Rating: 
Summary: A reality worth staring down
Review: Slavenka Drakulic' is Croatian, thus neither Serbian nor Bosnian as are those of whom she writes here; she is apparently sufficiently detached yet culturally close enough to make likely her understanding of her subjects. She is a journalist who has supplied important articles to international newspapers as well as an author. Drakulic' interviewed numerous rape victims of the Balkan wars and read hundreds of similar testimonies gathered by others. This "novel", or psychological reportage, is synthesized from her research.
'S.' could have been me. A young teacher from an educated background, she happened to be in a rural village, substitute-teaching for an acquaintance who was on maternity leave when Serbian soldiers invaded. Nothing - not her status, the fact that her mother is Serbian, the unfortunate timing of her good deed - saves her from her fate as a cruelly beaten rape object at the hands of Serbian soldiers whose behavior is nothing more than that of the most vicious animal known: the hateful, spiteful, mean HUMAN, the so-called "homo sapiens".
War is hell. The atrocities that happen here are not confined to the Balkan war of the early 1990s. While it was happening, I was sitting in my warm kitchen in a New England town, bemoaning far lesser indignities perpetrated on me by similarly vicious humans, but which could not touch the magnitude of degradation imposed on the women of Drakulic's reportage. To me, there is great value in understanding the relativity of horrors in one's life. Why am I feeling sorry for myself? There is great value in realizing what is happening elsewhere; that once again one group of humans is doing its best to exterminate another. I have never forgotten my shock when, as a small-town high school sophomore in 1955, I read a school library book on Hitler and Nazi Germany and suddenly realized the magnitude of those atrocities which had just happened - within my short lifetime! In Bosnia it has cropped up again: an evil amoebic pseudopod that can't be fatally squashed. Carrying it forward, "9-11" is more of the same evil. What about today's vicious Arab thugs (Janjaweed) in Darfur, the Sudan? And the gender-and-racially-biased police in the town where I live? Worst of all, there is no completely satisfactory way to deal with it. But do read this book; there is terrible importance in its message, the human issues presented and in the realization, the debate. We can choose to live smugly in our provincial complacency or we can stand up and be counted, at least as being among those who are aware of the goings-on in the rest of the world, if not among those acting to remedy the evils.
On that last thought, I read with interest of the continuing efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. In spite of my culture's bias to the contrary, a part of me feels that a certain amputation would be appropriate punishment for those found guilty of rape....an idea that will make any male quiver. Yes, the whole apparatus. Read the book and see what you think.
I'm going to seek other books by this author, realizing the value of her thought-provoking works which propel the reader out of ignorance and fatuous complacency.
Rating:
Summary: A horrifying, necesssary read.
Review: The book S: A NOVEL ABOUT THE BALKANS takes place in Bosnia in 1992 and 1993 during the war in which Serbian paramilitary instigators caused chaos in the nation, killing 250,000 Bosnian people and displacing around 2 million more. This novel focuses on the use of rape as a military tool to ethnically cleanse regions and to torture and dominate women in war.
S is a substitute teacher in a small Bosnian village, who is originally from Sarajevo, and is more urbane and educated than her colleagues in the town. Her father is Muslim, her mother is Serbian. (I am sorry to use these titles, as "Muslim" is used often instead of "Bosnian" based on Serb propaganda that there were no Bosnians, only Serbs and people of the Islamic faith, remnants of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans). One morning, before work, buses roll into the town, all the women are told to pack a few things and get on them with their small children, the men are rounded up, taken out of sight and shot. S.'s family in Sarajevo has already disappeared; she does not know where they are. She takes with her some jewelry, a nice dress and fancy Italian shoes and a family photo album.
The women get on the buses and are taken to a prison camp. While staying in the camp, some of the women are selected for occupation in the "Women's Room." These are quarters to which the Serbian soldiers go to get women to rape as they please. S. is chosen to live there, and must endure the pain, humiliation and dehumanization of that existence, until the camp commander chooses her as a weekend "companion" for himself. Because she is the captain's special choice, the other soliders leave her alone.
After some time, the camp occupants are told they will be exchanged, and they travel by bus to the Croatian border. Within Croatia, which has already successfully separated from Yugoslavia, the refugees live in another camp. S. has a cousin in Zagreb, but she does not accept her offer to live with her, seeing that she has not much to give, either. She chooses instead to emigrate to Sweden (it is the most different place she can think of to go from where she has been), and there she gives birth to her child, whom she conceived in the Women's Room at the camp.
