Shards by Ismet Prcic

Abstract

70 | World Literature Today reviews highest of all. When Ahmed anonymously sends his pictures to a popular weekly that he naïvely thinks of as being genuinely antigovernment, he finds they are presented in such a way as to trivialize the event that has so horrified him. Aided by a selfless journalist and a computer-geek friend, Ahmed schemes to make public the photographs and what they reveal about the corruption of Egypt’s ruling class. Almost to the last page one does not know whether the attempt will end in victory or in Ahmed’s ignominious death. Vertigo is possessed by a powerful vision of Mubarak’s Egypt as a cesspit of graft, greed, and ruthless hypocrisy, symbolized by the nightclub where much of the story takes place, a place where Egypt’s elite, accompanied by whores on the make, can go spend and drink in private. If Mourad is occasionally undisciplined and relentless, his novel is yet constantly inventive and alive. Robin Moger is to be congratulated on a translation that renders the speech of young Egyptian men in a contemporary style that never provokes a smile or a grimace. M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley Ismet Prcic. Shards. New York. Black Cat. 2011. isbn 9780802170811 In sharp prose, fresh similes, and trenchant wit, this nonlinear first novel, a deeply tragic black comedy, portrays the impact of the Bosnian War on soldiers and civilians through its protagonist, Ismet Prcic, a young Bosniak émigré who shares his creator ’s name and key biographical details. Shards, whose title signals its form and content, comprises three notebooks, “Escape,” “Shards,” and “Boom-Boom,” which Ismet records when directed to “write everything” as therapy for his disabling PTSD. Notes and diary scraps shuttle between Bosnia and Los Angeles, past and present. But their narrators , Ismet and his alter egos—Izzy, a cool-dude Angelino, and the two Mustafas, a puny, smart-ass version of Ismet with many of his memories and Mustafa’s shadow, a burly young peasant—are unreliable and occasionally penetrate one another’s narratives . Indeed, Ismet, “a good actor since the age of six,” when parental wars first disrupted his universe, consciously questions his memories: “Back in the USA, mati. Exit Ismet, enter Izzy. You have no idea how good it feels to be another . . . taking a break from the fake memoir.” Having fled the war just before his military induction, Ismet intersperses his recollections with the Mustafas’ horrific combat stories, appropriated from a Bosnian veteran in an LA hospital. His second “fake memoir” reflects his guilt—“What he had survived made me feel unworthy of calling myself a Bosnian”—and further disrupts his sense of identity: “Why do I write about Mustafa? Why does he have my memories?” As Ismet retreats from reality, Mustafa grows dominant. With each successive notebook , Ismet fragments further, until in “Boom-Boom” the remembered sounds of Bosnian shells so loudly disrupt his LA present that he can only escape through suicide. Unable to shape a coherent narrative or assemble a stable identity, he deconstructs . But the last entry of that final notebook, a letter wherein his long-suffering, adored, and adoring mati (mother) reveals how Ismet died and that Mustafa now looks after her, raises issues that destabilize the entire narrative. A dead Ismet cannot have written it. Alive, he cannot “remember” it. Has he become Mustafa ? What is true, what imagined? Finally, while exploring many vital issues, from trauma and familial dysfunction to ethnonationalism, diaspora, and the twentieth-century history of Yugoslavia, Shards proves a powerful metafiction that blurs the boundaries between memory and history, reality and fiction, to chart the disintegration of a fatally damaged psyche. Having willed his scribbles to his former LA roommate, Ismet commands him to “read all of this and try to piece me together.” So must the reader reconstruct that fictional “me” from his fragments to apprehend the reality it embodies and problematizes. “Memories are nothing like tapes. Tapes record reality . Minds record fiction,” says Asmir, head of the acting troupe through which Ismet escapes Bosnia. This artful faux memoir hauntingly conveys its complex truths. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University ...