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Loading... S.: A Novel about the Balkansby Slavenka Drakulic
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  deebee1 | Oct 30, 2009 |  This novel takes a harsh look at the realities of war for those left living in a battleground and eventually collected, used, abused, and displaced. The loss of a home, the horrors of a camp, the disturbing weilding of unchecked power, and the strength it takes to push through day by day are front and center in this book. Although serious and not appropriate for younger readers due to the physical and sexual violence - it is an amazing read, which will open your eyes to the horrors of a war often overlooked and the necessity to never let it happen again. (  ) Monkeypats | Aug 12, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0140298444, Paperback)"While she was in the warehouse S. feared uncertainty. Any kind of certainty seemed preferable to her. Now she was at least rid of that fear. There was no more uncertainty. She was in a storehouse of women, in a room where female bodies were stored for the use of men."The use of rape as a mode of warfare was one of the atrocities that made "ethnic cleansing" such a horrifying euphemism in the '90s. The number of Muslim rape victims has been hard to establish (estimates are as high as 60,000), and the depths of the damage even more difficult to comprehend. Hidden behind the newspaper accounts--the mind-numbing policy changes, drawn and redrawn borders, and fluctuating statistics--are the stories of what happened to thousands of Muslim women and how they have since dealt with their experience. In S: A Novel About the Balkans, the journalist Slavenka Drakulic uses a fictional everywoman, S., to convey the complex psychological torture of the victims of large-scale, systematic rape during the Bosnian War. Drakulic's plain, graphic prose is starkly effective; not surprisingly, her book is most powerful in the passages detailing the women's treatment by the cadres of Serbian soldiers. But S. is not just a passive victim: even in such conditions, there are moral choices that must be made and consequences to one's actions. S. discovers this through her "arrangement" with the camp commander, who chooses her for a more elaborate form of rape that involves candlelight dinners and her playing the role of a seductress. Submitting to the fantasy in order to remove herself from the gang rapes of the "women's room," S. refrains from using her new status to improve the lot of the other prisoners. The tradeoff risks the respect of her fellow victims ("You've sold yourself cheap," one of them says to her), and the future psychological cost isn't clear. When she discovers she is pregnant--the father could be any one of a hundred soldiers--she faces another set of difficult decisions. Should she bring a child born of such hate into the world? And should she tell the child about its origins? Or is she instead obliged to tell the truth about the war? "Which is the greater," she wonders, "the right to a father or the right to the truth." Though not overtly political, S. forces us to consider the long-term tragedy of the female victims of the Bosnian War, and is all the more valuable for its inclusion of these gray-area compromises and their painful aftereffects. --John Ponyicsanyi (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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A well-acclaimed book, it is a work of fiction, but based on real stories of countless women that the author had met and talked to. Indeed, we in the outside world, know very little about these, as very little documentation exists -- no one is willing to talk, the women bear their scars and wounds silently and more so since these things are taboo in their Muslim culture (CNN's Untold Stories, though, featured this issue some time ago). War is cruel and brings out the worst in man, but depending on how one looks at it, the story at the end, offers some hope of redemption.
Not an easy read at all, but highly recommended. The book is slim (about 200 pages), the chapters short but it took me 4 days to finish it. I found it impossible to read straight through -- it gets too heavy going sometimes, that i have had to stop after a few pages, and come back only much much later when i felt i had enough "strength" again to get ahead. (