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A review by arirang
Under Pressure by Faruk Šehić
3.0
To reach the conclusion that I’ve finished a short story collection, because writing about war has temporarily drained me.
To think of the structure of the book which resembles the EKG if a healthy heart. The peaks and valleys are stories of different emotional timbre, pace and rhythm. To feel the draw of long prose form with plenty of poetry thrown in.
With this book, Faruk Šehić becomes the joint-first author (with Isabel Waidner) to be longlisted twice for the UK's finest literary prize, The Republic of Consciousness, after his debut novel Quiet Flows the Una, translated by Will Firth from the 2011 original Knjiga o Uni, was longlisted in the prize's first year in 2017.
Under Pressure was originally published as Pod pritiskom (in 2004) and translated by Mirza Purić from Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, and published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Istros books.
The author explained the evolution of his literary career, from studying veterinary medicine, to volunteering as a soldier, to publishing poetry, short-stories (this book) then his debut novel (Quiet Flows the Una), in this interview with Susan Curtis: http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/faruk-sehic-head-to-head/
Under Pressure is a short story collection, or perhaps a fragmentary novel (*), set in north-western Bosnia, during and after the 1992-1995 conflict caused by insurrection led by Fikret Abdić and his Autonomist forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Province_of_Western_Bosnia). The narrator, as with the author himself at the time of the events described, is a early 29s volunteer serving in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, fighting against the Autonomists, and suffering, although he doesn't acknowledge it as such, from PTSD.
(* the author's take from the interview referenced below: “Well, it was originally written as a book of short stories, but in some literary representations it is understood and labeled as a kind of novel, because there is a unity of time, place and space, there is even a chronology, with occasional flashbacks.”)
The story quickly plunges us into the visceral and unheroic reality of war:
Zgemba is flicking bits of brain off the filo pie with his fingernail. He's tearing pieces off with his right hand, dipping them into salt and puting them in his mouth. With his left he's noshing on cottage cheese, from a white plastic bag splattered with a mixture of blood and brains. His mug is sooty from cartridge gas. In his lap he has a 7.62mm light machine gun. Five minutes ago this trench was occupied by the autonomist rebels. A still warm corpse is hanging over the breastwork. A burst blew half his skull off. I turn him on his back. From the inside pocket of his army jacket I take out his wallet. I look at a passport-size photograph of him. He had a receding hairline. Large melancholy eyes. With the sharp edge of the photograph I floss out bits of apple from between my teeth.
Under Pressure is a, deliberately jagged read, like the shrapnel from exploding shells, a piece of which lodges in the novel, Doestoevsky's Demons, which the narrator is reading. And the narration switches from the poetic to the crude, with the narrator and his comrades using alcohol and drugs to escape their grim reality, sometimes in the same paragraph:
October wind musters our veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the first runs as asphalt road. Further down below is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposes to guns of all calibers.
One striking aspect of the translation - and a decision that attracted some comment even in favourable reviews of the novel - is that the dialogue between the narrator and his fellow soldiers in rendered in a generic British vernacular, rather reminiscent of a politician dropping into Estuary English ("Well, did 'e make it, or what?"). This is intended to reflect an effect in the original which the author explained in an interview (https://minorliteratures.com/2019/06/27/faruk-sehic-war-is-just-not-something-you-can-render-in-one-great-fresco-sean-preston/) and to me it works well:
I told all this to a stranger who’d never been to war, as we stood at the bar in a restaurant car.
I watched as the crimson withdrew from his cheeks and his face turned pale.
...
And I never even mentioned Besic’s steaming intensives, which he pushed back into his stomach ripped up by hollow-point bullets, grey-green lint sticking to the hot mucous membrane.
The effect is to rather expose the futility of wars and the rationalisation of brutality that easily follows - I am a brave patriot, you fell for nationalist myths, they are a war criminal.
