"Here's how it is: The country where I was born no longer exists."

Gorgeous, attentive, precise, subtle, meaningful. Every sentence carried me softly into a greater understanding of not just one boy's life, but also of the turbulent tragic time through which he and his family lives. Reading this novel took concentration but the payoff was incalculable.

A man applies for German citizenship, and one of the requirements is to write a short history detailing where they lived before and why they want to live in Germany. Our narrator writes a few sentences and discovers they are all wrong. What follows is a meandering, imaginative look at how we define ourselves and our histories and how to talk about a home that no longer exists.

Stanišić has written a somewhat autobiographical novel about a man, much like himself, who grapples with his family history in the former country of Yugoslavia. He writes about going back to his family's home and finding that things are very much the same and very different. He realizes that his grandmother's memory is fading, and any chance to learn the stories of his ancestors will be lost along with it. This book jumps from half-formed memories of the past to musings about the present, and even has a choose-your-own-adventure portion towards the end. It is written in a way that may be difficult for Americans to read, but it will be very familiar to people with a father or grandmother who likes to tell stories that start in one place and wander far and wide before concluding.

Where You Come From
By Saša Stanišić
Translated by Damion Searls
Tin House December 2021
364 pages
Read via Netgalley

An at times funny semi-biographical novel that centers around the author, his parents, and his grandparents. The story does not unfold linearly but instead goes back and forth through different times in his life before, in Germany as a refugee, in Yugoslavia before the war, and visiting his grandmother in Bosnia Herzegovina. I’m glad I had the opportunity to read it.

With thousands of (high) ratings and reviews on Goodreads, I don't have any new to add. So, I'll just recommend this to literary fiction fans.

𝐎𝐟𝐟 𝐰𝐞 𝐠𝐨, 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐞𝐲𝐞𝐬, 𝐈’𝐦 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚 𝐟𝐞𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐧𝐨 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠.

Saša Stanišić shows us all a few things, about how you create a life after war changes everything, when the country you were rooted in no longer exists. Where did it go? If the country no longer exists, what happens to its people? About exile, and the remaining few who are left behind to remember, the ones who may well be able to explain where you come from. It’s auto-fiction, memoir with exaggeration, it’s a journey through memories- tender, silly, horrible. It’s the roar of a football crowd (soccer to Americans, pfft) a childhood in Višegrad beside the Drina, being multiethnic (his father is Serbian Orthodox, mother Bosnian Muslim), a grandmother who can read kidney beans, the collapse of Yugoslavia, fitting in and sticking out in Germany, a mountain town of 13 villagers who won’t forget and hold the memories of ancestors. It’s the bumpy road of old age and youth chasing their history, so full of ghosts. The pressing question is, who am I? How do I define my life, my family when so much was ripped away? He is one of the lucky ones, isn’t he? Escaping with his mother before the atrocities that befell so many.

Why does grandmother take care of gravesites? What do the ancestors have to teach him? Why is it so important to her that he knows where he came from? With humor, he writes beautifully to the Alien Registration Office as he applies for German citizenship but he also struggles to define home, the horror of borders and what it means for people like him, in between places, histories. His childhood, charmed, gave no hint to the division that was coming, the terror, the spilling of blood. War is his origins as much as it was his grandmother’s. The hunt for a better life, which he will find as a writer because like his grandmother once told him , he and his Pero are both troublemakers with words. What words can tell his story, knotted as it is with his ancestors and a history nightmares are made of? “Worlds die away”, and he is trying to capture his, fill in the gaps of his memories, comprehend the history his family made under the conditions fate created. Is where we end up accidental, chance, choice? Is he his languages? It is an adventure, even as he tries to carve a place for himself to fit into, even if he doesn’t always know where he belongs and is ashamed sometimes in the light of glaring differences.

It’s a disorienting life, not just for grandmother whose mind rests upon the shifting sands of time, but for him too on shifting lands. Proof of reason to have a place to stay, the existence of dragons, politics, communism, being Slavic, growing up among heathens, migrants, borderless, massacres… there are heavy subjects here but somehow this novel manages to be fun, light, playful considering an ugly history. Identity, what the hell does it mean for any of us whether we are solid in the place we were born or squeezed out into alien places we have to contort ourselves to assimilate in? Shame of differences or pride in them? What is the measure of a life? The end of the novel is chose your own ending themed, I remember those books well. Villages die, so do grandmothers. Sad, beautiful. I think this book moved me because it’s like listening to my father talk about his own memories of the country he fled. I am not surprised this novel won a prize, he is a gifted writer.

Publication Date: December 7, 2021

Tin House

The premise of the book was promising. Set in a village in the former Yugoslavia and current urban Germany, it’s about a displaced family that ends up in Germany to start a new life. Fraught with the challenges of language, culture, economic hardship, and social issues, the author combines autobiographical, fictional, and fable elements to unfold his story. I found the historical and cultural, the immigrant experience, and the struggles associated with moving to another country parts interesting. I especially enjoyed the main character’s close relationship with his grandmother and the descriptions of his many interactions with her. I did not enjoy the deployment of the fable style, which detracted from, rather than added to the impact of the story. Also, the frequent and abrupt transitions from one place/thought to another did not make for a smooth read. So overall, this was an okay read with the core story definitely ranking higher than the writing style. Hopefully others will enjoy the book more than I did. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

There are some people who you never want to ask where they are from unless you’re ready to sit down with them for hours, possibly over a coffee or tea, and listen to them spin out stories about not only where they come from, but also when and who they come from. Since I love a hot beverage and a story-spinner, I was happy to sit down (metaphorically) with Saša Stanišić as he tried to explain where/who/when he comes from in Where You Come From (expertly translated by Damion Searls).

Speaking strictly geographically, Saša Stanišić and his family are from Višegrad, in what is now the Republika Srpska (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Speaking temporally, the Stanišićs are from Yugoslavia. When civil and ethnic violence broke out when the country started to splinter in 1991, they fled to Germany. Speaking genealogically (I guess?), Stanišić comes from a sprawling family who live in Višegrad and the remote village of Oskoruša. A web of family stories and memories link them together: grandfathers who rafted the Drina, a great aunt who wanted to go into space, a grandmother who always called Stanišić a donkey. But Stanišić is also a refugee boy who grew into a man among many other refugees in Heidelburg. Where he lived, no one was from ’round here. All of this has given Stanišić a very reflective attitude and a semi-permanent sense of being an outsider.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Stanišić doesn’t tell his story in a straight line. He constantly jumps back and forth through time to give a complete answer to the question of where he comes from. This means we visit Yugoslavia in its last decade, a more peaceful Bosnia/Republika Srpska in the 2010s, with Germany in between. Perhaps the one constant in this work is Stanišić’s grandmother, Kristina, who was his link to the past even through her heart-breaking decline into dementia. So many things remind Stanišić of visiting his grandmother in Višegrad and Oskoruša. The more time I spent with this book, the more I started to see why. His grandmother, who weathered the horrific violence of the civil war, was a rock. Even after she started to show the signs of dementia, Kristina was stubborn about staying the same and living independently. She is also someone who appreciates a good story or a trip down memory lane.

Where You Come From is a strange ride, but one I grew to enjoy once I settled in with the Stanišić clan and the author’s penchant for time-traveling through his own life. Readers who like a non-linear autofictional narrative will enjoy this personal and family history.

What to say about this book other than it was fantastic from start to finish. The writing, the story, the people you get to know were all truly fascinating and held my attention from the first page. This is easily up there with my top books of the year. Heck, even the top books of this decade, albeit only two years in. The writing is so personal, yet so very informative. The whole book has a colloquial, but smart, feel. I want to read it again already.

I liked the writing style, but it felt like an extended musing/reminiscing rather than a story. I made it about 20% of the way through and lost interest.