How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramaphone has been widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic. The author has been compared to Foer, Vollman, David Foster Wallace, Ondaatje, and no doubt many, many others. Me, I’m dropping it at page 66 as part of my new policy not to chase sunk costs. (See earlier post on that topic.) Those comparisons are absurd. No doubt something of the book triggered something in the minds of some reviewers, but that doesn’t establish similarity of any sort and pasting such comparisons on the cover seems tantamount to false advertising.
I won’t pretend to speak to the whole novel, since I didn’t read it, but pages 1-66 read like a bad translation–or rather a good translation of bad english. It was written in German by a Bosnian and then translated by Anthea Bell, so there is more than one explanation for the choppy style. The prose, which speaks in a voice of wide-eyed innocence, never really rises above that naïve style, which is no doubt an attraction for some, but I found it rather labored. The story follows a boy, whose mother is a Bosnian and whose father is a Serb, as he is exiled by war and sees the plum eating days of his youth become swallowed by war. Needless to say, this is the story of Stanišić as well.
Call me a cynic, but could it be that the sensation following this novel is fueled in part by politics? Tell me I’m wrong, but my copy is going back to Amazon.