To close, one of the more poetic sections where the narrator reflects on what he experienced:
I flick through my memory full of dead faces
With words I try to paint a sphere of warmth
That existed during those forty-four months of life under pressure
To wrest myself from the desire of my words to be bloody and my tongue a blade
To find a single wartime fragment
Of unbreakable human kindness.
Not a comfortable read, a necessary one perhaps, but not entirely to my taste. 3.5 stars
To think of the structure of the book which resembles the EKG if a healthy heart. The peaks and valleys are stories of different emotional timbre, pace and rhythm. To feel the draw of long prose form with plenty of poetry thrown in.
With this book, Faruk Šehić becomes the joint-first author (with Isabel Waidner) to be longlisted twice for the UK's finest literary prize, The Republic of Consciousness, after his debut novel Quiet Flows the Una, translated by Will Firth from the 2011 original Knjiga o Uni, was longlisted in the prize's first year in 2017.
Under Pressure was originally published as Pod pritiskom (in 2004) and translated by Mirza Purić from Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, and published following a successful Kickstarter campaign by Istros books.
At Istros, we believe that good literature can transcend national interests and speak to us with the common voice of human experience. Discovering contemporary voices and rediscovering forgotten ones, Istros Books works hard to bring you the best that SE European literature can offer.Istros were also responsible for several of my favourite books in the last year, including Andrej Nikolaidis's brilliant Olcinium Trilogy translated by Will Firth, two wonderful, and very different books, from Dusan Sarotar, translated by Rawley Grau and Daša Drndić's 2019 Republic of Consciousness listed Doppelgänger, translated by SD Curtis (founder of Istros) and Celia Hawkesworth.
The author explained the evolution of his literary career, from studying veterinary medicine, to volunteering as a soldier, to publishing poetry, short-stories (this book) then his debut novel (Quiet Flows the Una), in this interview with Susan Curtis: http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/faruk-sehic-head-to-head/
Under Pressure is a short story collection, or perhaps a fragmentary novel (*), set in north-western Bosnia, during and after the 1992-1995 conflict caused by insurrection led by Fikret Abdić and his Autonomist forces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Province_of_Western_Bosnia). The narrator, as with the author himself at the time of the events described, is a early 29s volunteer serving in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, fighting against the Autonomists, and suffering, although he doesn't acknowledge it as such, from PTSD.
(* the author's take from the interview referenced below: “Well, it was originally written as a book of short stories, but in some literary representations it is understood and labeled as a kind of novel, because there is a unity of time, place and space, there is even a chronology, with occasional flashbacks.”)
The story quickly plunges us into the visceral and unheroic reality of war:
Zgemba is flicking bits of brain off the filo pie with his fingernail. He's tearing pieces off with his right hand, dipping them into salt and puting them in his mouth. With his left he's noshing on cottage cheese, from a white plastic bag splattered with a mixture of blood and brains. His mug is sooty from cartridge gas. In his lap he has a 7.62mm light machine gun. Five minutes ago this trench was occupied by the autonomist rebels. A still warm corpse is hanging over the breastwork. A burst blew half his skull off. I turn him on his back. From the inside pocket of his army jacket I take out his wallet. I look at a passport-size photograph of him. He had a receding hairline. Large melancholy eyes. With the sharp edge of the photograph I floss out bits of apple from between my teeth.
Under Pressure is a, deliberately jagged read, like the shrapnel from exploding shells, a piece of which lodges in the novel, Doestoevsky's Demons, which the narrator is reading. And the narration switches from the poetic to the crude, with the narrator and his comrades using alcohol and drugs to escape their grim reality, sometimes in the same paragraph:
October wind musters our veteran beech and hornbeam leaves. As they fall, they brush leaf against leaf, rustling like Indian silk. The pines are indestructible. Their dark green needles comb the wind. We wait for the battalion commander to give the off via a Motorola. Night is in force. We’re in the forest, where our strange firing line in the shape of a horseshoe is formed. Below the first runs as asphalt road. Further down below is a great big hollow, as dark as King Kong’s gullet. Three hundred metres across the hollow our line continues. So we’re bulging into their line. An un-fuck-with-able salient exposes to guns of all calibers.
