TIME KNEELS BETWEEN MOUNTAINS

In Pajalić’s novel, the lead enters adolescence during the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia.

After the influx of refugees from the ongoing genocide, Dževahira Torlak, who goes by Seka, lives in besieged Srebrenica with her parents, grandparents, older brother, her mother’s sister and sister-in-law, as well as an uncle and two young cousins. Her family has taken in two refugees, Edina Muharemović and her son, Ramo, who is Seka’s age. As the family works to survive continual bombing, snipers, disease, and hunger, Seka and Ramo grow close and begin a romance as the years go by. In imitation of Anne Frank, Seka, who’s Muslim, writes in a diary to her friend, Zora, a Serb who evacuated with her family before the war. Seka’s writing eventually brings her into contact with a journalist from Australia, where Zora now lives. Alyssa, the journalist, enlists Seka to write an exposé of the corruption in Srebrenica, which stems from closer to home than Seka first realizes. While the novel doesn’t require foreknowledge of the Bosnian genocide, Pajalić doesn’t provide much scaffolding; readers may want to research as they read. In an introduction, Pajalić provides trigger warnings, an index, and a glossary, all helpful tools for this harrowing story. According to the author, the “novel blends factual history with fictional storytelling to explore themes of justice, trauma, and complicity.” She gathered information for the novel from interviews she conducted with survivors of the genocide. Essays based on these interviews are collected in another of Pajalić’s books, Fragments of History: The Essays Behind the Stories. The novel, a thriller, deploys the drama and tension of the genre, though the action falls a bit flat during one character’s sudden villainous turn. Devastating descriptions of the gory consequences of war are the standout scenes here. Still, Seka experiences moments of beauty and joy, all lushly described: “I lost myself in the music, the anonymity of the darkness around us, the heaving bodies, and closed my eyes as I moved.” The novel skewers the international community’s complicity in genocide, which continues today.

An assiduously researched, cleareyed depiction of genocide.