Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was born in Belgrade a few years before the author and (unlike her) lived there until college graduation, throughout the wars and crises of the 1990s. I was hoping that this book could tell some authentic stories about my generation and my homeland, but after reading it I am disappointed on various levels, which I will try to explain in this review. MYTHS and RITUALS: I start here because this book is mostly advertised as a mythical Balkan novel. Some basic concepts the author does get right, for example the forty days of the soul do begin on the morning after death. I think that nearly all Serbians know this and observe 40 days of the soul, most commonly by hiring a priest to perform a (short, simple, singing-based) service at the cemetery on the 40th day after death. In the book, Grandma's obsession with other details, such as not doing laundry etc, seems a little overblown, especially since it later gets revealed that this character is actually Muslim, so the deaths of her parents and cousins would not have involved such rituals in her hometown, as the narrator mentions. But considering other issues in the novel, this is a relatively minor flaw. The gory rituals that the diggers perform in the book bother me a lot more. This is supposed to be a realistic contemporary part of the story, and readers are supposed to believe that peasants would search for bones of a distant cousin in someone's vineyard and that they would wash the bones: "the cracked dome of the skull, wiping down the empty sockets and the crooked lines between the teeth." "Then they were breaking the thighbones, sawing through them with a cleaver so that the body could not walk in death to bring sickness to the living..." This is supposed to be happening in broad daylight, with about a dozen people actively participating, and many more passers-by watching, out of curiosity. Please! The Balkans had their share of trouble, but average people haven't grown accustomed to this level of goriness, and I've never heard of anything like "wash the bones, bring the body, leave the hearth behind", and can't imagine any of my cousins or friends doing anything but running away in horror at this kind of proposition (or a much milder one, to be honest). FOLKLORE: The author tries to use some elements of the Balkan folklore, which is a good idea in principle, because the region is rich with colorful traditions. I just wish she did more research and tried to stay true to the real folklore, instead of mixing it with other random elements. For example, there is a story of gusle (the traditional instrument) and a character who aspires and ultimately fails to become an expert guslar. A traditional guslar sings epic songs about courage, freedom and loyalty, which the character sadly never tells in the book and the author never seriously addresses. Instead, she introduces two entirely foreign elements: the tiger and the deathless man. One would be acceptable (and I like the tiger better, for his role in the story I discuss bellow), but two is too much. The deathless man feels alien and generic, like a lost cousin of Joe Black, sent to this novel by some hurried Hollywood producer, in an effort to tie together the loose plot treads. Disappointing. CHARACTERS and PLOT: The book is narrated by a young doctor Natalia, who we get to know through her fearless search for clues surrounding her grandfather's death, and some earlier memories that are mostly defined by her aspiration for proper medical education in her troubled hometown. I haven't connected with this character at all, even thought I am supposed to be of her age and background, and actually have friends who are young doctors in Belgrade. But there is no emotion that rings true and very few stories seem plausible. For example, she thinks it's necessary that the University provides one corpse a week per student for educational purposes on the second year of pre-med, and responds to the lack of such resources by taking a trip to a Romanian human skull counterfeiter. Come on! Thankfully, Natalia is not the main character and her grandfather is a little more interesting in my mind, mostly because of the compassionate episode with the tiger and his wife. Their unusual relationship is actually the bright point of this novel. But the "mystery" surrounding his death turns into another disappointment and the "real" reason for his trip to Zdrevkov ultimately doesn't make much sense. As for the plot, at one point I was hopeful that everything might come together nicely, and was almost going to swallow the gruesome diggers, for I imagined they might be necessary to reveal the central question about grandfather's death. But it turns out that all the narrator really needs (to answer this question) is between her old memories and the bag she retrieves pretty early on her journey, so for the entire second half of the book her present actions contribute only to illuminating the grim side-story of the village she is staying in. Argh. SETTING: The narrator lives in The City, with two rivers one of which is The Danube, the Zoo at the old citadel, and people who eat burek and drink rakija. So why not just call it Belgrade? (If she really wanted to make it vaguer, she could have omitted at least one river and left the other one unnamed.) With the details provided, I have to call it Belgrade; nothing else makes sense. So the narrator is in Belgrade at the beginning of the first recent major war (that would be 1992) and the Administration has enforced the curfew, and the teenagers are protesting in their cars, and the hardest thing to find is foreign music. In reality, as far as I know, there was no memorable curfew, and no teenagers drove cars (the legal driving age was 18 and the gas was mighty expensive, so there was hardly any traffic in the city), and media piracy blossomed, so music was the cheapest thing to find. Should I go on? CONCLUSION: Tea Obreht is a talented writer with some knowledge of the Balkans. This could have been an interesting book, had the author done more research and tried to stay true to more authentic and less sensational elements. As written, the book is a mix of truths and misconceptions, which in my opinion succeeds in making an average reader very confused and a knowledgeable reader quite irritated in the end. And the big message is? That the Balkans are sad and tragic, and that desperate people resort to personal and collective myths in order to deal with harsh realities. 350 pages to learn this? The good news is that the Balkans are less grim and more dimensional than this novel suggests and I hope that one day someone manages to capture that in some better book.