Disconnected History

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I finished Andy Weir's The Martian and was shopping around Amazon on my Kindle looking for my next read. Then a name popped up that I swear I've seen before, but only in passing: Sara Nović. I recognized her name because our families shared the same origin: the former Yugoslavian country of Croatia. The book that seized my attention was her debut novel Girl at War, which was indeed about the Croatian War for Independence during the 1990's. Her character, Ana, was a 10 year old girl living in Zagreb living through the very beginnings of conflict between the three ethnic groups in that region: Roman Catholic Croats, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and Islamic Bosnians. During the novel, Ana faces the challenges of international interference (or lack thereof), orphanhood, and actual armed conflict. Later in the novel, Nović shows Ana ten years later studying literature at NYU after being adopted by foster parents after the war. Her studies bring back old memories in need of closure, prompting Ana to return to her home and face the ghosts of her past.

While this blog post is reading a bit like a book review, the point of relevance I wanted to illustrate was Nović's mastery of creating a junction between past and present (future in some respects). Both aspects of the novel felt like separate stories: the past was certainly read like a war story while the present presented like a coming of age story. What I found fascinating is the implications of retooling our short fiction into a larger, novel-worthy narrative. The individual stories could be welded together, much like how Nović did with friends and family who actually lived through the war, and turned into a larger story.