Bosnia and Herzegovina: Before the Feast, by Saša Stanišić

When Ann Morgan read a book from every country in the world in 2012, her choice for Bosnia and Herzegovina was Saša Stanišić's "How the Solider Repairs the Gramophone". So when I saw his second novel, "Before the Feast" on the shelf at the library, it seemed like a good choice, especially as the blurb on the back was quite appealing.

I quickly realised though, that the book is not set in Bosnia, and does not include Bosnian characters, apart from one short passage:
Golow had a Bosnian and a Serb working for him, and he had no idea exactly what the difference was. then he found out that they didn't really know either. They both hated the war. They argued only once about the question of guilt, because there's always a one-off argument about questions of guilt, but they settled the question peacefully and then decided to watch only the German news from then on,because on that channel everyone was to blame except the Germans - they coudn;t afford to be guilty of anything for the next thousand years, and the two Yugos could both live with that.

The author was born in Bosnia in 1978 but left during the war, at the age of 14, and currently lives in Germany.

The novel takes place in the East German village of Fürstenfelde. The author thanks the villagers of Fürstenberg, Fürstenfelde, Fürstenwalde, Fürstenwerder and Prenzlau for their information and hospitality, but the only one of these I could locate on a map was Prenzlau - nevertheless it does appear as if these may be real geographical locations. The inhabitants, however, are surely fictional. The action takes place on one night, on the day before the Anna feast. Though to say it takes place on that night is a simplification, given the wide ranging digressions which cover much of the history of the village. The characters are wonderfully idiosyncratic and include the local bell-ringer and his apprentice, two thieves, a dead ferryman, a retired lieutenant-colonel, the local artist, and a young girl called Anna, namesake of the Anna for whom the feast is named.

Then there are various animal characters - mice, chickens, and a vixen roaming the woods in the night.

The style is distinctive, or perhaps I should say "styles" as it changes from section to section. Parts are narrated by an unknown villager who uses the pronoun "we". Other passages sound as if they are quoted from historical documents, some parts use a straight forward third person narrative, in the present tense, other parts sound almost poetic, and there is even a passage of hand written script with numerous erasures and corrections.

I found it a highly entertaining book, from a promising young writer. Just not very Bosnian. (Although somehow, in style and outlook, it did not seem very German either).