Archive
Reviews
Readings of books from the region and beyond.
Try a theme — e.g. memory, exile, language. Search by idea, not just by title.
Chinook: Both Document and Elegy
"Chinook" is Bekim Sejranović's posthumously published, unfinished novel, a meditation on fractured and unstable identity carried by a narrator and his alter ego "Žutokosi." The review reads its incompleteness as a strength that lends the book a certain poetry, and admires its restless engagement with language, etymology, and translation. It regards the work as both document and elegy, a fitting final statement shaped by exile and displacement.
- Identity & belonging
- Contemporary fiction
Bejturan i ruža: The Boundaries of Love, Loss, and Identity
"Bejturan i ruža" is Aleksandar Hemon's novel that centers the love between Pinto and Osman rather than exile itself, refusing to become another nostalgic migration story. The review counts it among Hemon's finest, praising a multilingual texture that leaves eight languages untranslated to reflect Pinto's Sephardic Jewish identity and dismantle the illusion of a single tongue. It admires how the book places small, marginal figures fully inside the grip of grand history, with only the epilogue judged superfluous.
- Identity & belonging
- Memory & history
- Post-Yugoslav literature