch a facial twitch and laughed giddily, waved their little hands in front of our eyes, and scratched their little heads when we wouldn’t think. Adults mostly stared from a distance, wondering why anybody would do this. Two elderly men with their hands behind their backs looked at us with brutal disgust, shaking their heads like the end of the world was coming and we were somehow responsible. And it would all have been an exercise in craft, a spur-of-the-moment performance-art piece, something nobody would remember for long, had it not started shelling and had we not, in our madness, remained motionless in spite of it, among the mad-dashing citizens."

Laugh-out-loud funny passages like this:

"I was the first one up there in my tighty-whities, screaming giddily, staring one moment at the blue sky, the next at my white feet slapping the hard surface of the white cement, until the whiteness ended abruptly in a horizontal line and I found myself airborne above the blue, beneath the blue, in the blue and going up, up, up, I swear to God I would have been the first human to really fly had I not remembered, going up into the blue like that, that all my money was rolled up in a tobacco pouch hanging next to a pouch of another kind in my underwear."

And other passages that were a jumbled, pretentious mess. My favorite parts of the book were the stories about Ismet’s childhood in Bosnia, the heartbreaking stories of his depressed, chain-smoking mother and cheating father, the sweet stories of first love, and the funny stories about his acting in theatre.

I really hate the derogatory use of the word “pussy” to mean cowardly, and found the author used it frequently enough to annoy me and take me out of the story a few times.

Through his characters, real and imaginary, the author shows how difficult it can be to adjust to a new way of life. Though not a perfect story, it was a compelling one.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harrowing, hilarious, and wonderfully experimental, this is a terrific novel that captures the absurd brutalities of war. The prose is propulsive, the narrative is fractured, and every shard in this tale lands in the perfect spot. An impressive debut.

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

I read the first 50 pages to speed date the book (and decide if I wanted to keep it or toss it) and I wanted to just burrow down and keep reading. The tone moves quickly between light-hearted and devastating, and the honesty of the narrator (is it the author? jury seems out) is sometimes funny, sometimes surprising. I hope he doesn't keep vomiting. I'll keep reading!

[Lakis Fourouklas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is a Bosnian-American. As we read in his website he used to be just a Bosnian, but then he learned some English and they gave him a piece of paper that said that he now was an American. However, if we are to judge from this novel that comes out next week in the US, we’d say that he truly and simply is a writer from the Balkans, since in this he talks about all the big issues facing the region: the civil wars and the refugees, immigration and religion, which tends to bring people apart instead of together.
His narration moves in a handful of parallel levels and takes the reader on a time travelling journey, in order to make him understand in a unique way how his story, or rather history works.
The main characters are just two: Ismet and Mustafa. But does Mustafa really exist or is he just a fabrication, someone created in the imagination of Ismet? Well, according to the story he does exist, but bits and pieces of evidence we encounter once in a while seem to indicate the opposite, or rather that he’s just the alter ego of the narrator. Ismet has never been to war, has never fought, while Mustafa has; Ismet has travelled abroad, while Mustafa has not; Ismet is alive, while Mustafa is dead. Or is he now?
The author by creating a complicated plot he seems to play with the reader and with time, to abolish boundaries, to built certainties just to bring them crashing down, and to say that everything is possible, even that which is most improbable. His two heroes seem to complement each other, to subconsciously bring their beings together in order to create the ideal, under the dire circumstances, man; a man that loves a lot and hates just as much; that struggles and who runs away scared; that dreams of a beautiful life but constantly flirts with death.
The tribal and religious zealotries, the crooked politicians, the endless corruption and the non-stop cheating, but also true love, are some of the big issues that are talked about here. Using black humor as his vehicle the author throws his heroes into extreme and extremely hilarious situations, he hits and caresses them, he indicates for them the way they need to follow before tripping them up. It seems that what he’s silently trying to convey is that at the end of the day nothing is up to them. Some of them do manage to survive and build better lives for themselves; most though don’t, and thus they end up perishing under the ruins of war and the memories of a long gone past. However, even those who do survive don’t really make a clean run out of their past since wherever they go they always carry along with them their ghosts, whether these are successful or failed love affairs, whether they are some personal guilts or even their inability to enjoy life without the help of various substances.
Everybody coming out of a war is a loser, no matter what. “It had begun with politicians fighting on television,” Ismet says, and before too long the former friends started turning on each other and the reality of people of different origins living happily together proved in the end to be nothing but an illusion.
The author manages to construct, with the help of diary clippings, memories and oral accounts, the mosaic of some shattered lives, of people sacrificed on the altar of the insanity of war. Through this fluid and every now and then poetic narrative the reader comes to find out some things about the history of certain peoples, about borders and countries created by blood.
This is one of the best novels I have read this year so far, and I did read a lot. Highly recommended.

