neither
TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home
SAMUEL BECKETT
As a Bosnian who emigrated as a youth to the United States during the Yugoslav Wars, Ismet Prcic no doubt has plenty of trauma to unpack. Unspeakable Home reads as an autofictional account of just such a young man’s journey — containing stories of his shame-filled childhood, teenage years as a drunken orange-mohawked punk, a short-lived stint with his paternal uncle in California, and his college/young adult/married years with the Beloved — and the format is highly self-aware and unconventional by design. Prcic starts with a fan letter to the comedian Bill Burr, bemoaning his recent marital breakup (You wonder whether she would have filed for divorce if, instead of PTSD and alcoholism, your diagnosis had been diabetes or cancer, if your maladies were visible, measurable, if they didn’t have to be communicated by words, if they didn’t have to be believed to be true.) and then proceeds to describe how he intends to write this novel as a sort of mix tape of two halves. Throughout, details are hinted at in these letters to Bill Burr, and then stories are told about those details, often from different angles, and by the end, an entire, trauma-filled life has been explored in a precisely crafted work of art that knowingly exposes the craftsmanship. I truly do admire Prcic’s craft, and I am grateful for what I learned here about the Bosnian war experience, but I don’t always perfectly connect emotionally with this kind of postmodern MFA-trained writing style: art is subjective, and while I can recognise the skill on display here, it wasn’t entirely to my own tastes; I will understand every five star review or award this garners. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Historically, the Balkans — that gorgeous, ungovernable, godforsaken peninsula always in turmoil, always on the fringes of civilizations, always a broken-up borderland — had for centuries been a place to survive, endure. It had also been a place to fail to escape from and — both because and in spite of this — to love fiercely. If you were from this lush volatility, chances were you’d in some way participate in at least one war — two or even three if God really had it in for you and gave you a long life.
Coming from a centrally planned childhood with seaside vacations — surrounded by family and comrades — and huffing glue on bombed out streets with his punk gang (always afraid of being called up early to the country’s underequipped, undermanned army), the narrator was of two minds when his family decided to send him to America: relief at escaping the chaos, and survivor’s guilt for leaving everyone else behind. He describes this as PTSD (and when he eventually reveals some secrets about his childhood, we learn why he was always kind of broken), and this leads to alcoholism (with many stories of hiding and sneaking and scrounging for alcohol), and this leads to him losing everything. This is a novel of vignettes, framed between the fan letters to Burr, with self-aware metanarration, as when he quotes an article by Marina Biti and Iva Rosanda Žigo (“The Silenced Narrator and the Notion of ‘Proto-Narrative'”) that references Prcic’s first novel Shards:
The complexity of the narrative structure that involves not only multiple levels of diegesis and various diegetic combinations discussed by Genette but also an unusual correlation between verifiable reality and fiction, invites theoretical speculation primarily concerning elements that can be qualified as ‘disruptive’ to the memoir, related to trauma.
So, I guess he’s telling us that that’s what he’s doing here, too? Prcic later writes:
I’m not writing a biopic here; this is not that kind of story and mine is not that kind of life. I’ve got my conciliatory designs on the synapses between life and story of life — my own timid, wide-eyed attempt at living it — which is why I’m compelled to leave my sketches in, to show the work, as it were. If you spend your time on Earth trying to understand how you fit in life instead of living it, then to you, trying to understand is living, and what you’re reading is that hard admittance.
And so: This is obviously a well-written novel, crafted by a skilled and self-reflective author — and it also did give me a sense of what living through and escaping a conflict like this can do to a mind — so it is undeniably a worthwhile and artful read; another reader will want exactly this. This reader, as a matter of taste, prefers a novel that pretends to be only what it is.
