I am so confused about where this book falls on the spectrum of novel--memoir. It reads like a memoir that is based solely on childhood memory, impressions, and stories remembered and less on research (with family, with newspapers, etc) to find "the truth". Because, obviously, every person experiences their own truth--and childhood and long-ago truth can easily be distorted.

Stanisic was born in Yugoslavia (now Bosnia) and his family moved to Germany as refugees during the war in Yugoslavia. He is the narrator/main character of the book. In chapters of varying length he considers his childhood, what leaving did for and to his parents and grandparents. How they adjusted to Germany and how he did--they lost their careers and struggled with language, and he writes in German. Then his parents' being deported, his grandmother returning to Bosnia when she was deported (post-war). His fighting to get the paperwork to allow himself to stay in Germany--never considering, at the time, what his parents thought as they left for Florida. Much of the last half of the book his his grandmother's descent into dementia.

The overall tone of this book is wistfulness. Wondering who he and his parents might have been if there was no war, missing the camaraderie of his high school friends in Germany (from Yugo, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Germany). Missing his grandparents and the Bosnian traditions he never really learned; watching his grandmother deteriorate from afar. Interestingly, this book does not feel angry--this is not a book angry at the different factions in the former Yugoslavia or anger at people in Germany who mocked his name or accent (as so many North American immigration stories are). Rather it's an exploration of how it was and a recognition of his family's luck (his mother was warned by an acquaintance) and perhaps a touch of survivor's guilt. The little obvious anger in this book is focused on his grandmother's dementia.

The Choose-You-Own-Adventure bit at the end? Not for me, but I do wonder if Stanisic wrote that first, and then it morphed into the book. ( )

Sašas Herkunft ist auch meine, und ich verstehe es vermutlich nochmal... nicht besser, aber anders, worüber er schreibt. Das Geniale ist: er schreibt so gut, dass es auch jeder verstehen, nachfühlen, und auch gut finden kann. ( )

When Saša Stanišic is given a form to fill out, there's a box labelled "HERKUNFT" (ORIGINS), with much too little space for Stanišic to respond. This book is the longer response to that bureaucratic question. There's his childhood in the city of Višegrad, in a country that doesn't exist anymore. There's his later childhood and teenage years as the child of refugees, living near Heidelberg, Germany. Then there are his parents and his grandparents, especially his grandmother, who remained in Višegrad throughout the war and who is sinking into dementia. There's also the mountain village of Oskoruša, and the graveyard holding his ancestors. Stanišic explores his origins and along the way takes the reader along as he hangs out behind the ARAL station with the other teenagers who started out somewhere else, reads Choose Your Own Adventure books, visits Oskoruša with his tiny grandmother and reflects on what it is to belong to a country that no longer exists.

Stanišic's writing is so perfect; full of humor and emotion, stark realism and boundless optimism. This is a very, very good book. It's not yet out in English, but as it won the German Book Prize and one of his previous novels has already been translated, it's only a matter of time. Make sure you grab a copy as soon as you can. ( )

In an explicitly autobiographical novel, Stanišić looks at the arbitrary, random nature of our cultural and geographic origins and how they contribute to, but don't determine, who we are. He describes growing up in Višegrad, close to the border between Serbian and Bosnia, and of course the site of Ivo Andrić's iconic Bridge on the Drina. His parents, one from a Serb and one from a Muslim family, are both people who have been brought up to see themselves primarily as Yugoslavians and socialists, and young Saša doesn't grow up with any important cultural heritage beyond supporting Red Star Belgrade and mythologising Tito's partisans. When everything falls apart in 1992 and there are rumours of a coming attack on Muslims, the family escape to Germany just in time.

Stanišić writes with obvious gratitude about the way he was given the chance to build a new life in a multi-culti suburb of Heidelberg, where the centre of out-of-school social life for the diverse group of migrant and refugee teenagers was the ARAL filling-station (only rule: no smoking near the pumps). He had the good luck to go to a school where most people were from "somewhere else" and you didn't have to waste time in silly disputes between Yugo's and Germans. But he's always interspersing his positive comments with little snippets from 2018 news bulletins, and there's a barely-buried message to his German readers: if you go on voting for these AfD nutters, you'll end up where we did in 1992.

At the same time, the adult Saša, now a full-time writer living in Hamburg with his partner and son, is rediscovering his links with his Stanišić grandmother in Višegrad. She takes him to the mountain village his great-grandparents came from, once a thriving community but now shrunk to thirteen elderly residents and a graveyard where most of the tombstones say "Stanišić". As his elderly grandmother's mind starts to go off in directions of its own, the writer also finds himself roaming at will through his creative imagination, introducing dragons and snakes and then ironically commenting on their zoological inappropriateness.

Witty, very upbeat considering that it's a novel whose central themes include genocide, dementia and exile, always poetic and formally experimental: a very interesting book. I don't know if it will be the Tin drum of the 2020s (the little throwaway references to Grass's classic suggest that Stanišić may well be hoping for this), but it certainly stands a good chance. ( )