[Olga Kowalska (WielkiBuk) · Rating 4 out of 5]

When it comes to war, to memories and the intensity of one's experience, "Shards" were simply amazing. The war is real, it stays forever and there's nowhere to hide from it. Ismet Prcic is a living proof of it.

[David Crego · Rating 2 out of 5]

No sale Pablo Iglesias en ningún momento.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find myself wanting to write an amazing review to really do justice to this book - one of the best I've read in a long time - but there's no real way to do it justice.

I loved it. I'm not just saying that because I know the author. (If I hated it, I'd just *forget* to review it.)

This book was such a great story - the protagonist, who confusingly has the same name as the author - is putting together the pieces of his life. He grew up in Yugoslavia & lived through the beginnings of the Bosnian War before emigrating to the US (Los Angeles, specifically) at the age of 18 instead of joining the army. The secondary protagonist, Mustafa, did not leave Bosnia, but instead DID join the army, which didn't necessary go well for him (and why would it?).

It was thought-provoking and honest - for all that it's a work of fiction masquerading as a memoir. (That was the hardest part for me, really...I found myself being VERY concerned with the pieces that talk about Melissa - character Ismet's California girlfriend. I had to remind myself a LOT that this was fiction.)

The language and imagery is fantastic. I could see and feel more than I wanted to; it wasn't easy to escape the stark glimpses of a post-Soviet, war-torn country. I found myself being impressed that the language was so fantastic, especially since the author did not, I presume, grow up reading/writing/speaking English. (And for all that I know the author and know that he speaks English fluently.)

So - read it. You won't be sorry, I promise.

[Garry · Rating 5 out of 5]

My enjoyment of a book is influenced by my mood when I read it. I was definitely in a great place when I finished this one (a tropical island off the coast of Cambodia), but it would have been a 5 star favourite nonetheless.

Shards is an autobiographical story of a Bosnian refugee, and a tight and tense one at that. But it is more than this - it's speaks of how it feels to be a person touched by war, to be a family separated and broken by conflict, to have the guilt of a survivor, to struggle to adapt to freedom.

The central story is an account of how the author came to defect to America, and his descent once he gets there. It is interwoven with the story of Mustafa, who stayed behind and fought. Mustafa may have been a real person, but his story is almost certainly fiction - as played out in Prcic's mind - and he represents the author's sense of his 'better self'. We also read short letters that the author wrote to his mother but never posted... letters in which he displays his unravelling mind.

I have made Shards sound like a very difficult book to read. It's not! Prcic treats his depressing subject matter with such a light touch that it never sinks. He weaves his story in an incredibly complex fashion, but does so in a way that it never feels out of reach. He is painfully open, but remains slightly (and sufficiently) detatched. This is a very readable novel from a talented writer.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

