The Naïve Fiction of Saša Stanišić

Are American writers of fiction capable of no stronger response to catastrophe than whimsy? It is difficult, surveying recent and remarked-on novels, to answer no. Works as varied as Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and Stephen Merrill Block’s “The Story of Forgetting” all greet disasters (ranging from 9/11 to the ravages of Alzheimer’s) with well-bred, careful flights of fancy, self-consciously zany plot elements, and winsome prose. “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone” (Grove, 269 pages, $24.00), the debut novel by the young Bosnian writer Saša Stanišić, suggests that this strange literary phenomenon, endemic to America, has already begun stalking Europe.Translated from German — by no less a figure than Anthea Bell, translator of W.G. Sebald and “Asterix the Gaul” — “Gramophone” tells the story of a young Bosnian, and of the sufferings of him and his family during the Bosnian War and their flight into Germany. In the course of the novel, the family undergoes the death of a grandfather, a humorous pregnancy, a party to inaugurate the installation of a new toilet, comical incidents with symbolic catfish, the discovery, loss, and eventual recovery of first love, the barrages of war, and a full complement of racketing plot elements reminiscent — even derivative — of the works of absurdists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Jaroslav Hasek, and Günter Grass.Each tragedy — and there are many more, major and minor — is made weightless and insubstantial by whimsy, which Mr. Stanišić has poured into a convenient vessel: Aleksandar, the baby of the Krsmanovic family. Unctuously clever, stridently cute, Aleksandar’s inner monologue serves as the novel’s central narrative underpinning, as he moves from a remembered boyhood to a remembered adolescence. There is an argument to be made for Mr. Stanišić ‘s vision: The plastic, spotlit mind of a child, fragmented, innocent, and exploratory, can be an ideal mode in which to convey disaster and decay side by side with signs of the resilience and vivid light of life. (Mr. Grass, for one, has made profitable use of the narrative conceit.) And Aleksandar’s gradual transition into greater historical awareness might, in more capable hands, reflect the tempering of that innocence by catastrophe.While the art of catastrophe will tolerate whole constellations of novelistic approaches, it cannot tolerate authorial disingenuousness, which pickles such efforts, turning insights sour, paltry, and false. And this, unfortunately, Mr. Stanišić has in spades. The book begins with an evocation of the strength of a child’s faith and imaginative power:Grandpa Slavko measured my head with Granny’s washing line, I got a magic hat made of cardboard, and Grandpa Slavko said: I’m really too young for this sort of thing and you’re already too old.So I got a magic hat with yellow and blue shooting stars on it, trailing yellow and blue tails, and I cut out a little crescent moon to go with them and two triangular rockets.Gagarin was flying one, Grandpa Slavko was flying the other.Grandpa, I can’t go out in this hat!I should just hope not!Although this is highly saccharine, it at least coheres: We know what Mr. Stanišić is trying to effect, whether or not we admire it. But within a few narrative beats, he is already letting himself slip and reverting to passages like this:As if to express his opinion of plums in general he polished an apple on his sleeve and bit into it so hard that the apple broke right apart, and juice ran down both his double chins. Undeterred, the big man made a face and closed his eyes with relish.This, by contrast, represents a complete violation of the promise implicitly made in the book’s opening moments. Speaking through a growing, maturing child is a risk-ridden pursuit: It requires complete immersion, or at least the wholly maintained appearance of complete immersion. Such a voice gives an author considerable latitude, yes, but it also demands great vigilance against the kind of authorial laziness Mr. Stanišić shows in the passage above, in which he sounds much more like a well-read if unremarkable adult writer of prose.Mr. Stanišić is trying to speak in a voice at once innocent enough to suspend our disbelief and experienced enough to permit workmanlike prose. Throughout “Gramophone,” Stanišić injects phrases — such as “the true meaning of a broken heart” or “a thousand questions” — meant to evoke a wide-eyed incapacity for metaphor, but which are no more illuminating than cheap — and worse, fully adult — dodges, shoddy filler phrases to stop the book’s imaginative gaps.An entire section near the book’s end purports to be a novel in miniature, written by Aleksandar about his most important memories. (Mr. Stanišić fails to make clear when Aleksandar had the time to produce this book.) But even there, in what should be the most effectless and artless part of the novel, Mr. Stanišić can’t maintain the illusion:I’d wish for everything to be all right forever, I say.What do you call all right, asked Mother, sitting down on the edge of the bed.It’s all right when you make me sandwiches for this evening tomorrow, and I can go fishing tomorrow and you don’t worry about where I am, and Grandpa lives forever, and you all live forever . . . and the houses play music, and no-one has to bother about Croatia anymore, and there are little boxes containing tastes so that we can swap them with each other, and we don’t forget to hug, and . . .My mother’s lips are trembling. That’s fine, she says, and for the first time since there have been any first times concerned she doesn’t say: but don’t go too far out.And therein we can see precisely why Mr. Stanišić fails: An artist can only take up a child’s innocence, and counterpoise it against disaster, if his understanding of innocence extends beyond the merely sentimental. If an admonition about hugging is your most perfect distillation of the lessons of a childhood Eden, the loss of that Eden cannot offer much meaning.Calamity, of course, invites diverse expression: Recent historical crises have inspired wild and variegated efforts in literature, from the Dostoevskian excess and corrosive sarcasm of “The Gulag Archipelago” to the hideous photo-realism of Tadeusz Borowski to the pseudo-documentarianism of Roberto Bolaño.It’s saddening that, with “Gramophone,” yet another sweet-natured, empty novel has interposed itself between our understanding and the political horrors of our time.Mr. Munson is the online editor of Commentary.

The Naïve Fiction of Saša Stanišić

The Naïve Fiction of Saša Stanišić

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