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My original review (2000) in the San Francisco Chronicle

S. A Novel of the Balkans By Slavenka Drakulic Viking; 216 pages; $22.95
Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic has given the world a gift, digging into the twisted reality of the war that splintered the former Yugoslavia and emerging with ``S.,'' a searing story about a woman held in a Bosnian concentration camp. It is a haunting, difficult novel that is also somehow redemptive.

In the past, Drakulic has demonstrated in essays such as ``Cafe Europa: Life After Communism'' an inspired knack for unlikely but telling details. She also has a restlessness and a moral imagination that give her work nuance and power and flavor -- this last quality being one she jokes about in the title of her I-loved-him-so- much-I-ate-him novel, ``The Taste of a Man.''

But never has she combined her approach and her subject matter into anything like the cataclysmic power of this new novel, which makes her earlier novels look like secondary-school warmups. Drakulic not only pulls us into the world of this anonymous young woman, a teacher taken away by Serb soldiers along with everyone else in the town she works in, but she does it without manipulation.

``The smell, the smell of dust in the dry air, that is what she will remember,'' begins an early chapter. ``The taste of coffee with too much sugar. The image of women quietly climbing on to the bus, one by one, as if going on an excursion. And the smell of her own sweat.''

Some might call Drakulic's adroit use of sight and sound and fleeting impression manipulative, but when it works as well as this, the criticism seems misplaced.

Drakulic takes us through the succession of horrors endured by S. in such a relaxed manner, it almost seems like travel writing. There is the uncertain young man who comes to take S. away. ``The black nail of his big toe is poking out of his torn cloth sneakers,'' she writes. There is the subdued horror of packing just a few belongings when S. has no idea how long she will be gone or where she's being taken. And there is the power of a good list, such as this one describing the villagers: ``These people are leaving behind uneaten food on the table, unwashed dishes, unfinished work, animals in the barn, radios playing, laundry for ironing, arguments.''

Drakulic keeps her prose orderly and controlled. Simple impression follows simple impression. The cumulative effect makes the reader go from understanding the fracture of Yugoslavia by what was shown on TV to knowing it through benumbing verisimilitude.

Because Drakulic always looks for the small, human moment that can offer respite from horror, the atrocities portrayed never seem gratuitous or polemical. That's saying a lot, given such passages as S. overhearing a ``young voice'' saying: ``I saw three dead girls in a ditch. I knew them from school. They were naked. Their breasts had been cut off. I covered them with leaves.''

The book never drags, and no page stands out as less gripping than the next. But the story rises to another level of horror when S. moves into the ``women's room'' in the concentration camp. Drakulic juxtaposes the ordinary with the extraordinary to make these scenes so powerful:

``S. tries to unbutton her blouse. Three pairs of men's eyes watch her movements as her trembling fingers fail to find the buttons. It is not that she does not want to obey their order. On the contrary, she is in a hurry to do so. At that moment she cannot even think about doing anything else -- but S. no longer controls her fingers.''

What the soldiers do to S., the hows and whys of it, cannot fail to shake loose troubling perspectives on war and what it means. Drakulic could not have written a book this good, this free of cheap effect, if she had rushed herself. She had to spend time mulling over the war, gaining something to serve as ballast, something enabling her to see the truth in a line such as, ``But the soldiers are no longer people either, except that they are less aware of it.''

Despite the dehumanization suffered, Drakulic's main character remains alive on the page, even if she doesn't have an actual name, just a letter, like all the women in the story. ``I'm alive, she thinks, as if this were a secret to be kept for herself.'' Later, ``(s)he jumps, suddenly, as if startled out of a dream.'' And still later, during the unnerving section devoted to S.'s odd liaison with the camp's sad, proper and yet ultimately debauched commander: ``Smells are a dangerous thing, they catapult you back into the past and she is afraid of forgetting where she is. She must focus on the captain.''

Eventually, S. and the others are released from the camp. The psychology of what they face afterward has been explored elsewhere, but even so, Drakulic's take on psychological dislocation comes across as fresh. S. can't look back. She can't look forward. She can't even claim the present. ``But nothing is close enough to her yet, not the wet asphalt she is treading, not the cup of coffee she is holding, not the snowflakes falling on her face.''

Only when S. resettles in Stockholm, that gleaming Swedish bastion of prosperity and social services, can she try to come to terms with living. Just what that entails can't be reduced to a few words, but her agonizing reflections, and where they lead, never feel less than honest.

Steve Kettmann is an American writer living in Berlin.



This article appeared on page RV - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle