Saša Stanišic Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Grammophone) Luchterhand Literaturverlag, August 2006, 224 pp ISBN: 3-630-87242-5 This novel chronicles, through a succession of graphic scenes, the descent of Yugoslavia into conflict and genocide. The narrator, Aleksandar, is a gifted storyteller, who describes everyday life in his former country through the eyes of the child he then was. He opens his tale with his grandfather dying in 1990 while watching Carl Lewis break the hundred metre world record in Tokyo - a symbol, as the reader is soon made aware, of unhappy events to come. At first the tone is humorous and sunny. The narrator recalls his father calling the family's unreliable new Yugo 'a donkey on wheels' and satirically illustrates the waning influence of Communism by boasting of his insistence on addressing his teacher as 'Mr No-Longer-Comrade'. His father was Serb, his mother Muslim, and the reader's early impressions are of a small, vibrant and tolerant community. But alongside these pictures come warnings of more ominous events. The town's Muslim men begin to disappear and the volume of traffic passing through Visegrad increases as people begin to flee the violence elsewhere in Bosnia. Attacks on the town eventually force Aleksandar and his family to take shelter in a cellar, and during this time he rescues a girl called Asija, whose parents are missing, by claiming that she is his sister. Following these events, the family leave the town, moving first to Belgrade and then to Essen, where they stay with relatives. The next section of the novel of the novel revisits more memories of early childhood, but this time informed by an adult's perspective, and follows Aleksandar's decision to return to Bosnia now that the war is over. It is only now that the reader becomes fully aware of the circumstances from which the family escaped. We learn of the massacre of the town's Muslim population, their corpses disposed of in the River Drina, where Aleksandar fished as a child. This is a portrait with a focus on life not death and it is this, combined with the fact that its nostalgic note never descends into sentimentality, that makes the book, however grim its circumstances, so enjoyable to read.