“ 'Indian or Italian?'
“'Bosnian,' I told him.
“He rolled his eyes.
“'To eat! Do you want Indian food or Italian food for dinner?'
“I wanted to stomp on my own balls” (14).
“I'd rather throw myself eyeball first into a cactus” (21).
“...Dr. Cyrus he laughed, said that what I was experiencing was normal, that our brains are peculiar computers that constantly augment and even edit true events out of our memory when those events do not fit into the narrative that we tell to ourselves every day, the narrative of our own lives.
“We're all heroes of our bullshit is how he put it” (22).
“The moment Marshal Tito died I shat myself. These incidents were not connected” (25).
“The sight of people buying ice cream, pulling their tongues around and over it, savoring its frosty succulence, never failed to give me a boner of a sweet tooth” (31-32).
“She's American. She goes to church. She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage” (41).
“...she was the one doing the majority of the physical work because of my father's supposed bad back and actual laziness” (47).
“It Freudian-slipped into our words and belly danced in our dreams” (58).
"Mustafa's grandfather was born in a shed. The shed was right next to a puny, derelict hosue, where the rest of his family sat in a miserable silence. They were awaiting this newest addition to the already swarming Nalic household with dread. The room was pungent with smoke from a malfunctioning chimney, and all of their bellies crackled with need. When she brought him into the house the family looked at him and saw not a son or a brother but an enemy" (85).
“I don't recognize my hometown, mati. I'm standing right in front of my graffiti-covered high school and I miss Moorpark College. And Moorpark backward is Kraproom” (94).
“For this statement to make sense you have to understand the nature of the Yugoslavian brand of Communism. Take architects, for example. Say a public building is to be made. In Communism it's not the best architect who gets to make the building; it's the guy (almost always a man) with seniority in the Party who happens to be an architect that gets to make the building. And to get seniority you have to kiss a lots of ass, sit on committees for stuff you know nothing about, endure years of boring speeches, write and deliver years of boring speeches, and get drunk nightly with the bigwigs to show that you're involved in both the community and its social life. By then you're 98 percent bureaucrat and 2 percent architect. This is the reason why the public buildings in the Balkans all look like filing cabinets and why, in turn, they are almost always called 'homes' (Home of Health, Home of the Youth, Home of the Workers, Home of the Army): to evoke that warm feeling inside to compensate for their actual soullessness. It's shit in your mouth, but officially it's called ice cream” (97).
“Around 4:30, that lazy calm Sunday feeling washed over me like rage, ironed my brow, and corseted my thoughts. It happened while watching my hamster spin his wheel of misfortune, relentlessly” (100).
“I shook my head. The shit you do to try to kill the butterflies” (104).
“I didn't know that time could be so dense, so true, and that a sliver of it could envelop you like that, overpower you. 'Then' was as dense as 'now' is fleeting. I was are of 'then' as I wish I were aware of 'now' right now instead of writing about then; it's pathetic” (104).
“Shit was a-brew, I could just see it” (105).
“He went from age twenty-five to five in an instant, bawling at the injustice and ignorance, at the malice of people who knew only profit and wouldn't know art if Dali signed their limp, melting dicks” (107).
“While holding my breath, I fought off my brain by stuffing myself with words people wrote, beverages people distilled, and sleeping pills people manufactured” (112).
“Memories are nothing like tapes. Tapes record reality. Minds record fiction” (119).
“...this child's drawing would walk toward me, evolving into an impressionistic painting, then into a realistic one, then become a scene from an Easter European film with blatant social realism that made me want to shoot myself” (125).
“When, finally, she did turn from a blob into herself, right on time, by the way...” (125).
“Her instructions got eaten up by billows of laughter from a number of newly matured voice boxes, something that couldn't be said for their owners” (139).
“ 'How can you be so disgusting?' She tried to sound like a disappointed mother.
“ 'Inspiration'” (139).
“Everything but the river returned to silence” (151).
“You could see he preferred the front lines, where the world was divided into us and them and you lived in your muscles instead of your head because matters were crystal clear and nothing was up for interpretation and there was no need to use the head at all apart from planning maneuvers, dreaming, and remembering” (174-175).
“...faces made of misery, eyes made of empty” (178).
“A slothful, hungover rain tapped them on the shoulders as they waited for the trucks to take them to the front line” (196).
“There was something about him, a veneer of divorced guys in cheap motels on rainy afternoons, staring into swirls of wallpaper and throttled dreams” (197).
“He touched the rim of his cap casually, as if checking to see whether he had put it on at all this morning” (198).
“At first he was going to let it be, since he didn’t have to walk for a while and he was fed up with tying them all the time, but the little insects of compulsion gnawed at this thoughts, reminding him that untied laces were in an unnatural state, that the universe ached because of it, that he had to do something about that” (200).
“…his face ablaze with fever; you could light a cigarette on his cheek. They set him down like a repossessed dresser and gave the driver the green light to go” (210).
“In Bosnian this last sentence rhymed: Menji je zao, al tako ti je grah pao, sort of a fatalistic little rhyme illustrating one’s lack of power in the ways of the universe” (214).
“…an eroded loaf of bread…” (226).
“Out on the upper deck the wind bore down on us, nabbed at our cigarettes, smoked them for us” (232).
“No, I had never before that day seen fireworks. Neither had Ramona, nor Omar, nor Boro. Asmir and the musicians were older. They remembered with fully formed adult bodies and minds life before the war. Before chaos, they’d known order, before senselessness, sense. They were really out of Bosnia because leaving chaos to them felt like returning to normalcy. But, if you were forged in the chaos, then there was no return. There was no escape. To you chaos was normalcy. And normalcy was proving to be an unnatural, brittle state” (240).
“I looked at my white breath against the gray building across the street and thought about mankind, about how hot we had to be on the inside to survive in such cold environs” (249).
“He looked like a child, or a father who had lost one” (250).
“She didn’t even bother to answer his questions anymore, probably because he was asking them in Bosnian” (273).
“…her face austere, almost disgusted, her nose pointing down to her chin and her chin commendably reciprocating” (284).
"His smirk returned but this time with undergarments of malice" (299).
"Had a bunch of cops tried to deport me when I left the theater, I would have gone through them like Mel Gibson through a carload of wet cardboard cutouts..." (304).
"...a page from a newspaper bullied by a particularly ardent gust..." (305).
"A range of feelings and thoughts about those feelings walked to the proscenium of her face, posed for a moment, and then walked off the runway to be replaced by the next one" (306).
“There’s a brawny fellow tinkering inside the gaping crocodile mouth of an El Camino in a driveway…” (317).
“…and everything is a mess and clustered against the cyclorama of colorful junk mail offering junk food and junk dreams for prices a junky could afford…” (334).
“In that darkness I wish I am elsewhere, or elseone, and I let go” (342).
“Now, the sad thing is that some pieces of this nothing thought themselves up, imagined themselves up, then thought up and imagined and created this thing called reality. These little nothings got very caught up in all this reality they invented, and made it very complex and cyclical, so much so that it made them forget that they were really, in essence, still nothing. It made them stupid. It made them real” (378).
*Also included is the following quote from Samuel Beckett: “…a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.”

