THE BALKAN REGION IS SUBJECT TO its own kind of Orientalism in the Western imagination. The birthplace of European civilization, it has nevertheless frequently been mythologized as Europe’s less civilized other. The eruption of violence in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s did nothing to dispel this trend. Indeed, it has been argued that even such engaged recent commentators as Peter Handke, W. G. Sebald, Norbert Gstrein, and Juli Zeh struggle to move beyond the stereotypes of exotic yet tragic Balkan otherness. In Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006; How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 2008), however, the other writes back, representing, in the author’s own words, “sad things, positively.” This novel, loosely based on the author’s own experience, concerns the Bosnian conflict of 1992 and its aftermath. Despite evoking a tragic set of events, it is hugely energetic, often humorous, and ultimately life-affirming. It does not shirk the horror of the war, even though it does not represent it directly. Rather, it approaches it obliquely in a number of ways, building into its aesthetic the knowledge that time, like life, moves on. That Stanišić’s “sad things, positively” self-description appeared on Twitter, the microblogging social networking site, and in English, are symptomatic of the positive outcome of his own personal story as well; namely, his transformation from child refugee into global bestselling author and multilingual citizen of the world.

Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert met with rave reviews both at home in Germany and abroad, particularly in the English-speaking world when Anthea Bell’s translation appeared in 2008; it has been translated into some twenty-eight languages. Critics found it an exhilarating read, fast-paced and vivid. Its labyrinthine, patchwork, or symphonic structure, its mixing of genres — part family novel, part migration story, part war memoir, with shades of magic realism — and its bold incorporation of elements of the tragic, the picaresque, the absurd, the surreal, the comic, the melancholic, the lyrical, and the naive drew widespread praise. Stanišić was hailed as a major new voice, “an exceptionally talented, impish and caring writer who has walked to the edge of the abyss,” his “crazy-quilt novel” celebrated as “a bold, questing work of art deeply rooted in the complex history of a blood-soaked, bone-planted land.