Painting reality means surrendering to it

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a beautiful chaos of characters, stories, lists, jokes, songs, and poems. The novel follows Aleksandar from a charming childhood in Bosnian town of Višegrad, through and away from the war, to Belgrade, then to Germany, and back to Bosnia again. This book will make you laugh and cry, and sometimes at the same time too. The chapters follow the stream-of-consciousness style of the novel, with long lists of headings such as “When flowers are just flowers, how Mr. Hemingway and Comrade Marx feel about each other, who’s the real Tetris champion, and the indignity suffered by Bogoljub Balvan’s scarf.”

Aleksandar is a product of a "mixed marriage" and he understands that "some people have wrong names." He has a special relationship with his grandfather who dies suddenly of a heart attack, but who teaches him all that he knows about writing stories, which he continues to do in his honor. Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. His town of Višegrad is small enough for everyone's business to get around, and Aleksandar introduces us to all his neighbors and their quirks. The book avoids sentimentality, threading reminders of senseless violence throughout. But it is also much more than a story about the war, it is a powerful meditation on the the present, the past, and a story about reconciliation with reality. This story is built from moments of acceptance of pain, tragedy, loss, endings, and beginnings. It is a meditation on the present and the past, on good and bad, and on what and how we decide to carry on with us.

And the present is the road that leads away from the summerhouse, swarming with tank tracks, smelling of heavy smoke, killing horses, dogs, houses, people. You have to remember them both, Granny whispers from the backseat, the time when everything was alright and the time when nothing was alright.

Aleksandar witnesses things that no child should witness, and in the midst of brutal violence and tragedy, he befriends a refugee girl Asja who arrives to his town, and hides in the same shelter with his family. Soon after her arrival, Aleksandar and his family flee the country, but the memory of Asja becomes ever stronger in his mind once he reaches Germany. For ten years, he writes letters to her (but they most likely never reach her, except once), informing her about their life in Germany, his father's work on the black market ("...work that breaks your back and at the same time it makes you criminal, even though you're not really stealing anything"), his mother's wracked hands from working at the laundromat, his first days in German school, his grandmother's silence, her attempt to garden in front of their building and the visit from the authorities.

If I'm asked where I come from, I say that's a difficult question, because I come from a country that doesn't exist anymore, not where I used to live. Here, they call us Yugos, they call Albanians and Bulgarians Yugos too, it's simpler for everyone.

Over ten years, his memories take form and solidify, preparing him for a return to his hometown. Aleksandar makes a list of the people and stories he remembers, and decides to revisit them all. Revisiting Bosnia turns out to be another reconciliation for Aleksandar - he makes peace with the fact that the war has left scars everywhere, and that people and cities are forever changed. Everything is the same and everything has changed beyond recognition. As one of his old friends says: "Aleks! Just look around you! Do you know anyone here? You don't even know me!"

Aleksandar never gives up on looking for Asja, and at the very end of the book, it seems like she responds and calls him back, but we never get to hear their conversation. The story ends when he picks up the phone.

A good story, you'd have said, is like our river Drina: never calm, it doesn't trickle along, it is rough and broad, tributaries flow in to enrich it, it rises above its banks, it bubbles and roars, here and there it flows into shallows but then it comes to rapids again, preludes to the depths where there's no splashing. But one thing neither the Drina nor the stories can do: there's no going back for any of them.