Drakulic, a Croatian journalist (sorry, I cannot make the diacritical mark above the c that Serbo-Croatian uses; I believe it is pronounced, "DRAH-koo-leech"), began this project by speaking to women who had suffered in the war, had been routinely raped by soldiers, some of whom had born children as a result of those attacks. The Penguin version that I read contains a readers' guide in the back in which a conversation with Drakulic is included, along with discussion questions and a short introduction.
She spoke with women who were very willing to tell her the details of what happened to them, but not their emotional responses, as that was too horrifying for them to recount, so she turned the project into fiction, so that she could write the response of the victims to this dehumanizing torture tactic. All of the characters are known by their initials only, in an effort to universalize their existences, to disallow the reader to feel that this could not happen to them, that it happened far, far away. As a woman with a name that starts with S. I was distinctly drawn in to her identity. S's story focuses on how the war alienates the victims from the rest of socieyt, but rape distinctly isolates the women victims from anyone's understanding.
S. focuses a lot on the mental state that allows people to be immediately subjugated by another's will. She cannot accept how all of them, herself included (who offered coffee to the soldier that came into her apartment and told her to pack), immediately obeyed the invaders, left their entire lives and identities behind and followed without fighting. She is struck by how quickly they willingly lie down on the floor of the former machine shed at the camp and defecate in a field in full view of the captors.
The book is violent at times, but the horror of it is somewhat removed, very realistically told by someone who cannot quite bear it and who would never sensationalize the obviously vile by over elaborating on it. There are particularly egregious acts retold through the prisoners' eyes (the burning of male prisoners' corpses, a particularly vicious rape in the Women's Room of a girl by a boy she grew up with), but overall the book focuses on the pyschological state of a victim of the war's cruel machinery.
Though it is fiction, I think in some ways, it is more powerful than a factual article would be. We know these things, abstractly; we understand that they happened. To read a novelization, an amalgam of the sufferings of thousands of women, who become personal to one, makes the truth burst inside the reader's psyche with the force that a thousand newspaper articles cannot convey. A descriptor on the back lists the book as "grim and horrific" and says the book "puts a human face on harrowing headlines." Indeed it does.
I recommend this book to anyone. It's well written, and fulfills a role well that fiction is meant to play, illuminating another's reality so that it becomes one's own.
Rating:
Summary: The Horrors of War
Review: The sparse title of this book reflects the contents within. Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian journalist turned writer, has given the world one of the sparsest, depressing novels of all time. It is a pity she's not better known because she is an excellent author. This book is one of several that she has written, and I suspect it might be her best one. I only came across this book because I noticed it was a book about the Balkans, an area in which I have an avid interest.The whole book is essentially the inner thoughts of S., a half Serb/half Muslim schoolteacher who finds herself caught up in the Bosnian war in the early 1990's. S. is abducted at gunpoint and sent to a camp where she quickly finds herself in the throes of dehumanization. S. and groups of other women are tormented by guards, denied adequate housing and food, and denied proper medical care. The book nosedives into insanity when S. is chosen to become an inmate of the "women's camp," a special brothel set up to service the soldiers of the camp. S. and others are routinely raped and tortured. Drakulic tells us the details, which I will not reproduce here for reasons of decency. S. survives the camp by becoming the girlfriend of the camp commander. Eventually, S. is freed through a prisoner exchange and ends up in Zagreb with a cousin and her family. S. doesn't want to stay and ends up hitting the refugee lottery by getting a visa to Sweden. Unfortunately for S., she discovers she is pregnant by one of the soldiers involved in the rapes. S. agonizes over her condition and decides to put the baby up for adoption. The end of the book can be seen as either happy or depressing, although I tend to see it as the former, a triumph over the inhumanity of war. Drakulic pulls no punches with this tale. The rapes are depicted in nauseating detail, as is the process of dehumanization practiced on all of the prisoners. Most jarring is the occasional mention of dates (can this really be happening in 1992? In Europe?). What Drakulic has essentially accomplished is shrinking down the process of war to the level of the individual. S. is one individual, and it staggers the mind to think there were thousands, or even millions, of stories analogous to hers. Certainly, referring to this character as "S." is a way of trying to illustrate this point. A name does not matter because so many are going through this trauma. The guards of the camp certainly don't care what her name is, nor do the people in charge of this war. This is a sick book full of depressing and grim stories. I'm still glad I read it, though. It is good to be reminded of war and its horrors. War is not parades and glory. War is the systematic dehumanization of one group of people by another (although both sides are often dehumanized in the process). Those of us who may live out our lives in peace because we live in the West should consider ourselves very lucky. To not have to go through the things described in this book is like winning a global lottery. S. is highly recommended by this reader.
