Croatian War Nocturnal by Sebastian Schulman

Abstract

obsessed with the stories of Oedipus, Rostam , and Sohrab. Thirty years later, Cem returns to Ongoren despite ill omens, to discover his destiny and to meet Enver, the narrator of the novel. The entwined stories of fathers and sons take unexpected turns and proceed like the epics that have long shaped Cem’s life. Pamuk’s readers will no doubt recognize the presence of his past works in this novel. Enver’s voice resonates with the assassin’s voice in Snow, Rostam and Sohrab’s story and the traveling theater company will bring back lines from the same novel; readers may find themselves hearing the cracking skull of a calligrapher in a sixteenth-century Ottoman well (My Name Is Red). Instead of the Venetians and Ottomans of the White Castle, it is Sophocles ’ Oedipus Rex and the Iranian poet Ferdowsi ’s Rostam and Sohrab that are gazing at each other, negotiating deep-seated fears about patriarchy in the East and West. Like Füsun, the red-haired woman, Gülcihan, despite her presence on the Turkish cover of the novel, is no more than a subject of desire. And Cem says his life changes after he reads a book on dreams, a statement that brings to mind the unforgettable opening sentence of The New Life. Despite its familiarity, however, The RedHaired Woman is a haunting and unprecedented novel. Pamuk’s mischievousness and playfulness are at a minimum, perhaps nonexistent. The murders in the book are sketched against a background of ancient epics and stories that create for the reader the illusion of a closed system, where one feels the weight of predestination and trauma in any troubled father-son relationship. Cem, who is a Poe fan in the story, immures himself with these classical stories, making the detective murder story within the novel even more evocative. In his shortest novel to date, Pamuk leaves the reader with questions about his choices in storytelling and his late style. For instance, the changing of the book title from The Well to The Red-Haired Woman means giving up a perfectly Freudian metaphor that captures the subtle threads in the book. This relatively late change in the title seems to coincide with the inclusion of Gülcihan as one of the narrators in the story and Pamuk’s decision to have a woman amid heavily patriarchal voices. This dominant patriarchal tone is reiterated with the presence and inclusion of the Western canon, from Hamlet to Rousseau and Jules Verne. In this way, the red-haired woman exists as a mysterious, iconic figure , represented by a Rossetti painting, reduced to a book dedication, and caught up in an Oedipal net. Iclal Vanwesenbeeck SUNY Fredonia Spomenka Štimec. Croatian War Nocturnal. Trans. Sebastian Schulman. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 120 pages. The Balkan Wars spawned literature across genres, in languages from émigré English and German to nascent Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian. But Spomenka Štimec’s “fictional memoir” occupies a unique position. Defying the outcome of that war—six new nations, each comprising a dialect with an army—its language, Esperanto, from sperare (to hope), also functions as its theme. Each word embodies the aim of Zamenhof, who founded Esperanto in 1887 to transcend national boundaries and unite the world. Esperanto connects the eleven segments of this nocturnal (not a diary, its Latin root, nox / night, opposing dia / day) that capture the dark realities of the time. The typewriter of Štimec’s persona belonged to the Distributed Language Translation Project, a Dutch effort from 1985 to 1990 to enable machine translation using Esperanto as the intermediary language. On it this Esperanto Center employee, her visits to Serbia “a trip to our Croatian great-grandmother,” her annual holidays with Serbian cousins a “circle of harmony,” nightly records her experiences—Zagreb’s air raids, Vukovar’s destruction, Sarajevo’s siege, blossoming nationalism, separation from family, the death or disappearance of Esperanto colleagues. In Štimec’s epigrammatic style, irony both mediates and underscores horror, highlighting the absurd consequences of war (e.g., the hurdles faced when trying to ship a dead soldier’s body to his native France, revealing “the politics of storing the dead,” or the endless steps required to...