Where You Come From is a book that’s hard to describe. It doesn’t fit neatly into a one-line elevator pitch. Broadly speaking, it’s a memoir of Stanišić’s childhood in Bosnia, his escape during the war of the 1990s and his life as a refugee in Germany. It’s also a biography of his grandmother, capturing her descent into dementia, and - as the title might suggest – a discourse on whether or not where you come from really matters, at the end of the day. But, as the author himself concedes, it is not entirely autobiographical, because he is, and always has been, a storyteller.
A review from the Irish Examiner on the dustcover of my copy calls Stanišić ‘offensively gifted’, which seems to me to sum up his writing style perfectly. There are writers who experiment with convention and fail. There are writers whose words roll smoothly through your mind because they follow an established consensus on how a sentence should be constructed. And then there are those rare talents like Stanišić, who create flawless imagery by playing with language in ways you would never consider possible.
The passage where he riffs on the name Oskoruška – the small village where his grandfather grew up – and “hard Slavic endings” held me spellbound with its brilliant manipulation of the written word. It was the distinctive sentence construction that drew me in from the first pages of this book – Stanišić is obscenely talented with words. (Of course, my half-remembered AS level German isn’t good enough for me to have read it in the language Stanišić wrote it in (his second language), so much credit must go to the translator, Damion Searls.)
Stanišić spent the first fourteen years of his life in Višegrad, and his descriptions of the town and its surroundings are wonderfully evocative. By coincidence, I was also in Višegrad in the summer of 2018, when the final passages of the book take place, and the descriptions of the trips to Oskoruška put me in mind of the cabin we rented on the banks of the Drina; the walk we took in blazing heat, up winding tracks into the hillside, past impossibly remote gardens laden with tomato vines and fruit trees. (And I couldn’t help but laugh at his judgement of Andrićgrad.)
As a true Yugoslav, with a Bosnian Serb father and Bosniak mother, Stanišić does touch upon the senselessness and destruction of the Bosnian War of 1992-95, but it’s not the main theme of the book. The narrative instead focuses on the experience of leaving a place and trying to fit in somewhere new. Stanišić’s recounting of the refugee experience in Germany makes painful reading, perhaps because it still seems so relevant now. We condemn the wars, we feel sorry for the people affected, but do we really want the reality of them living on our street? Rarely has this sense of disconnection been written about so eloquently.
The ending of Where You Come From takes the form of a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, which is where the book lost me a bit. I’m the sort of person who gets anxious in museums if the layout doesn’t take me in an obvious direction, in case I experience time in a non-linear fashion, or – worse still – miss any vital information. Flipping back and forth through the pages, I worried that I would choose the wrong option and miss something fundamental. Stanišić expresses his love of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’ as a child, which explains the structure, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was this was merely a gimmick. Or was it an inspired artistic choice? Are we supposed to re-read the book and each time choose a different path?
These fictional aspects of the book certainly pose questions about the unreliability of memory, especially when childhood recollections are so easily clouded by nostalgia. Themes are interwoven throughout the book so subtly that you don’t notice them at first. A disappearing village mirrors a disappearing memory. The fragmented nature of dementia is reflected in the disjointed, dreamlike quality of the final chapters. The narrative is not linear, and neither is life.
Seldom has a book left me with so many questions to ponder. Does where you come from matter? Does it define you? Do we try to foster a sense of attachment and identity in order to anchor ourselves to something? Is all this more important for those who leave? And these questions will undoubtedly hold more weight for a Yugoslav – for someone who was born, as Stanišić was, in a country that no longer exists.
It's hard to sum up Where You Come From in any succinct way. The only thing I will say is: read it. I can promise you that this is one of those books that will stay with you for many years to come.
