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A review by georgiepie
Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
5.0
The last line of the first chapter reads: “It is March 7, 2018, in Višegrad, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Grandmother is eighty-seven years old and eleven years old.” This sentence alone captures the heart of the novel; a sense that appearance, reality, the past and the present are in a constant state of flux. It’s an auto-fiction, a memoir with exaggeration, it’s a journey through memories - tender, silly, horrible.
What a gem Where You Come From was. Less of an excavation of the mundane, a walk in dirty laundry, and more an examination of mundanity in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. Stanišić shows us how to create a life after war changes everything, when the country you were rooted in no longer exists. Where did this country go? If the country no longer exists, what happens to its people?
What a gem Where You Come From was. Less of an excavation of the mundane, a walk in dirty laundry, and more an examination of mundanity in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. Stanišić shows us how to create a life after war changes everything, when the country you were rooted in no longer exists. Where did this country go? If the country no longer exists, what happens to its people?
Content Warnings
Moderate: Genocide, Racial slurs, and War