Nine titles about the aftermath of the Balkan wars

Christine Evans was born in London and grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Prior to moving to the US in 2000, she played saxophone in Perth and Sydney bands and directed music for theatrical events, including her own plays.

She writes fiction, plays, opera libretti, and essays.

Three Marys, for which she wrote the opera libretto (Andrée Greenwell, composer), premiered at the Sydney Opera House in May, 2023, and is available for streaming worldwide from the opera house.

Evans's debut US novel is Nadia.

At Electric Lit she tagged "nine books—funny, tragic, absurd, harsh and beautiful—about the aftermath of the Balkan wars." One title on the list:

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon

Alexsander Hemon’s extraordinary memoir-in-essays interweaves memories of his life in Sarajevo; reflections on war’s aftermath, food, football and friendship; the divided condition of the immigrant; love, family and heartbreak; and the attempt to rebuild a sense of home in his new city-of-exile, Chicago.

Briefly in the US on a writing fellowship, during Hemon’s absence the looming war engulfed Sarajevo. On May 2, 1992, the day after he canceled his return flight, the last trains left the city and “the longest siege in modern history” began. At first unmoored and unable to comprehend American space, Hemon writes about the need to find in Chicago what he’d lost through exile from Sarajevo: a “geography of the soul.” He builds this, block by block, through walking the city and finding: a café, a bar, a football game in which he can anchor himself.

Hemon’s book is a mosaic made from such maps and stories, the ironies and impact of which are only apparent from absorbing the whole. The essay “The Book of My Life” is about Hemon’s Sarajevo literature professor, who told his students about the book his five-year-old daughter was writing. “She had titled it ‘The Book of My Life,’ but had written only the first chapter. She planned to wait for more life to accumulate, he told us, before starting Chapter 2. We laughed, still in our early chapters, oblivious to the malignant plots accelerating all around us.” Later, the professor joins the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) “headed by Radovan Karadžić, the talentless poet destined to become the world’s most-wanted war criminal.” When the SDS is involved in the bombing of the Sarajevo library, Hemon writes, “The infernal irony of a poet (bad though he may have been) and a literature professor causing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books did not escape me.”

It was only on finishing the book that I was struck, in turn, by the infernal irony of Hemon naming his own book by adapting a title (“Life” to “Lives”) invented by the young child of a book-burner and mass-murderer.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue