"The majestic Una river becomes a metaphor for life – and death – in this delicate, haunting novel by a veteran of the Bosnian war', wrotes Eileen Battersby in her review of Quietly Flows The Una by Faruk Sehic.
"Faruk Sehic is a Bosniak veteran of the Bosnian war of the 1990s (“the Serbs and Croats tried to persuade me to write ‘Bosnian Muslim’ because Yugoslavs didn’t really exist, they said”), and he has accepted that he has become two people. One is the boy who loved exploring the natural world of the Una, which dominates homeland and narrative. Sehic’s other, lesser self is the soldier who went to war and knew that “tomorrow we would be burning houses and killing people with the same names as us”. These personalities unite in the telling of this autobiographical novel."
Rivertrain blog's ecstatic review begins: "This is an extraordinary book by the Bosnian writer Faruk Šehić . The language is lyrical and poetic. The writing cannot be categorized, it escapes all definitions, one form metamorphosing into another, just like the river that is the central character and forms the constant, a paradoxical constant, for even as it is always there, a presence that is both reliable and loved, its nature is shifting and protean".
The author himself will attending a launch hosted by the EBRD tomorrow evening for which registration is required. The event provides an excellent opportunity to discover the importance of metaphor in South-eastern Ruritania.
Faruk Šehić – Quiet Flows the Una
Translated by Will Firth
Published by Istros Books
ISBN 978 1908 236 494