One striking aspect of the translation - and a decision that attracted some comment even in favourable reviews of the novel - is that the dialogue between the narrator and his fellow soldiers in rendered in a generic British vernacular, rather reminiscent of a politician dropping into Estuary English ("Well, did 'e make it, or what?"). This is intended to reflect an effect in the original which the author explained in an interview (https://minorliteratures.com/2019/06/27/faruk-sehic-war-is-just-not-something-you-can-render-in-one-great-fresco-sean-preston/) and to me it works well:
>Q: This book was translated by Mirza Purić.The translator explained his rationale, in a later interview: https://inpressbooks.co.uk/blogs/news/the-translator-s-interview-mirza-puric-on-under-pressure
FŠ: Mirza is so important not only because he is a great translator, but because he knows the dialect I have used in this book. His mother is from the same city as me, in fact. He knows the soul of the language I use within the book’s dialogue, which is a mixture of western Bosnian dialects, largely the language of rural people, because in the war we were mostly fighting in villages where none of us had been before. We were urban lads, and for us this way of speaking was ridiculous, archaic and unknown. We ridiculed it at first, but through this kind of interaction this way of speaking entered our personal speech and became part of our new linguistic identity.
Q: Yes, the use of that dialect really struck me. The English interpretation of it is something approaching provincial working class, I think. Does that rest easy with you? Why that over the “thee”, “thou” and “thy” afforded to the Catalonians of Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, for instance? The dialogue in other ways is very similarly to this book.
FŠ: I think this is more a question for Susan Curtis (Istros Books editor), because if I remember well, the dialect used by the translator originally was like a Broad Yorkshire. This was changed for practical reasons. It would not be understandable to readers in the US, for instance. The most important thing is that the language in the dialogue is rough and raw, because that’s how it is with the rural slang of western Bosnia.
Q: did you face any specific challenges related to the cultural specificity of the story and the author’s experience?Towards the novel's end the narrator and his comrades are enjoying a respite from the war, in town, and listen to Kurt Cobain's rendition of Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World from Nirvana Unplugged. The lyrics (not included in the novel) include:
MP: In many ways this is a very local book. For instance, most of the dialogue is in a rather rustic local dialect which can be barely comprehensible to most outsiders. I grew up a bike ride from Faruk so this was no problem. I originally had broad Yorkshire there, as I thought the socio-linguistic status and distance from the standard were about right, but there were concerns that the readers would have to work a bit too hard to make sense of all t’ clipped articles, funny syntax and obscure words, so in the end I had to go with some kind of generic non-standard English. I’m a bit of a stickler for heritage languages and dialects and I’m not too happy about this, but it had to be done.
I searched for form and landBut losing control is precisely what they do. Fuelled by alcohol and grief at the loss of a fellow fighter they end up in a losing fight with the local police, before exacting indirect revenge by brutally assaulting some Autonomist prisoners of war. The narrator then relates:
For years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazeless stare
We walked a million hills
I must have died alone
A long, long time ago
Who knows?
Not me
I never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world.
I told all this to a stranger who’d never been to war, as we stood at the bar in a restaurant car.
I watched as the crimson withdrew from his cheeks and his face turned pale.
...
And I never even mentioned Besic’s steaming intensives, which he pushed back into his stomach ripped up by hollow-point bullets, grey-green lint sticking to the hot mucous membrane.
The effect is to rather expose the futility of wars and the rationalisation of brutality that easily follows - I am a brave patriot, you fell for nationalist myths, they are a war criminal.
To close, one of the more poetic sections where the narrator reflects on what he experienced:
I flick through my memory full of dead faces
With words I try to paint a sphere of warmth
That existed during those forty-four months of life under pressure
To wrest myself from the desire of my words to be bloody and my tongue a blade
To find a single wartime fragment
Of unbreakable human kindness.
Not a comfortable read, a necessary one perhaps, but not entirely to my taste. 3.5 stars