Rating:
Summary: The Novel of the Balkan War
Review: This book stands with the novel "The Painted Bird" and the film "Come and See" as an essential work of art contfronting the horrors of 20th- Century warfare for the innocent. I am travelling to Croatia and have been boning up on the region's history and literature (Ivo Andric), and became familiar with Drakulic through her essays on post-communist Yugoslavia, "Cafe Europa". The slim novel "S." was certainly more than I could hope for as a window to the atrocities we only think we were aware of in 1992. To burrow into the psyche of a normal woman, whom we would all recognize in our own towns, dehumanized by the atrocities visited on interred muslim Croats and Bosnians, Drakulic forgoes the usual-- metaphor and poetic illustration. Instead, she uses the construction of the story to great advantage; introducing us to her heroine in a first chapter of crushingly bleak circumstances, at the end of her journey -- the birth of her unwanted child of rape in a Swedish refugee camp -- with an uncompromising presentation of the devastating effects her experiences have had on her sense of her own humanity, only to move to the beginning of the story and show us how mundane and recognizable her life was on the very morning that the soldiers entered her village. The contrast between this ordinary life and the gruesome memories she has already begun to share as she sees her hated newborn in the first chapter establish a strong connection between her and the reader, and now Drakulic can begin the Holocaust-like journey of S. The methodical dehumanization and torure of the women in the interrment camp is shown in shocking frankness and it is very difficult to take, realizing this was the reality of what the Hague Trials are now confronting. But at the end of the book, as S. is again left with her newborn, Drakulic brings humanity back to the world in a fully expected but beautifully rendered conclusion. I don't imagine that we're likely to see another novel of the Balkan War prisoner/refugee, so we could all stand to learn from this invaluable account, from such a clear-eyed author, about a war that moved us all, and the effects of all war on all non-combantants who survive it.
Rating:
Summary: War? What War?
Review: When I saw this book, I bought it immediately, because I had read "How we survived Communism and Even Laughed" and enjoyed it. It does not seem correct however, to say that I enjoyed this book. Slavenka Drakulic has stated that she wanted to add the feelings and emotions to the facts of the mass rapes and experiences in the camps that occurred during the Bosnian war. I believe that she has done a marvelous job. It is a courageous and very honest book in that it tells us what we humans can be like, not just what we would like to think we are like. Drakulic does not demonize or idealize anyone, neither the soldiers or the women. After leaving the camps, and on her way to Stockholm as a refugee, S. "is still troubled by the thought that all the while the 'women's room' existed, so did this world, with its regularly flying planes and smiling flight attendants." For the other passengers war is not real. When I was a young, I remember reading about some horror happening to children in World War II and I thought, that can not happen to me, my parents will protect me and if they can't, the police would not allow it to happen and certainly the government of the United States would not allow it. Yet we all knew about Bosnia and the destruction of Sarajevo, we watched it on TV, just as we had watched the olympics there a few short years earlier. As I read this book, I wondered how the World could have allowed these things to happen. This is not an optimistic book.
Rating:
Summary: War? What War?
Review: When I saw this book, I bought it immediately, because I had read "How we survived Communism and Even Laughed" and enjoyed it. It does not seem correct however, to say that I enjoyed this book. Slavenka Drakulic has stated that she wanted to add the feelings and emotions to the facts of the mass rapes and experiences in the camps that occurred during the Bosnian war. I believe that she has done a marvelous job. It is a courageous and very honest book in that it tells us what we humans can be like, not just what we would like to think we are like. Drakulic does not demonize or idealize anyone, neither the soldiers or the women. After leaving the camps, and on her way to Stockholm as a refugee, S. "is still troubled by the thought that all the while the 'women's room' existed, so did this world, with its regularly flying planes and smiling flight attendants." For the other passengers war is not real. When I was a young, I remember reading about some horror happening to children in World War II and I thought, that can not happen to me, my parents will protect me and if they can't, the police would not allow it to happen and certainly the government of the United States would not allow it. Yet we all knew about Bosnia and the destruction of Sarajevo, we watched it on TV, just as we had watched the olympics there a few short years earlier. As I read this book, I wondered how the World could have allowed these things to happen. This is not an optimistic book.
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