This is a searing portrait of the human devastation wrought by the Bosnian wars, and their aftermath - told through the stories of those who are left alive and looking for their families and their remains - by a young writer who has all the makings of a Kapuscinski or a Gourevitch.This book is suitable for readers of Philip Gourevitch, Janine Di Giovanni, Timothy Garton Ash, Slavenka Drakulic, Fergal Keane, Michael Ignatieff, Anna Funder, Misha Glenny.During four years of war in Bosnia, over 100,000 people lost their lives. But it was months, even years, before the mass graves started to yield up their dead and the process of identification, burial and mourning could begin. For many, the waiting, the searching and the suspended grieving still continues.Here we travel through the ravaged post-war landscape in the company of a few of those who survived, as they visit the scenes of their loss: a hall where the clothing of victims is displayed; an underground cave with its pale jumble of bones; a camp for homeless refugees; a city now abandoned to the ghosts of painful memories; and a funeral service where a family finally says goodbye. These encounters are snapshots and memorials, capturing a jagged moment in a community's history as it is still flinching from its raw and recent past, not quite yet able to believe in a possibility of a peaceful future.
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'His style is all the more powerful for its restraint: outrage speaks terribly for itself, needs no hype, no colour.'
-- The Times
The prose ... is devastatingly simple and lucid ... Such a book could be written in no other way.
-- The Guardian
`[His writing] has an overwhelming power... Read this incredible book to learn how thin is the veneer of civilisation.' -- Literary Review
-- The Times
The prose ... is devastatingly simple and lucid ... Such a book could be written in no other way.
-- The Guardian
`[His writing] has an overwhelming power... Read this incredible book to learn how thin is the veneer of civilisation.' -- Literary Review
About the Author
Born in 1969 in Krakow, WOJCIECH TOCHMAN is an award-winning reporter and writer. With Like Eating A Stone, Tochman became a finalist for the Nike Polish Literary Prize and for the Prix Temoin du Monde, awarded by Radio France International.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Originally written in 2002 but only recently translated into English, this bleak, chilling and compelling book takes its title from a child's description of his mother grinding her teeth as she dreams she is visited by her murdered husband.
The author does not attempt to explain the Bosnian conflict nor does he particularly put events into context. This is a story of genocide rather than a history of the war. Central to the narrative is the work of Polish-American-Icelandic anthropologist Dr Ewa Kolowski and her obsessive quest to identify victims from their remains, usually clothing and bones.
Writing in spare, almost deadpan prose the author describes horror upon horror without explicit comment although in places his appalled outrage can clearly be felt. He doesn't go into great detail about what was done to the victims but his restraint makes the information he does share all the more hideous - the practice of shooting prisoners first through the pelvis "just in case" they tried to run from the real execution; old people too infirm to cross mountains to safety being left behind ("The abandoned old people did not need the food they had for long. Their throats were cut. Their bodies were torn apart by wolves that dragged their bones all over the district"); the awful story of Nebosja and Edna who had been boy- and girlfriend before the conflict and who became torturer and victim during it. Little is said about what he did to her but in two brief, icy sentences the outcome is described: "When he had finished Edna was barely alive. Today Nebosja B lives in Prijedor and works for the police." Later we learn that Edna was helped on to a bus and never seen again until her bones were identified.
The stories of people like Edna and Hasan, a popular, hardworking vet who killed himself with a grenade rather than fall into Serbian hands, will linger long in the memory. Like Eating a Stone is a masterpiece which shows with frightening clarity what happens when civilisation breaks down.
The author does not attempt to explain the Bosnian conflict nor does he particularly put events into context. This is a story of genocide rather than a history of the war. Central to the narrative is the work of Polish-American-Icelandic anthropologist Dr Ewa Kolowski and her obsessive quest to identify victims from their remains, usually clothing and bones.
Writing in spare, almost deadpan prose the author describes horror upon horror without explicit comment although in places his appalled outrage can clearly be felt. He doesn't go into great detail about what was done to the victims but his restraint makes the information he does share all the more hideous - the practice of shooting prisoners first through the pelvis "just in case" they tried to run from the real execution; old people too infirm to cross mountains to safety being left behind ("The abandoned old people did not need the food they had for long. Their throats were cut. Their bodies were torn apart by wolves that dragged their bones all over the district"); the awful story of Nebosja and Edna who had been boy- and girlfriend before the conflict and who became torturer and victim during it. Little is said about what he did to her but in two brief, icy sentences the outcome is described: "When he had finished Edna was barely alive. Today Nebosja B lives in Prijedor and works for the police." Later we learn that Edna was helped on to a bus and never seen again until her bones were identified.
The stories of people like Edna and Hasan, a popular, hardworking vet who killed himself with a grenade rather than fall into Serbian hands, will linger long in the memory. Like Eating a Stone is a masterpiece which shows with frightening clarity what happens when civilisation breaks down.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By S. Stretton
Format:Paperback
I travel to Bosnia to do voluntary work with the survivors of this Balkan war, and work in these areas with these people. This book gives a very true account of happenings, events and atrocities that occured, and are what we hear our patients telling us. A very good but at times harrowing read, but the world should be aware of what goes on in war and what passes as war crime. They are still suffering and trying to rebuild their lives even now.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This Polish writen book on the ethnic cleansing that occurred in Bosnia against the Muslim population is like the books of that other great Polish travel writer Kapuscinski, written in simple episodes and vignettes that portray the whole larger story of events with great force. This story is also written retrospectively so is seen solely through the eyes of the survivors, many of whom are still searching for family members who went missing during the conflicts that tore communities apart. That in turn provides the harrowing platform as the story tells how mass graves are found and the dead given the time that has elapsed since their deaths can only be identified by bones and any remanants of clothing found. Claims by family members on such bones needs DNA matches before the remains uncovered can be buried and the Muslim families feel they have said goodbye to their dead.
Tochman weaves his story around a number of visits to such events with overlaps occurring between personal memories of the survivors and the inhumanities they saw and suffered especially at the hands of the Serb forces, with the work of the foreign specialists who now help in this medical detective work, piecing bodies together from the remains of bones found in mass hidden graves.
What the book also shows is that whatever the peace settlement that was brokered by the USA with Serbia and Bosnia including in theory but not reality the reinstatement of seized homes to prior owners, it has done very little to fix the deep hatreds that will remain as a result of recent events. The poverty that is the aftermath of the war for all, both victors and losers, is sad proof that ultimately nobody has escaped the fallout from the conflict even though many of the local Serb perpetrators involved in ethnic cleansing seem to face little threat of legal prosecution from the evidence presented.
The author Alan Paton once wrote: "When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive". Based on this book's evidence, that forgiveness will be a long time coming in Bosnia at least.
Tochman weaves his story around a number of visits to such events with overlaps occurring between personal memories of the survivors and the inhumanities they saw and suffered especially at the hands of the Serb forces, with the work of the foreign specialists who now help in this medical detective work, piecing bodies together from the remains of bones found in mass hidden graves.
What the book also shows is that whatever the peace settlement that was brokered by the USA with Serbia and Bosnia including in theory but not reality the reinstatement of seized homes to prior owners, it has done very little to fix the deep hatreds that will remain as a result of recent events. The poverty that is the aftermath of the war for all, both victors and losers, is sad proof that ultimately nobody has escaped the fallout from the conflict even though many of the local Serb perpetrators involved in ethnic cleansing seem to face little threat of legal prosecution from the evidence presented.
The author Alan Paton once wrote: "When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive". Based on this book's evidence, that forgiveness will be a long time coming in Bosnia at least.
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