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.

At the beginning of 2008, I set myself the goal to read at least one book a week. When the year ended, I was reading three books that would have counted as my 40th book. Not too bad a score, if only because the number of 52 books was as arbitrary as it was ridiculous. The resolution wasn’t even made because of a love for prose; merely, it stemmed from a strong feeling of having to make up. Make up for all those years I spent getting older without growing up, walking fast without getting further and experiencing without becoming more experienced; reading novels, which I never did enough, had become something of a metaphor for those lost years.

My goals for 2009 include to read as many good books as possible, without the number becoming a goal in itself. Other, and slightly more important, goals include growing up, getting further and becoming more experienced. In just about any aspect of life. If continuing to read books will help with that in any kind of way, then that’s only a good thing.

But I do love prose in itself and I might have loved it —and poetry, too— in 2008 more than ever. I was attempting to compile a top 10 of the books I read, but gave up after 15 titles that absolutely had to be included, which shows how many good books I read. Here, however, is an incomplete overview of some books that really mattered.

Every time I finish a book by Coetzee, I think it will take a while before I pick up the next one. But I keep being drawn to his stories and his prose and The Master of Petersburg, which I just finished, is his fifth book I have read this year. I actually had been meaning to read this one for a longer time, ever since my grandmother (who will turn 85 next weekend) had told me she had read it; I regret that I had not realised earlier that her interest in literature goes much deeper than reading popular Dutch authors.

The Master of Petersburg is not a happy book; none of Coetzee’s novels are. Depressive might even be accurate, but they are never depressing. Human failure, in particular when dealing with other humans, is described to the tiniest details, but failure does not extend beyond that: the world never fails, is not a failure, and certainly not a bad place per se. Although, I think that to a certain extent, one should be willing (and perhaps even wishing) to see that.

This book once again shows Coetzee’s almost unique talent as an author. The failure is that of a father who has lost his (step)son in a mysterious accident; he then tries to understand what happened, how and why the son died, but also, more importantly, the relationship between the father and the son. The father, it should be noted, is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian author: the book is set in 1860s Saint Petersburg and several events actually took place during Dostoevsky’s life. But the father is as much Coetzee himself, who has lost a son (Dostoevsky’s had a stepson but was outlived by him) and wrote about the experience in this book.

The other day, I had a somewhat unexpected discussion on contemporary literature with a mathematics professor. I told him to read Coetzee’s Disgrace, for I still think that is his best piece of art (although it took me some time to appreciate that). And the autobiographical Boyhood is probably his most accessible work. But this one comes close to both really.