‘War’ is a lyrical but unsparing journey
War, if you’ve been through one, is always with you, even after it has been over for a long time and everything around you is quiet and still.
Ask any combat veteran. For that matter, ask Ana Juric, the narrator/protagonist of Sara Nović’s shattering and promising debut novel, Girl at
War. At its start, Ana is a 10-yearold growing up bright, alert and unassuming in Croatia. It is 1991 and her childhood is about to come to a premature, savage end.
“The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes,” the book begins with what deserves to become one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines. The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk la- ment and as taut as wire wrapped through an electrified fence.
Nović, writing about the civil war that tore Yugoslavia into bloody fragments in the 1990s, spends most of her novel’s first 90 pages gently peeling away at the layers of Ana’s no longer safe, secure world. Ana, her father, mother and younger sister, Rahela, are dislodged from anything resembling a home and become refugees in their own bruised and broken land.
Grim details assemble like corpses on these pages, many of them as mundane as the slow flickering of a house lamp (“the whim of a damaged wire”) or as jolting as the lone report of an AK-47 that resounds “like a laugh” as it cuts down an unarmed painter among the men, women and children rounded up by abusive soldiers.
What is more remarkable is that the American-born Nović assembled such a vivid narrative from speaking with friends and family members who lived through the war.
The book jumps ahead from the early ’90s to just past the Millennium. Ana is a 20-year-old college student living in New York City, where she and her sister — now known mostly as Rachel — were taken in by foster parents, Jack and Laura. Ana escapes the oblivion that swallowed her parents, but not the war. The memo- ries sometimes are as sudden and brutal as her one-time enemies; on public transportation where she dreams of bodies, or when Fourth of July fireworks send her screaming for cover into Jack and Laura’s house.
The literature Ana studies in school provides some commiseration, if not consolation; the rueful memory collages of German novelist W.G. Sebald and, perhaps inevitably, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s epochal 1941 account of Yugoslavia in an earlier time of travail.
She takes West’s book with her on a return to post-civil war Croatia, where a side road takes her back several years to a time when she wasn’t just running from her enemies, but fighting — and shooting — back.
Then the book shifts to Ana’s future and the distant prospect of not forgetting or forgiving, but a kind of tentative cease-fire of the soul.