How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
SynopsisPlot
When his grandfather dies suddenly, Aleks summons this gift of storytelling to see him through his grief. It is a gift he will have to call on again when soldiers transform Višegrad--a town previously unconscious of racial and religious divides--into a nightmarish landscape of terror and violence. Though Aleks and his family fled to Germany, he is haunted by his past, and especially by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save.
Story
About this book
Aleksandar, known as Aleks, grows up in Višegrad, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina where different ethnic and religious communities live side by side without apparent friction. He is a boy with a strong imagination and a habit of reshaping the world through stories, a skill he first develops after the sudden death of his grandfather. Storytelling becomes his way of processing loss and holding on to what matters.
When war reaches Višegrad in the 1990s, the town is reshaped by violence and division. Aleks and his family flee to Germany, but safety does not erase what he has witnessed. He carries memories of the place he left behind and of Asija, a girl he tried to protect and whose fate he does not know. In Germany, he exists between two lives: the one unfolding around him and the one he cannot stop replaying.
Saša Stanišić published this novel in German in 2006, drawing on his own experience of displacement from Bosnia during the war. The story moves between Aleks as a child in Višegrad and as a young man in Germany, using his voice to convey both the ordinariness of daily life before the conflict and the rupture that followed.
