GOLDEN SHRAPNEL
By Almir Imširević
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Cover drawing by Biba Kayewich
At a remove from Sarajevo, on a writer’s residency in France, a playwright finds himself in the thrall of echoes from the past — in a labyrinth of siege-time references.
This is not an ordinary memoir, but an exploration of traumatic experience as revealed by remnants of association. It is also a mapping of otherness from the standpoint of the stranger, of near affinities that end in divergence, color as a point of contrast, of animosity like a bolt from the blue.
This debut novel by acclaimed playwright Almir Imsirevic is existentialist in the vein of Albert Camus’s The Stranger. At its center is a survivor of the Sarajevo siege, the recipient of a writer’s residency in a small French town, trying to thread together the loose ends of his life after his father's death, still haunted by a trauma that refuses to fade. The town’s peace only amplifies the dark legacy of war within the protagonist. While its most striking passages take the story backward, this is ultimately a novel grounded in wonder — in a deep sense of astonishment at the mystery of one’s own life and the lives of others. —Faruk Šehić, author of Quiet Flows the Una
By calling the numbered chapters “shrapnel,” Imširević signals, on a symbolic level, just how fragile the war trauma buried in the memories of Sarajevo’s siege survivors truly is. Enki’s flashbacks implode within him in the most unexpected corners of his picturesque exile, or during seemingly mundane situations. Anything can become a trigger that pulls Enki back, silently and painfully, into a brutal past. Enki’s loose identification with Islam stirs in him an absurd sense of guilt and prompts an ongoing questioning of both earthly and transcendent meaning. Imširević guides the narrative with impressive control, shaping vivid and compelling characters who exist in a constant state of precariousness. Everything seems to be within reach — love, violence, reconciliation — just a breath away. —Davor Špišić, Telegram.hr
Golden Shrapnel is an intimate confession, a stream of memory from a mind shaped by war. Each “shrapnel” chapter stems from that experience. Enki Duraković, plagued by writer's block and mental unrest, describes how “his newly born nostalgia is being nourished by turning the Alps into the mountain peaks of Bosnia.” His time in Ferney-Voltaire is long enough for us to recognize in him the opposing forces of cultural adaptation and resistance. The town becomes, in his consciousness, a mirror to Sarajevo, the place of his deepest identification. — Ivana Golijanin “Voltaire Defends Sarajevo,“ Oslobođenje
ALMIR IMŠIREVIĆ is a playwright, dramaturg, critic, and professor. His works have been produced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, France, Turkey, Poland, Kosovo, Italy, and the Czech Republic. Included as a playwright in the Twentieth Century Anthology of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Drama, he has served as a dramaturg as well on numerous plays for B&H theaters, and as a critic for Sarajevo-based magazines.
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ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ translates fiction and non-fiction from the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. She is author of Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of War.
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PURCHASE
Softcover — ISBN: 978-1-942281-34-4 — 254 pages
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