Quiet Flows the Una

in the literary canon of twentieth-century Europe, and Newman’s new translation will certainly boost its chances. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Faruk Šehić. Quiet Flows the Una. Trans. Will Firth. London. Istros Books. 2016. 193 pages. When a trauma as perverse, crushing, and searing as the extended, violent breakup of one’s nation occurs, it can take the most sensitive of souls a generation or longer to compress this experience, gain hold, and make of it something of lasting aesthetic value—and in this way rise above it, to say, “See, we are not monsters, we are artists still, true and enduring.” Quiet Flows the Una is such a work. Its redemption comes in the edgy, open way its sweetly earned idiom acknowledges the horror of the Bosnian War and the writer’s combat experience in it. Just as the monster within is finally able to grow through and beyond this back into cummings-like smallness, so too this meditative, poetic refashioning parallels—i.e., re-creates as it recounts—the writer’s journey, as he takes ownership over his experiences and feelings, packed and layered in this autobiographical novel, and constructs a way to pass through unscathed. Nor does Šehić take the easy, patriotic recourse of idealizing his prewar childhood state. The poetic soul is already born into scarcely contained revulsion, the prose relentless in eviscerating all demons alike, in etched, sensual detail. “Somewhere in this catalogue of disgust and attraction was the nasal sing-song of the blind Romany who used to stand with his creased face and matted black hair in the town marketplace every Monday of the late 1980s, amidst the masses that stank of sweat and fresh curd cheese.” The natural symbols give way to the allegorical, thence to the phantasmagorical , as the real war, with its real deaths and actually horrid stench, bubbles up into the text. Even this morphs back as monsters of war regress to gentler roles; characters , locales, and impressions fold back in, assimilated after their sway of warmth or ill has passed. It’s hard to catalog the many ways this work satisfies. There is its intellectual rigor—with generous reference points in modern and contemporary film, literature, music, and philosophy, placing events insistently within our larger, shared culture—as well as the prose’s generally uncompromising tenor itself. There is its psychological rigor, restraining any impulse to moral superiority. There is the sheer compression and innovation, pushing this narrative into folds of continually greater nuance and delight—and make no mistake, this is a work flooded with delight, enlivened further with whimsical line illustrations by Aleksandra Nina Knežević. A special place must also be accorded to Will Firth, who has translated the Bosnian original into an English laden with unique atmosphere, at once exotically local yet recognizably universal throughout. Behind all this there is such hard experience —the iconic shattering of the Yugoslav wars—that Quiet Flows the Una is selfevidently earned and relevant and never devolves to writerly exercise. Yet in it we find also the poet’s insistence throughout that it succeed or fail on its artistic merits. Succeed it does—and the resulting catharsis can lift us all. Andrew Singer Trafika Europa Joann Sfar. Pascin. Trans. Edward Gauvin. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Uncivilized Books. 2016. 186 pages. Through a series of vignettes depicting the personal life and sexual escapades of Julius Mordecai Pincas (Pascin), French cartoonist Oleg Kashin Fardwor Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life under Putin Trans. Will Evans Restless Books Intertwining the mystical essence of science fiction and the humor of political satire, Fardwor Russia is an allegorical tale of contemporary Russian life. Human error from reckless experimentation produces a growth serum that sets off a comedy of errors as farcical as it is descriptive about the temptations of absolute power. Tahar Ben Jelloun The Happy Marriage Trans. André Naffis-Sahely Melville House Class and culture play oversized roles in this engaging novel about the disintegration of a marriage in Morocco. When an acclaimed painter blames his wife for his illness, he writes a book detailing his account of their unhappy union. His wife retaliates by writing her own version, and the

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