The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (Paperback)

Sacco's fixer was Neven, a Bosnian Serb who loves his city and fought in one of the many ad hoc brigades that were assembled by charismatic men in the early days of the war before a real Bosnian army was established.  An outsize character, Neven becomes a kind of lens through which Sacco tries to understand the war's very confusing impact on Sarajevo. The book hopscotches between various stages of the war and the present in a kaleidoscopic jumble of images, confusing nicknames, and impenetrable mix of fact and myth. Through Neven, Sacco tells the fragmentary tale of some of the more prominent warlords (almost all of whom were shady prewar characters), and of their sometimes heroic, sometimes despicable activities during the siege. To a certain extent, they are the subject of the book, populist characters who took it upon themselves to create personal armies to fight the separatist Serbs when there was no central government or army to do so (most of the Yugoslav army supplies were handed over to Serbia following the dissolution of Yugoslavia). Of course, many of these patriotic men were also probably interested in enriching themselves, and as the war dragged on, attempts were made to incorporate them into the regular army and police and things got rather messy. As Sacco recounts, many of the "facts" surrounding various killings, atrocities, and profiteering by the warlords will forever remain obscured by the fog of war, and the need for politicians to wash their hands of those dirty times.

At the same time, what becomes increasingly interesting is the relationship between Sacco and Neven, and the plausibility of Neven's endless stories about what it was like "back then." Neven is a down and out character who owes money all over town, and Sacco clearly feels guilty about walking around with bundles of Deutchmarks, while his fixer is real-life war veteran. The subtle (and not so subtle) assaults on Sacco's wallet become a running theme, and are an interesting window on the less glamorous side of being a foreign correspondent. At the same time, as Sacco spends more and more time in Sarajevo, he meets more and more people who cast doubts on Neven's veracity. He's certainly known all over town, and certainly did fight in the war, but there's also clearly a gulf between his stories and the truth. And as a Serb, he's also somewhat of a pariah in his own home city, his apartment is seized by connected refugees, and a general antipathy for Serbs hover around him.

Ultimately, readers looking for a clear understanding of who was who, and what was what during the war, are going to be frustrated -- and are perhaps missing the whole point. This book is all about the fog of war, the strange mutations of time and place that raise certain men to power and then cast them aside, as well as the guilt and confusion of being an outsider looking in