[Wiola Myszkowska Re:telling]

Przeczytane drugi raz. Jedna z najtrudniejszych książek.

[How_sven · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this book up out of a running interest in the subject matter - I've read quite a bit of Eastern European/Balkan writers and have spent quite a bit of time in the Balkans as well as studying Eastern European history. The premise of the novel is actually quite intriguing as well. A boy, with the same name as the author, escapes the war in Bosnia to come to America. We then read how he remembers his story (in the form of a memoir which he writes at the urging of his therapist), his diary that he keeps, as well as the parallel life of Mustafa, whose life mirrors that of Ismet's at times and at others veers away from it. Perhaps it is how Ismet has recreated events in his imagination and how he understands how his life could have been different. This can lead to an interesting discussion about experiences, reality, perspective and how we construct memory. So as far as plot and structure go, it's an interesting, stimulating book.

With all that said, however, I don't think that it was very well written. The subject matter, which sold me on buying the book, also was what got it published, rather than literary merit. It's certainly an intriguing premise and story but needed an editor. Perhaps it was intentional on Prcic's part, but the style feels like that of a writer who is simply trying too hard to be artistic and "literary." I've wondered if Prcic (the author of the text as a whole) is simply imposing this style on his character Prcic who is also writing that either it's written poorly or it's written well because it's been deliberately written poorly to show his character as not being a good writer. The style jumps from crass adolescent humor to flowery metaphors and similes.
For example:

"Instead, she put a kiss on my lips, unexpectedly, and sensing it was going to be a brief, devastating one, I leaned into it more and felt my pursed lips fight for purchase against hers, trying to protract the mellifluent contact, and then it was all over. She stood up, told me to call her tomorrow morning, and walked away forever. I watched her devolve from the flesh-to-flesh contact, to a specter down the street, her peach-colored backpack bobbing slightly, noiselessly, her hand flying up for a wave, then - foliage."

"The earlier shell had hit the parking lot in front of it, lifted this VW bug, flipped it, and brought it down atop a little Citroen. By the time we got close, you couldn't see what colors they were, as they were burned extracrispy and still burning. The bug looked a little bit like a turtle on its back. Some pissed-off storeowners were sweeping their broken windows off the pavement. There were shrapnel holes everywhere. We overheard that two women were killed, but we walked past the jail and up to Banja Park to make out."

I liked the subject matter and the story. Unfortunately, however, I did not find it to be well written.

[Aithne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ważna informacja: nie wybrałam sobie tej książki. Dostałam ją, o ile dobrze pamiętam, w walentynkowej promocji w Publio - do zakupionych książek mogłam dobrać za darmo albo jakiś kryminał, albo książkę o wojnie w byłej Jugosławii, czyli właśnie Odłamki. Nie byłam więc do niej jakoś ekstatycznie nastawiona, wiedziałam o niej tylko tyle, ile przeczytałam na szybko w opisie, nie byłam też przygotowana do tej lektury pod względem dostatecznej znajomości historii. Ale dałam jej szansę (chyba nawet wcześniej niż pozostałym książkom - tym, za zakup których ją dostałam!), zaczęłam czytać i... Skończenie jej zajęło mi dobre pół roku.

