How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone - Hardcover

Sasa Stanisić was born in Visegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978. At the age of fourteen, he fled to Germany with his family and went on to study literature in Heidelberg and Leipzig. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is his first novel.

"A brilliant debut novel from a young Bosnian writer . . . Stanisic's story is loaded on each page with galvanizing details, desperately making an inventory of an imperiled world. He maintains a delirious, jump-cut pace as words flash dark-to-light-to-dark, and sentences coil and snap, conjuring a macabre carnival atmosphere. . . . This crazy-quilt novel, a sensation in Europe, is a bold, questing work of art deeply rooted in the complex history of a blood-soaked, bone-planted land. . . . Stanisic is an exceptionally talented, impish and caring writer who has walked the edge of the abyss. One hopes that he will continue to grapple with the paradoxes intrinsic to the human condition and tell many more empathic, revealing and imaginative stories full of cathartic laughter and feeling." -- Donna Seaman, The Los Angeles Times

"Beyond succeeding as a compelling fictional account of the very real tragedy of a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, [How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone] is also testament to the power of the imagination--and its limitations. . . . Stanisic's tale will remain exceptional: A gifted storyteller, he's able to translate unspeakably gruesome history into something poignant and hauntingly beautiful." -- Sidra Durst, The Village Voice

"In Sasa Stanisic's bittersweet, musical novel about a boy growing up in Bosnia-Herzogovina before and during the war, many things happen that are impossible to understand, startlingly visual, bordering on the surreal but all too real. . . . This is a funny, heartbreaking, beautifully written novel." -- Mary Brennan, The Seattle Times

"In his tale of childhood and war, Stanisic populates the river Drina with a dying grandfather, ghostly voices, a glasses-wearing catfish, discarded cabinets, and mutilated corpses. [His] story never calms, it rages, rough and broad and joyful. It contains both brutal heartbreak and whimsical delight. In short, it's great art. . . . Stanisic's prose is wildly inventive, never satisfied with too straightforward or familiar a telling . . . [and] so carefully crafted, so full of thrilling associative leaps and spinning breathlessness, that the author achieves poetry. . . . We live, we survive, we heal, the author wants us to see, by telling stories. This is a writer to watch." -- Jesse Nathan, San Francisco Chronicle

"Stanisic's debut novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone will convert skeptics with the sheer force of its emotional power. . . . Stanisic's perfectly chosen observations refract and amplify the horrifying, maddening surroundings, heightening both ends of the emotional spectrum, creating a story that, like war itself, is too large and chaotic to ever leave simply." -- Karla Starr, The Oregonian

"Stanisic's talent blazes off page after page. . . . That his tale contains so much natural, laugh-out-loud comedy speaks volumes for the author, whose autobiographical hero, Aleksandar, `somewhere between eight and fourteen,' is a talkative, precocious delight, determinedly optimistic in the face of heartbreaking losses, forever making startling little observations on life that somehow get it all wrong and yet sort of right. . . . Stanisic is so prodigiously full of big, open-hearted wisdom, I shudder to think what he has lived through to produce, at such an early age, such a transcendent little masterwork." -- Nick DiMartino, Shelf-Awareness

"Wildly imaginative storytelling . . . Through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Aleksandar Krsmonovic, we witness a massacre perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against their Muslim neighbors in the town of Visegrad in 1992. . . . Madcap flights of invention and comic exaggeration clash movingly with the painfully real chronicle of terror, loss, and exile at the story's heart. . . . Far from trivializing the terrible history, the fanciful style makes it all the more acute. . . . How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone bears witness to this horror with tragicomic intensity, reflecting the possibilities and limitations of fiction in the face of atrocity." -- Ross Benjamin, Bookforum

"Even with hindsight, the Clinton-era conflict in the Balkans remains a confusing mess of clashing ethnic, national, and religious identities. A handful of compelling stories about this period have been bubbling to the surface . . . [and] How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone stands out as one of the best. . . . A challenging and haunted work." -- Drew Toal, Time Out New York