By Roy Kesey
Bullfight Media
2006
Roy Kesey’s novella is reminiscent of Jerzy Kosinki’s The Painted Bird as it deals with someone watching and living the horrors of war. While Kosinski focused on World War II, Kesey focuses on the more recent Serbian-Croatian conflict. Taking a young protagonist, Josko Banovic, who is anonymous in many ways while in school, he develops Banovic into an expert marksman and cold-blooded sniper. He is in the thick of war, but he is someone who kills from a distance.
Kesey also has several brief inter-chapters that act as fables and show us other people along the countryside and how the war changes and ravages them. These sections are especially poetic and dream-like.
As a reader moves deeper into the book, Josko appears to be in a dream-like state as he begins following a siren of sorts. At that same time, he searches for his sister Klara. Both quests are part of the tangled, hallucinatory world that Josko inhabits as the disintegration of his country and society continues. Brutal and brilliant, this novella captures the essence of what happens to those torn apart by war. Its title reveals itself by the time the journey is over. - J.Koetzner
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