Ciężko podsumować pół roku lektury, bo nie za dobrze pamiętam fragmenty, które czytałam jeszcze w lutym, no ale. Z tego, co pamiętam: gdyby Odłamki składały się tylko z bośniackich retrospekcji, pewnie podobałyby mi się o wiele bardziej. Te rozdziały były (czy raczej: bywały) wciągające i niektóre zapadły mi w pamięć na tyle, że nawet po tym pół roku dobrze je pamiętam. Za to całą część z majakami Ismeta w Ameryce wyrzuciłabym w pioruny, bo nie wnosi nic - no, poza ogólnym poczuciem, że główny bohater się w nowym życiu nie odnalazł i grunt usuwa mu się spod nóg.

Bardzo raziły mnie w tej książce wulgaryzmy. Zrozumiałabym je w dialogach, zwłaszcza że ma to być powieść, przynajmniej w pewnym stopniu, autobiograficzna - jeśli takie lub podobne zdania faktycznie padły, to czemu by je cenzurować. Ale autor z lubością używa ich w narracji, raz po raz racząc czytelnika opisami z gatunku: Nasze żołądki nie były przyzwyczajone do tego wszystkiego, rzygaliśmy więc do papierowych torebek i sraliśmy na potęgę gdzie tylko się dało, Widziałeś to tyle razy, że stało się nudne, znasz to jak własną kieszeń, jak własnego fiuta, Sofa zapada się niczym stare, ziemiste cycki etc. To tylko wycinek z paru stron, z dzisiejszej porcji. Pewnie nie wszystkim to przeszkadza, może nawet mało komu, ale ja akurat czego innego oczekuję od literatury. Nie każdy może być Charlesem Bukowskim.

W podziękowaniach autor pisze m.in.: Za opanowanie pięćsetstronicowego bałaganu i wiarę w to, że jest to książka, chciałbym podziękować (...). Mój główny problem z Odłamkami polega na tym, że nie za bardzo podzielam tę wiarę. Ten miks retrospekcji, historii (fikcyjnej? Rzeczywistej i wypartej ze świadomości, wspominanej jako życie kogoś innego? Ale jak to pogodzić z bośniackimi retrospekcjami, w myśl których Ismet nigdy nie walczył w tej wojnie?) Mustafy Nalicia, dziennika, listów do matki, opowieści o życiu w USA rodem z Inherent Vice przypomina mi raczej sklecone ze sobą zapiski, każdy z innej parafii, niż powieść. Biorąc pod uwagę, że powstanie Odłamków jest w jakiś tam sposób związane z psychoterapią autora, nie zdziwiłabym się, gdyby geneza tej książki naprawdę tak wyglądała.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In beginning a description of Ismet Prcic's (pronounced Per-Sick) debut novel "Shards" I first must mention that novel is filled with stories, scenes, and characters that are truly enjoyable to read and range from heartbreaking to humorous. But what really makes the book stand apart was Prcic's fluid nature of storytelling that made the novel *novel* for me.

The bulk of the Story is set in 1990's Bosnia, where Prcic comes of age the war ravaged city of Tuzla. It is in Bosnia that his stories are the most common and can resonate with any Young Adult. While the war rages, Ismet (main character of the same name of our author) and his friends carry on and live like most teenage boys caught up in girls, drugs, and under the sway of a charismatic theater director.

The main action of the story centers around Ismet's flight from Bosnia to be sponsored by his uncle in California, but it is when he arrives in California that Ismet begins to come unglued, suffering from insomnia, alcoholism, memories from the war, and beginning to fuse his memories and identity with Mustafa- a young man (or figment of Ismet's imagination?) that fought in the war and serves as Ismet's mirror image. Prcic alternates between Mustafa's and Ismet's story and the reader is left uncertain what is 'real' and what is fiction- where Mustafa ends and Ismet begins.

Not only was it refreshing to read about a time an place that I'm largely unfamiliar with- but Prcic's style plays fast and loose with the conventions of story telling. Is it a memoir or a novel? Will the real Ismet Prcic please stand up? The story delightfully sends you 'round the bend with Mustafa's and Ismets shared and diverging histories- and strangely was reminiscent of the main character(s) of 'Fight Club'- complete with a killer ending.

Note: This is a Goodread First Read

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[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

How does one define himself, and find an identity? These are questions that are hard enough in a "normal" life - ideas that one continues to explore through out his life. Now, imagine a life torn apart by war, foreign travel/escape, and the effort to reestablish yourself as a war-torn immigrant in your early twenties. This sets the stage for Shards, by Ismet Prcic. The main character, also Ismet Prcic, is faced with the choice of leaving his family in civil-war-torn Bosnia for a chance at a new life in the States. The narrative, however, is not linear. Rather, we get "shards" of the story as told through journal entries, much like shards of shrapnel scattered by a mortar. There is an apt comparison in the book about a young neighborhood boy going around to collect pieces of shrapnel to try and recreate a whole mortar, which we know is impossible. And so Ismet, on his journey away from family and to the States, attempts to piece together his identity and memory while his life is falling apart. Ismet writes about a parallel character named Mustafa, who's life looks suspiciously similar to Ismet's, but he chooses to stay and fight in the war. These characters' lives run closer and closer together as the book proceeds, and the reader is left questioning which is real. This is a beautiful, brutal book, that is part memoir and part fiction. The writing will have you glued, and the imagery in the middle of the action. You won't be disappointed, but maybe frustrated as I was, left questioning what was real and what was imagined.

[Francesca · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Il romanzo di debutto, Schegge, di Ismet Prcic non è una semplice storia, ma è una sorta di resoconto, talora allucinatorio, ma sempre brutale e straziante, della sua esperienza attraverso la guerra della (ex) Jugoslavia: e Prcic, musulmano bosniaco, nato nel 1977 a Tuzla, attraverso la scrittura cerca di dare senso, se mai uno possa esservene, a quel trauma, di oggettivarlo per tentare di superarlo.

Schegge, già il titolo avverte, non è una storia lineare, benché non prepari per quanto verrà descritto nelle successive pagine.
Durante tutto il libro, siamo nella mente del protagonista Ismet Prcic, che spesso sembra essere sdoppiato in due persone: una è Ismet, conosciuto negli Stati Uniti come Izzy, che forse ha commesso suicidio o forse potrebbe essere ancora vivo nella persona di un secondo personaggio, il suo alter ego, Mustafa Nalic.
Non è mai chiaro se i personaggi siano effettivamente due, uno solo, o altri – forse sono tutte le vittime di quella tregenda, ciascuna con la propria storia, etnia, religione, ma tutti altrettanto e ugualmente umani.

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[Kris Fernandez-Everett · Rating 4 out of 5]

not a book to be read lightly... not only does the title give away much about the style of the book itself, but these are not themes that are at all light and frothy... no one is kidding when they say this book is as much about the absurdity of life -- and there are some passages which forced me into a double take because the mood, the atmosphere reminded me so much of camus and 'the stranger' -- as it is about the futility of war and the ridicule of the state (yes, there's some kafka mixed in here too)... the juxtaposition of ismet's experience -- outside -- with mustafa's experience -- inside -- couldn't do anything but benefit into some kind of melding into one double sided coin -- and so it does... a fabulous read, but one that you MUST concentrate on the whole way through -- narrators change, time jumps around, perspective changes... frankly, just about every convention there is to mess with gets a pretty serious work-out in this novel... highly recommended...

[Sandra Delehanty · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are very few books I cannot put down; this was one. Having experienced first-hand post traumatic symptoms relative to my own upbringing and then later, treated PTSD as a psychologist, I found Shards a moving and well written account of the experience. It is not enough to describe intrusive memories or emotional numbing in clinical terms for the average person to "get it". Being in it makes a person feel crazy. Reading Ismet's diary, Mustafa's story, and seeing through the young author's eyes what it is to "come of age" in war time Bosnia is breathtaking. And funny. Very funny. Funny as only young men trying to be cool when they are so not cool can be funny. I could not help loving Izzie. An excellent read.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't think of another book that could be so aptly described as VISCERAL. People get eviscerated, viscera are exposed, and the writing itself originates in the visceral realm of the gut. That's why a book this sad can also be this funny. There's a thin veneer between what's inside and outside--the book is full of puke, piss, and blood--and what's inside of a person is always trying to get out, to paraphrase Denis Johnson. It's hard to keep up a facade when you're being pierced by shards, blown into shards, or when you are a shard.

[Josiah Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid novel that gives good insight to a culture and history that is so near yet so far away. Good experimentation with narrative and a story with quite memorable scenes that require attention. There are definitely connections to be made that demand a re-read. I was not a big fan of the ending to the narrator but I was satisfied with the ending to the novel and it's form.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

So well written. The war in Bosnia, the suffering of civilians, bombs day and night, trying to live a "normal" life, PTSD, survivor guilt, the discomfort of an immigrant, the discomfort of being young and in love and different, the alter ego of the man you should have been vs. the Izzy who tries to live a life in California. So many layers. So well written. Not perfect, but almost.

[Thorn MotherIssues · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admittedly the topic hit close to home, but I don't remember another book that's given me goosebumps like this. A beautiful, painful look at living (?) through trauma.

[Alberto González Ortiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro que da gusto leer. Lástima que, con el paso de las páginas, lo veía todo tan lejano a mí, que su magia se me fue evaporando.

[Yasmin Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

El autor escribe bien, pero tuve que dejar el libro a la mitad para concluirlo en otro momento, porque se me hizo muy pesado de leer sobretodo por la dispersión de los acontecimientos que relata.

[Bucket · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He thinks he can recreate a shell by putting together all the shards. Insane!"

Shards is a fantastic novel. The structure is as it's called - it's shards. We move back and forth in time and perspective and form.

We see Ismet's life in California and his youth in Bosnia and trip to Scotland, sometimes through journal fragments, sometimes letters to his mom, sometimes straightforward narrative.

We see the experiences of Mustafa (who may or may not be Ismet) as a soldier and we see him appear and disappear in Ismet's life - through narrative that occasionally drifts into the second person, or repeats whole paragraphs, verbatim, that we've already read.

There's a sense that this is autobiographical, but also not. That this is Prcic as author wrestling with his demons by imaging an Ismet who is wrestling with the same demons:

"How is it that some shell that exploded long ago in Tuzla can reassemble itself, fly backward into the mouth of the mortar that shot it, get shot again, and reach me here [in California]? How is it that I can exist in both the past and the present simultaneously, be both body and soul simultaneously, live both reality and fantasy simultaneously?"

Prcic's prose is super readable and very visceral. He's not afraid of ugly images but doesn't overdramatize them. The prose and structure together make this move at a quick clip somehow, even though the story seems to be putting off getting to an ending that we already know from the start. Overall -- I recommend!

[Emmanuel Hofer · Rating 4 out of 5]

(7.75/10)

No suelo nunca colocar notas pero, creo, este libro marcó un antes y un después.
No es ninguna locura, pero es doloroso, extremadamente doloroso. Te hace empatizar con alguien que es un loquito, un tipo frío y hasta un boludo si se quiere.
Te encarna en una guerra, de verdad que lo hace, y su manera de estar escrito con una línea temporal difusa y hasta descontrolada es fantástica. El rejunte de cartas, sueños, historias de mentira, historias reales…
Realmente lo disfruté y lo padecí.

Junten los pedazos va a ser el libro con el que pasé un mes terrible, donde me asaltaron, donde lloré y me reconstruí.

[Amyg1024 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some really good aspects. I really liked the rendering of the dissonance of clashing one's native culture with American culture. On the down side, I found it really confusing. It probably did not help that I was reading another book interspersed in the same weeks as this one. But, the upshot is, I had a hard time keeping track of what was happening to whom and when in historical time.

[Patrick Al-de Lange · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully haunting story about the effects of war.

The novel follows the writer's life during the war in Bosnia, and his life in America where he tries to deal with the mental aftermath. It also follows the exploits of a man the writer glancingly met while have to sign up for the army, but from then on keeps propping up everywhere.

All these shards of stories create an imperfect raw and touching whole.

[Alyssa Bauer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book came into my hands at the wrong time unfortunately. The mental break that occurs in the author is almost a parallel to what someone I love is experiencing so I found it all very triggering. That being said, it is a very unique and interesting way to consider the effects of war and religious violence. It has inspired me to learn more about the war in Bosnia and what led to it. Overall not a bad book, just bad timing.

[Kat Walter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gut wrenching read. Searching for love and “normalcy “ in wartime Bosnia, escaping to freedom, and then suffering PTSD in California. With the surreal narration, the reader spirals into the madness of the main character/characters. Well done.