If one could write a story about a war in a clear, straightforward way, then that war would not have been there in the first place.

More than any war, ever, the one in former Yugoslavia felt close to me. Because it happened when I was just old enough to understand what the war was about; or perhaps old enough to understand that some things about it weren’t to be understood. Because it happened closer to me than any war that took place during my life. Because I have met Dutch soldiers who had served there as UN peace keepers; or peace-could-not-keepers, rather. Because in secondary school I had befriended two girls from Bosnia, who had fled their country during the war. Yet, when reading SaÅ¡a StaniÅ¡ić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, I realise how it seems to have taken place in a universe parallel to the safe and friendly one in which I grew up.

I was a bit hesitant about starting this book, worried that it would paint a grim and dark picture. Indeed, many parts of the book are grim and dark, yet that is not the point the book is making. This is a book about telling stories: stories about happy and sad things; stories about small details; stories to remember; stories to survive. It took me well over a hundred pages to get into the book —which isn’t entirely chronologically, while some bits, even in the context of the book, are fictional— but then I could hardly put it down. I wanted to help Alexander, the book’s main character and presumably StaniÅ¡ić’s alter ego, make sense of past and present, understand what had happened during that night in 1992 and tell stories like his late granddad had told him to do.

Stanišić, who like Alexander fled to Germany in 1992 and writes in the language of his adopted country, is here to tell us many more stories.