Synopsis
Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights is an extraordinary document of life deep inside one of the world's most war-ravaged regions.
Until the spring of 1992, when she was thirty, Elma Softic led a relatively ordinary, happy, middle-class life. She lived with her parents and sister, taught philosophy at a business college, and enjoyed the typical cafe life of a cosmopolitan city.
When the Serbs began bombing that spring, Elma began a diary, her attempt to bear what seemed increasingly unbearable, to stay focused while living in a state of siege. Eventually, she "got sick of it. The war was no longer something to put oneself out for." Rather, what she needed was a listener, someone to talk to about day to day life in Sarajevo. Through ham radio correspondence, she made new friends in Zagreb, who asked her to put her observations on paper in the form of open letters. It was these letters, first passed hand to hand, then reaching an ever-larger public in Croatia and throughout Europe, that created a sensation with their eloquent, sometimes stunning descriptions of modern life - a life not unlike our own - rendered primitive by war.
Published in Canada for the first time in English and now available to readers in the United States, Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights is a collection of Elma's diaries and letters, dated April 1992 to June 1995. With a novelist's eye for detail and a natural storyteller's gift for narrative, she gives clear and compelling voice to a place, a conflict and a life that are, for the most part, unthinkable, unspeakable and unimaginable.
Reviews
When war began in Sarajevo in April 1992, Softic began keeping a diary of her experience living in a city at war, recording the tribulations of life without dependable electricity, running water, or even food. She quickly became disillusioned with the posturing and the empty threats of the other European governments and the international community. After one year, Softic switched from diary form to letters written to acquaintances in Zagreb, and these letters present a more detailed picture of her situation until June 1995. Unlike Zlata's Diary (LJ 4/15/94), this is an adult's view of the war, yet many of the observations and conclusions are remarkably similar. Friends and family are more important to both young women than politics or male war games; ordinary people do matter. Softic remains in Sarajevo, determined to experience the full measure of living through a war and also to survive. Popular collections should consider.?Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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