Tag: The Balkans

Olivia Manning: The Balkan Trilogy

“The story of a marriage and of a war,” reveals the NYRB description. Thus it was with a sense of irony that I picked this up after learning that Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh met on the set of the 1987 BBC adaptation, married two years later, and divorced when Branagh had an affair with Helena Bonham Carter.

I have to admit that the silly curiosity in whether Guy and Harriet Pringle would meet a similar fate was partly what spurred me to read on. Lest this begins to sound like a gossip column, let me continue by writing that there is a certain ease in reading Olivia Manning.

That can hardly be said of other wartime books that have close to a thousand pages, and yet, here is The Balkan Trilogy; alive with the imperfections of being, the tragicomedy of the human condition, the uncertainties of love and life, and keen observations on history that kept me engaged up to the very end.

Manning is also an ideal literary guide for a place one rarely reads about. The last volume is set in Greece and the first two in Rumania. Despite my daring adventures in world literature, Rumania remains unfamiliar territory, but with her geospatial adeptness and descriptive prowess sustained by first-hand experiences, I was wholly transported to Bucharest’s golden domes, outdoor cafes, and societal hodgepodge, and baptized into the political currents of WWII through the stunning perspective of the Balkans.

My initiation to Manning’s work was School for Love. As if reading my thoughts, Rachel Cusk’s introduction addresses my reflection on why I was met with yet another orphan as a main protagonist: “A central metaphor for war, displacement, cataclysm, and the death of the old world in 1940s Europe.”

And yet, despite the solemn themes and the fight for a marriage in the face of disenchantment and war, the aforementioned ease stems from a writer who stops to smell the roses; someone who implies that doing so does not distract us from the more important things in life but nourishes us instead and gives our lives more meaning.

Sometimes we need a massive trilogy to be reminded that the only real fortune in this cruel world is to live and love.

Miljenko Jergovic: Sarajevo Marlboro & Ivo Andric: Omer Pasha Latas

She knew there would be pain in these books. But don’t people in the warmest climes imbibe hot drinks to temper the body’s response to heat? By that logic, here she is; steeped in the rich wordscape and sorrowful history of the Balkans.

The first days of November find this reader still silenced by life. A point in which literature remains among the few things left that can coax words out of her.

Sarajevo Marlboro and Omer Pasha Latas fell into her possession around the same time. That both books come from two of her favorite publishers, that the earth tones of their elegant covers match her autumnal soul, that both authors are exemplary, that their stories juxtapose on the same geographical region, were reasons enough to read them together.

Jergović’s extraordinary vignettes is a dip into a sea of humanity and tragedy in the midst of the Yugoslav wars. Andrić, born a century before these wars, whose words seem to flow as naturally as a limpid stream in the Bosnian countryside, write of a different time under the Ottoman rule, but of eerily similar sufferings.

Sarajevo Marlboro, traces of life retrieved from the rubble, fragments that suggest that the real casualties of war are the living; Omer Pasha Latas, unfinished at the time of Andrić’s death. But none of these books leave this reader dissatisfied. It is strangely easy to be drawn into the hypnotic quality of the details.

Both books intimate our need for context and our need for stories if only to make sense of life and divine its purpose; they whisper about the lies of those in power and of fabricated histories; but both beautifully manifest the ephemerality of life.

Andrić’s last word: “Music”. Jergović’s last paragraph: “You can never list or recall the private libraries that have burned down in Sarajevo… But the fate of the Sarajevo University Library, its famous city hall, whose books took a whole night and day to go up in flames, will be remembered as the fire to end all fires, a last mythical celebration of ash and dust. It happened, after a whistle and an explosion… Gently stroke your books, dear stranger, and remember they are dust.”

Dust: Like everything else we deem precious in this world. So while she can, this reader will stroke her books. They don’t always hold the answers, but they hold her, and hold the dusty, broken pieces of herself together.